San Diego arena – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

October 17, 2025October 21, 2025 Neil deMause

Guys! The AI industry needs our help! Nobody wants AI, and AI has lots of AI, so AI is paying AI to make more AI and sell it to AI and making it up in stock price, and that can’t end well! Let’s help out by asking poor li’l ChatGPT to write this week’s Friday roundup, I’ll check in and see how it does:

Friday roundup: Bears still begging, Thunder still building, and Jaguars still staircasing

[Not terrible, not great. Really the headline should reference the top items, and also what the hell is “staircasing” supposed to mean?]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time once again to spin the roulette wheel of public cash and see which stadium and arena schemes landed on taxpayers this week:

[“Spin the roulette wheel of public cash” is a terrible turn of phrase. Also, to complete the metaphor, the wheel should be “landing on” various schemes, not the schemes landing on taxpayers.]

San Diego’s Midway Rising plan to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-seat venue and a pile of housing and retail is inching toward a December 5 planning commission deadline, with the city still wrangling over traffic impacts, affordable housing quotas, and who gets the upside from the $3.9 billion redevelopment. Because nothing says “revitalization” like betting on a 1970s arena site to turn into a housing solution via sports subsidies.

[I haven’t written much lately about Midway Rising, which would replace the former home of the San Diego Clippers, among others, with one of those mixed-use district that are all the rage now, including a new arena. The whole project would cost $3.9 billion, and if ChatGPT knew that it could look back at old articles to understand this week’s, it would have found Voice of San Diego’s explainer about how the project would get an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, which is basically a TIF that would kick back property taxes around the site to the developers. How much in taxes? Voice of San Diego didn’t say, and ChatGPT didn’t email property tax economist Geoff Propheter to ask, and Geoff hasn’t gotten to my email yet, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The last line, meanwhile, is a decent attempt at FoS-style snark, but points off for it not meaning anything.]

Oklahoma City’s new $900 million Thunder arena is still on track for a 2028 opening, after voters okayed a 1% sales tax to fund most of it. The latest renderings feature lots of glass and “urban integration,” which probably means the public will be paying for a very expensive window. Construction could start in 2026, with the city touting it as a 21st-century civic monument and critics calling it a half-billion-dollar bribe to keep the team happy through 2050.

[Oh come on, you link to fresh vaportecture and don’t even run the images, let alone clown on the woman in the short-shorts who is about to jog right into a stair railing? Also, how is it a half-billion-dollar bribe when the public is spending $850 million? Zero stars!]

The Chicago Bears are back trying to convince Illinois taxpayers to help fund their new domed stadium in Arlington Heights, which team execs insist is the “only viable” site. They already own the land, but are still pushing for $855 million in public infrastructure money, because no NFL owner can resist a good subsidy play before kickoff. If they can pull this off, they say they’ll even be nice enough to bid for a Super Bowl in 2031.

[This is not news. Or rather, it was news last week, which is when we covered it.]

Penn State’s $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation keeps creeping forward, promising better luxury seating and a closer-to-the-field fan experience, though the main takeaway seems to be that even college football programs are now acting like pro franchises when it comes to stadium arms races. There’s also an Adidas sponsorship wrinkle, just to make sure the project stays as corporate as possible.

[College football programs have been acting like pro franchises for a long time, but they’re outside the scope of this site because life is short. If all it cost to cover college stadiums was consuming every last drop of water on the planet, I guess I might consider it.]

The Albany Firebirds’ Arena Football League announced an expansion team in Saginaw, Michigan — the Michigan Arsenal — which will play at the Dow Events Center. It’s minor-league stuff, but still one more example of how arena football owners keep testing the limits of how many taxpayer-subsidized arenas are lying around waiting for someone to fill a few dates on the calendar.

[The — what? First off, the arena football league is now called Arena Football One, and the Firebirds are just one of its nine teams. The Arsenal will indeed play in Saginaw, in a stadium built in 1972. I don’t see anything to complain about here, or even to care about, unless you are an arena football fan in central Michigan, in which case today’s your lucky day, I guess?]

Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium is getting a new 4,400-seat indoor concert venue next door, courtesy of Panthers owner David Tepper’s entertainment arm. The new hall will slot nicely into his plan to turn every patch of Uptown into “TepperWorld,” assuming the city doesn’t mind another dose of infrastructure subsidies wrapped in the language of “music tourism.”

[Nobody is calling it “TepperWorld.” And most of the $650 million in public money Tepper got for his stadium development wouldn’t be for “infrastructure subsidies.” And “music tourism” is an actual term (people traveling to go see music, I’m doing it myself soon), though not one that’s particularly in play in Charlotte.]

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: one new dome, one giant glass box, one mega-housing-sports mashup, and a staircase in Jacksonville that somehow counts as “progress.” Same time next Friday — unless one of these cities goes broke before then.

[Giant glass box? Staircase? Either ChatGPT is drunk or I am.]

Okay, let’s shrug off the italics and see what other actual news the robots chose to ignore:

The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency has reassigned the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed road upgrade plan back to committee, with one county commissioner saying, “So many questions out there in my mind that I don’t know how we move forward at this point.” But Jimmy Haslam is hungry for his $70 million in road money nowwwww.
North Kansas City Mayor Jesse Smith said in a press statement yesterday that he’s engaged in “substantial” talks with the Kansas City Royals owners over a new stadium and remains “committed to transparency throughout this process” but also that talks will be confidential for now, which is a lot of mixed messages, frankly. North Kansas City has a population of 4,467, so it’s probably a fair bet that most of the talks are around how to get the county and state to foot the bill for this thing, even more than they already are.
The New England Revolution‘s attempts to build a stadium in Everett already drew complaints from Boston officials that they’d need to be consulted on traffic and other impacts, and now four other cities — Malden, Medford, Chelsea and Revere — want in on those talks too. This is maybe going to be a while.
Port St. Lucie is spending $27.5 million on a minor league soccer stadium, and WPTV asked two local barbers how it would it affect the economy.
Not to be left out, Denver7 examined how a new Broncos stadium would affect the local economy by talking to a coffee company owner and a personal trainer.

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: Some stochastic parrots, hallucinated staircases, and terrible journalism. The future, in other words! Same time next Friday — unless the robots have taken over and are talking to themselves by then, and we can go spend all our time on music tourism until the economy collapses.

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Friday roundup: Titans seek $300m in tax kickbacks to keep stadium “first-class,” Bucs could be next

January 7, 2022 Neil deMause

Happy first Friday roundup of 2022! A couple of days ago I thought maybe we’d have a refreshing lull in new stadium demand news to start the year, but then hell started a-popping to make up for lost time:

When the Tennessee Titans moved from Houston in 1997, they became one of the teams to get a state-of-the-art clause requiring their city to spend whatever it takes to keep their new stadium “first-class” relative to other NFL stadiums. (The St. Louis Rams, who moved two years earlier, ended up using their clause to demand a whole new stadium, then when that didn’t happen to break their lease and move to Los Angeles.) Now, a year after dropping hints and some renderings about what kind of upgrades they were looking for, Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk has revealed the price tag: $600 million, half of which would be funded by kicking back future sales taxes from 130 acres of land around the stadium. This would be part of a lease extension for the Titans, which makes one wonder why the state-of-the-art clause in the old lease is even in play, but when you have Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. CEO Butch Spyridon saying “there’s a sizzle that comes with Nashville because of the entertainment industry” and “you can’t buy that kind of aura,” it may be too much to hope for hard-nosed bargaining.
“Tampa Bay Buccaneers will not seek a new stadium, county commissioner says” is the headline in today’s Tampa Bay Business Journal, but it leaves out what Hillsborough County commissioner Ken Hagan also said: “They’re going to want to ensure that we’re continuing to make that a world-class facility so you don’t need a new facility.” Bucs owners the Glazer family just got $29 million in renovation money in 2016 (plus $10 million in federal pandemic stimulus money in 2020); no word yet on what the Glazers will be asking for this time around, but given that Hagan is already setting this up as at least it’ll be cheaper than a whole new stadium, expect it to be a lot.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ended up not discussing Buffalo Bills stadium spending in her State of the State address, but a team spokesperson and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz both say there should be an announcement soonish.
The Voice of San Diego has a long story about San Diego’s Frontier neighborhood, an integrated community with low rents built by the federal government to solve a World War II housing crisis that the city demolished in the 1960s in the name of “urban renewal” and replaced with its sports arena. There was a lot of that going around in Southern California at the time.
For those readers who complain that this site focuses too much on sports subsidies when plenty of non-sports construction projects get equally huge taxpayer gifts — there aren’t many, since most readers appreciate that life is short and corporate welfare is long, but I hear from you occasionally — here’s a story about how the state of Texas is giving Samsung $981 million in property tax breaks plus $260 million in infrastructure improvements for a new chip plant in the Austin suburb of Taylor. Good Jobs First has calculated that this will be the largest subsidy deal in Texas history, but Taylor Mayor Brandt Rydell responded, “Whether we would end up on some list and wind up being criticized for the project, that is not something we were concerned about.” Damn naysayers, always saying nay! Anyway, hope Taylor residents are okay with paying property taxes while the giant electronics company down the road doesn’t.
And finally, your moment of vaportecture:

https://twitter.com/jvhawkins/status/1478777675586101249

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Friday roundup: Bears owner bids to buy Arlington Park, plus do you really need anything else?

June 18, 2021 Neil deMause

Happy Friday, everyone! Unless you’re in the American West and currently melting from the heat, in which case, umm, try to stay indoors and hydrated, and don’t think about how in coming years it’s only likely to get worse. (This is maybe another reason why the Oakland A’s aren’t likely to move to Las Vegas, though building a new stadium right on San Francisco Bay is an equally bad idea in climate-proofing terms.)

Lots of news this week, so let’s get down to business:

Until now talk of the Chicago Bears moving to a new stadium on the site of the closing Arlington Park racetrack in suburban Arlington Heights has been mostly limited to idle suburban-newspaper-columnist speculation, but that speculation got kicked up a notch yesterday when Bears CEO Ted Phillips tweeted that the team had put in a bid to purchase the racetrack as part of its due diligence to “explore every possible option to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our organization and its future.” Now, putting in a bid doesn’t mean Bears execs are necessarily planning on moving — they would still need someone to pay for a stadium, for starters, and also have a lease on Soldier Field that runs through 2033, and even if they won the bid they could always choose to develop the site some other way or re-sell it to another developer who would — but it clearly does mean that they want “Bears could move to Arlington Heights” to remain a part of any discussion about their demands for improvements to their current stadium.
The snagged plan to rebuild San Diego’s arena is now completely dead, after the state of California ruled that the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that all government-owned land be made available for affordable housing requires that, you know, that. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria says he’ll now move to restart the bidding process, in hopes of finding a developer who’ll build affordable housing as well as an arena, because to do otherwise would meaning giving up on his dream of a hellscape of people frozen in time.
Remember when former A’s pitcher Dave Stewart said he wanted to buy the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum site and build “nice restaurants and shops” and “employment opportunities”? The Oakland city council doesn’t seem to, even though Stewart claims to be the high bidder, and that makes Dave Stewart sad.
The Dutchess County legislature voted in favor of spending $12.5 million on upgrades to the Hudson Valley Renegades stadium using federal recovery act money that was supposed to be used to fill in pandemic-related budget gaps. Dissenting county legislator Brennan Kearney decried “the tone-deafness of proposing that our first batch of funding be used at the stadium” while there are residents “who are unable to pay their rent, who are still hungry, who are unvaccinated,” but really, doesn’t everyone in a community benefit from a new clubhouse and batting cages?
Ron Burkle may have cut his losses by deciding that buying an MLS team for Sacramento for $200 million and at the same time building a $250 million stadium was a lousy investment, but it’s also getting him sued by his would-be stadium construction contractor for fraud and breach of contract over $2.3 million unpaid invoices. That’d still be cheaper than actually building the damn stadium, and Burkle can certainly afford to pay it — maybe with all the money he undoubtedly saves by avoiding income tax like his fellow richies.
Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis’s owner’s suite at his new stadium is already getting a $688,000 renovation even though he’s never used it. Davis claims that this is because it was never actually finished, which makes it harder to point and laugh, but also that one new amenity will be a glass wall between the suite and the stadium interior so Davis doesn’t ever have to hear the game or those awful fans, so by all means point and laugh at that.
There were at least three separate articles this week about the color pattern of seats at the new St. Louis S.C. stadium, which can best be described as “red and blue, kind of speckled.” Remember journalism? Those were some good times.

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Friday roundup: How to tell a dump of a stadium from a marvel, and why “stupid infrastructure” should become a term of art

April 9, 2021April 9, 2021 Neil deMause

I have nothing introductory to say this week other than that I’m wondering if you kind FoS supporters would give me $2 million in 24 hours if I made more robots out of lacrosse masks. So on to the news:

Here’s a long article about the opening of Veterans Stadium 50 years ago that has some interesting bits about all the other stadium proposals for the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles that were considered and rejected, but mostly is instructive for referring to the Vet as “a cathedral” and “a marvel” rather than how it was mostly described when it was being torn down, which was along the lines of “a dump.” It’s funny how things go from wonderful to outmoded to nostalgic, based mostly on who can make money off of getting them built and/or getting them replaced.
Honolulu’s replacement for the genuinely-falling-down Aloha Stadium is set to cost $350 million, and the state legislature has quietly switched its financing plan from a roughly 50-50 split of revenue bonds (those paid back with stadium revenues) and general obligation bonds (those paid back out of the state’s general fund) to all general obligation bonds. This could be because revenue bonds are a tougher sell during a pandemic when no revenue is coming in, or it could be because revenue bonds are a tough sell regardless when the only revenue will be from college football games; either way, my question stands about whether maybe if you can’t afford a $350 million college football stadium, you just don’t build a $350 million college football stadium.
Aaron Gordon makes an excellent point about the current debates over the federal infrastructure bill that the question should be less what counts as “infrastructure” and more what creates a good public-benefits bang for public bucks. For example: “Should we be spending $174 billion in electric vehicle incentives — a subsidy for massively profitable automakers and upper-middle class Americans — when a fraction of that could provide frequent, reliable bus service to the majority of Americans instead?” Nobody’s proposed any of the new federal infrastructure money going to stadiums just yet that I’ve seen, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to build a gondola with it, at which point I sincerely hope the decision is based less on whether gondolas are infrastructure than on whether gondolas are stupid infrastructure.
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s plan to tear down his city’s old arena and build a new arena with money from mumble mumble hey look over there has hit a snag in the form of our old friend the California Surplus Land Act, which you will remember from such past hits as “Can Inglewood provide land for a new Los Angeles Clippers arena without offering it up to affordable-housing developers first?” The Surplus Land Act got tightened with new guidelines in late 2019, so turns out the city may have to reopen bidding on the arena site, though San Diego COO Jay Goldstone (cities have COOs now?) told the Union-Tribune “there is no intention to issue a new request for proposals at this time.” Tune back in for further updates once the lawyers are done.
The planned $450 million renovation of the Superdome for the New Orleans Saints has been stalled and may be scaled back as a result of 1) the pandemic, which is making investing in such things as expanded clubs and suites look like not so great an idea, and 2) state legislators who are questioning the state’s $90 million (with another $210 million coming from the state stadium district, which is also run and funded by the state) as too expensive because “they’re the New Orleans Saints, not the Louisiana Saints.” (Okay…) The good news, reports WBRZ: “the latest federal coronavirus aid package has dollars for which the [stadium] district could be eligible.” Aaron, you listening to this?
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno still hasn’t decided whether to build a new stadium or renovate the old one on the 153 acres of land worth $500 million that Anaheim gifted him with for only $150 million last year, but he has released some images of colored blobs of whether things might go, or not.
If you were wondering whether former NBA player Jackie Robinson’s plan for a $2.7 billion arena/hotel/conference center/bowling alley/wedding chapel in Las Vegas is still in the works, a year after he initially said it would be completed, and with still no sports team to play in the arena because Vegas is already swimming in arenas, the answer is of course it is.
And finally, if you thought the Dollar Loan Center Center was hilarious, you’ll love Inter Miami‘s renaming of its temporary (they swear) stadium to “AutoNation’s DRV PNK Stadium,” a name that just trips off the tongue. It looks like AutoNation even spells it “drive pink” sometimes, so the bizarre spelling seems especially unnecessary, but if you want to promote your car dealerships by giving money to cancer research and then paying the local soccer team to put your charity’s name on its stadium, you can spell it however you want, because America.

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.

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Friday roundup: San Diego okays $1B arena complex, Manfred floats neutral-site World Series, and that time the Twins ran stadium ads featuring a kid who’d died from cancer

November 6, 2020 Neil deMause

I am way too tired this morning from waiting for tranches of vote counts to drop to write an amusing intro, so let’s get straight to the news:

San Diego voters have approved Measure E, which removes a 30-foot height limit on buildings in the Midway District, which will allow the construction of a $1 billion-or-so new arena complex, which it’s still not entirely clear how it would be paid for, plus there’s still a lawsuit against it, so tune back in later.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has told Sports Business Daily that holding the World Series at a neutral site every year is not “completely off the table” because “you can plan, you can take out travel, you can pick sites that eliminate weather problems.” Marc Normandin notes that this is probably just a trial balloon — “Manfred says a lot of things to gauge the reaction of them, and then attempts to move forward with the things he thinks he can get away with or that are worth MLB’s time regardless of fan reaction” — but also points out that MLB could require cities to bid for the World Series like they do the Olympics, or at least use hosting rights as a carrot for cities to build new stadiums (like they already do with the All-Star Game), which is likely a way bigger factor than how early John Smoltz gets to book his plane tickets.
The MLS expansion team Charlotte F.C. is no longer looking to build a new headquarters at the former Eastland Mall, apparently as a Covid-sparked cost-saving measure. As a result, the city of Charlotte is cutting its subsidies to the team (at least for now) from $110 million to $39 million. There needs to be a new agreement worked out between the team and the city, but also the city council is voting on it on Monday, so maybe it’s already worked out?
The Toronto Raptors could play the 2020-21 season in Newark to get around U.S.-Canada travel restrictions, because at least Newark is in the East. The safety of playing basketball indoors without a bubble remains unclear, but that big German indoor concert study shows that maybe it’s actually safe so long as there’s good ventilation and everyone wears masks and distances, which basketball players aren’t going to do, so never mind.
D.C. United fired its security company to save money and then asked team staffers to take unpaid shifts sitting in the arena watching security cameras, which is very much not a good look. Adding “Volunteering to assist with security will certainly be looked favorably upon (and vice versa)” really didn’t help.
Hotels in Tampa Bay are excited about the upcoming Super Bowl, even if it’s at reduced capacity, because absolutely nobody is staying at hotels in Tampa Bay right now.
Portland’s sports-owner-friendly mayor Ted Wheeler was re-elected, and this guy is really happy because yeah sports!!!
As if the San Francisco 49ers battle with the city of Santa Clara over their stadium operations isn’t weird enough, now the team has signed a parking agreement with the city and then asked the city to tear it up, which is both weird and probably illegal.
SB Nation’s Minnesota Twins blog looks back at that time team execs ran an ad warning that if they didn’t get a new stadium and the team left town, outfielder Marty Cordova could no longer visit eight-year-old cancer patients. Also the kid in the ad had already died by the time it ran. That did not work out well, but the Twins still got their publicly funded stadium a decade later by doing an end run around the city and getting the county to pay for it, so all’s well that ends well or something.

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Friday roundup: Utah may build stadium for rugby (and the children!), Suns build big-ass kitchen, plus more robots than you can shake a stick at

October 2, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy October! We seem to have now reached the uncanny valley of the epidemic, where some things are returning to almost normal — or even hyper-normal, as in the case of the baseball postseason having expanded to include so many teams I keep expecting the Sugar Land Skeeters to show up — while other things remain sadly unchanged. I guess if there’s a silver lining it’s that the resumption of some normal things hasn’t caused the pandemic to worsen perceptibly (yet), but that’s what people were saying about the Netherlands back in June and that didn’t work out well at all. Just wear your masks, people, and don’t take them off to eat or talk on the phone or talk to the president, and let’s hope for the best.

The owners of the Utah Warriors pro rugby team want to built a 10,000-seat stadium for (duh) rugby and also maybe another pro sports team and also provide “not only the high school kids but also community leaders, citizens within this community a venue where they can do something unique and fun and interesting but not have to look at a three-quarters empty stadium and not really be able to have that experience because of it.” (Typical attendance at Warriors games: about 3,000, which, true enough, would only be a seven-tenths empty stadium!) No word yet about specific financing plans other than “investors” will help pay for it, because what savvy money manager can resist the lure of pro rugby?
More on what the Phoenix Suns are building with their $168 million in public renovation money in addition to new furniture: a two-story kitchen! If that doesn’t foster downtown development and economic growth, I don’t know what will.
If you were wondering whether MLB is still moving ahead with plans to kill 40 minor-league teams, hell yeah they are. Some teams will be replaced by teams of college players who won’t have to be paid, though, so fans can now enjoy crappier baseball and witnessing the growth of the exposure economy all at once! It’s educational!
The New York Islanders have announced they’re definitely playing next season at the Nassau Coliseum despite the Coliseum not actually having an operator at present, that won’t be a problem, surely.
San Diego’s ballot proposal to lift height limits on waterfront development to allow for a new sports arena: necessary to revitalize a community or power grab by developers, you make the call!
There have been so many articles about NFL teams buying virus-fighting robots to disinfect their stadiums, even though you’re extremely less likely to get sick from touching a stadium than by sitting near a live breathing person. But people love robots, and journalists especially love writing articles about robots, and sports teams love journalists writing articles about them doing good things for fans (with robots!), so robot stories it is!
The University of Florida is having trouble selling out even a reduced-capacity stadium for its home football opener tomorrow, and its coach has been pleading with fans to turn out, which maybe is not the best public health policy? Or the best fan relations policy, if fans are staying home because they don’t want to risk getting themselves and their families sick?
This is not a good headline, given that the Los Angeles Angels weren’t moving anywhere and the city of Anaheim isn’t actually getting $320 million.
This is a good headline. And a good article.

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Friday roundup: Throwing good money after bad edition

August 21, 2020August 21, 2020 Neil deMause

This will be remembered as the week that all 30 MLB teams played at once, after the Cincinnati Reds returned from being sidelined by a positive Covid test … for one whole day, until the New York Mets were sidelined by two positive Covid tests. Is this a sign that having 900 players plus coaches plus other staff flying around a country with some of the highest Covid rates in the world is likely to keep resulting in occasional infections? Probably! Is it a sign that the MLB season is doomed to fail? Probably not, given that the season is almost halfway over already, though it’s going to get interesting once the “Everybody Plays!” postseason kicks off and a positive test result means delaying the entire schedule, and/or maybe playing entire playoff series as seven-inning doubleheaders. There’s increasing talk of playing everything after the first round in a bubble in, uh, Texas and Southern California, which sounds like a terrible idea but the NBA has managed to keep its players uninfected in the eye of the Covid hurricane in Florida, so who knows, really. Maybe there are no good ideas right now, only more and less terrible ones.

Anyway, enough about the goofy baseball season that could end up with a sub-.500 team winning the World Series, let’s talk about what you’re really here for:

Mikhail Prokhorov has finally gotten out of his Nassau Coliseum lease after shutting the building down to force Nassau County to find a new leaseholder. The lucky winner: Nick Mastroianni II, a Florida financier who previously helped finance the Coliseum’s renovations by raising $100 million in EB-5 green-cards-for-investments money, and who also is being sued by investors who claim Mastroianni isn’t making required interest payments on their loans. The county is deferring any rent payments for at least the next 60 days, and “is open to renegotiating the financial terms of the lease,” reports Newsday, but maybe now the New York Islanders will get to play games in Nassau next season, probably without fans in attendance, and who can put a price on that, right?
Hey, remember that new arena that San Diego is thinking about building despite not having a major league franchise to play in it or any hope of one anytime soon? Turns out it’s also on a site that stands a good chance of being underwater in a few decades thanks to sea level rise. All the better to give San Diego a chance to build an even newer arena then, creating more economic impact! Or maybe a big flood wall? I bet economists haven’t yet spent 30 years revealing the lack of economic impact of giant flood walls, let’s go with that one.
Asked about the Washington Football Team‘s stadium plans, new team president Jason Wright told the Washington Times he’s less concerned about where it will be built than “the principles we will use to build the stadium,” and if you choose to interpret that as we’re not going to commit to a site until we see who’ll give us the most money to build it, you’re not alone.
If you want to read the Knoxville News article “A new baseball stadium can lift the fortunes of a city, but not all by itself” you’ll have to cough up for a subscription, because they don’t let just anybody read that kind of insightful analysis for free! (I’ll take a guess at what it says: The economic benefits of a new baseball stadium depend on synergy with, uh, a thriving ballpark district that provides multiplier effects and prompts development and provides much-needed construction jobs and lets a thousand flowers bloom and anyone have a Knoxville News subscription who can let me know how I’m doing so far?)
I haven’t been bothering to keep you updated on every NFL team’s plan for holding games with or without fans, but the Minnesota Vikings asking to allow in (an unspecified number of) fans to their indoor stadium raises enough of my eyebrows to be worth a bullet point. It would be nice for Mark Reilly, Managing Editor, Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal to have at least maybe asked what the HVAC system is like at the Vikings stadium, but when your managing editor has to write the articles, you probably have bigger problems to worry about than whether you’re doing a good job of reporting the news.
There’s a documentary in the works about Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s campaign to get a new stadium built in the late ’80s, which memorably included pretend moves to Florida and legislators setting their watches back to hold votes after a midnight deadline and all kinds of other juicy goodness, so let’s hope it gets completed.
And finally, in non-sports subsidy news, enjoy Pat Garofalo’s report on the private hotel waterpark that Nashville provided $13.8 million in tax breaks for in 2017, and which is now repaying the public generosity by allowing them to ride the rides, for a mere $49.99 a day. Apparently this whole waterpark dodge was originally supposed to help lure conventions to town somehow, but at least now there’s a backup plan for encouraging economic activity, even if it’s just give us more money, this time to ride water slides in the middle of a pandemic. Remember, even people getting off an airplane and handing each other a million dollars and getting back on the airplane counts as local economic activity, this whole getting the economy back on its feet thing is easier than I thought!

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Friday roundup: Stadium news reporting hits rock bottom, don’t believe anything you read (except on this site, duh)

August 14, 2020 Neil deMause

Hey look, it’s Friday again! The St. Louis Cardinals are maybe (assuming no positive test results today) going to start playing games again tomorrow for the first time in 17 days; if they pull it off, and no other teams have outbreaks in the meantime, it will be the first time in nearly three weeks that all 30 baseball teams will be in action, and every team in the four major U.S. sports that are in action. That’s way better than I expected, frankly, and shows that isolating players from the general public (and each other) can work — there’s probably a decent chance that most leagues can limp to a conclusion without shutting down entirely, though football remains an enormous question mark with such huge rosters and no bubbles. Still, glass half full, that’s what I always say! (Okay, I never say it, but I’ll say it now.)

In other newses:

A Florida judge has ruled that Inter Miami‘s ballot measure that approved its new stadium was written properly, giving David Beckham one less lawsuit to worry about. Now he just needs to figure out how exactly he’s going to build the stadium, but it’s still early, he’s only been working on this for seven years.
Paterson, New Jersey, has approved a 30-year tax break for the refurbishment and redevelopment of its old Negro League stadium, Hinchliffe Stadium, but there remains no word on how much the tax break is worth. The Paterson Times calls the $129,153 per year in taxes the stadium will now pay “substantially less” than what it would pay normally, but math is still hard, man.
A Florida man broke into a minor-league stadium in St. Petersburg and started living in one of the luxury suites and eating the concessions food that no one else was using, and instead of getting a medal for coming up with an ingenious solution to the region’s homelessness problem, he was arrested, I swear, there’s no justice in this world.
The postponement of the Big Ten and Pac-12 college football seasons until at least the spring is causing an economic crisis for nearby coffee shops and local economies as a whole, according to “an author of several best-selling books on college football” and a “spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry,” respectively. Or, you know, not.
Former San Diego Padres owner John Moores has gotten “involved” in plans to build a new arena in that city, getting “regular updates,” and that’s big news, says San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Tom Krasovic, because “consider his track record”! Moores’ track record, for those who may have forgotten: He got the city of San Diego to fund a new Padres stadium in part by putting ads for it on the outfield walls during Padres games, then proposed a combined stadium-and-convention-center for the Chargers that went nowhere. He did sell the Padres after the new stadium opened for a 500% profit, though, so he’s definitely good at some things.
The Los Angeles Rams and Chargers‘ SoFi Stadium construction site is suffering a major outbreak of Covid, with 77 construction workers testing positive. That’s a positivity rate of, uh, the Los Angeles Daily News doesn’t actually say, so there’s no way to tell if stadium workers are spreading it at the worksite or just picking it up elsewhere in virus-riddled Southern California. It’s almost like reporting raw numbers without any context is bad journalism!
The decision by the city of Henderson, Nevada, to spend upwards of $30 million on a minor-league hockey arena for the Silver Knights is paying off already, says a Las Vegas Sun column by … the mayor of Henderson? I guess it saves time to just let elected officials write the newspaper instead of having to have reporters go interview them and then interview other people and then try to figure out who’s right, but it’s kind of less useful for that whole “informing people” thing.
The Green Bay Booyah summer collegiate league baseball team says it’s been holding games with fans allowed at one-quarter capacity and Brown County reports no outbreaks related to attendance at Booyah games, something the team and the county attribute to the measures taken by the team, which include wearing masks in indoor sections of the stadium and … and … oh, come on, seriously, WLUK-TV? The Booyah website isn’t much help either, though it does teach us that the Booyah logo is a rooster shouting “Booyah!” with a paddle for an exclamation point and … what is that in place of the Y, exactly? Too bad the team face masks depicting the rooster hiding in what looks like a vat of spaghetti sauce are sold out, because truly this is the greatest team merch ever.

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Friday roundup: Silver Knights face arena suit, Prokhorov seeks to ditch Nassau lease, journalism spirals the drain

July 17, 2020July 17, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! MLS has resumed play with an MLS Is Back tournament in Orlando (at least for all the teams other than the two that dropped out because they had too many coronavirus-positive players), and MLB starts its season next Thursday, and restarting sports leagues are soaking up all of the United States’ available testing capacity and ballplayers are getting called “pansies” for wearing masks to the grocery store. Also, another of the few remaining news outlets just laid off a ton of quality people, including several I used to work with, because journalism is one of the many nice things we apparently can’t have anymore.

If all that doesn’t cheer you up, here’s a passel of stadium-and-arena-related news that probably won’t do the trick either:

The Henderson city council voted unanimously yesterday to reject a petition seeking to overturn the city’s decision to spend $60 million on a minor-league hockey arena plus some other stuff, which should probably come as no surprise given that it’s the same council that voted to approve the Silver Knights arena in the first place. (The petitions were initially rejected because of a technicality about whether enough information was included on every page of the petition, but the council was under no obligation to consider the legal requirements rather than just voting for what they wanted to happen.) Petitioners could now seek to sue the city, which is how these things always seem to turn out.
Former Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is in negotiations to get out of his lease with Nassau County on the Nassau Coliseum, Nassau Executive Laura Curran revealed Tuesday. This could work out well for all concerned, or it could let Prokhorov get out of his lease obligations by having shut down the arena and held it hostage; the devil will be in the details of the talks, and Curran didn’t divulge anything about those.
The Palace of Auburn Hills, former home of the Detroit Pistons, got blowed up real good on Saturday, as one does when one is a 32-year-old sports arena in the early 21st century. And if you thought you already saw images several months ago of the Palace being torn down, that’s because you did, but history repeats itself, the second time with dynamite.
The Edmonton Oilers‘ four-year-old arena was partially flooded by a hailstorm, but don’t worry, the NHL says it will still be able to use it for its planned restart on August 1. Or maybe Edmonton will have to build another new arena in the next two weeks, it’s always hard to say with these things.
Fivethirtyeight tried to evaluate whether the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium is a better place to see a ballgame than their old one by overlaying one seating cross-section on the other and determining that the last row of seats is 33 feet closer to the field horizontally and only a few feet higher vertically, so that’s an improvement! Except that they failed to take into account that the new stadium has 8,000 fewer seats than the old one, so really you want to compare the worst seats in the new place to the 40,000th best seat in the old place, since the people in the last row of the old place will now be watching at home on TV. I remember when Nate Silver still made sure his writers did their math correctly, those were good times.
D.C. United is surveying fans to ask them if they’ll feel safe attending soccer matches in person later this summer, because who better to ask for advice about public health policy than random soccer fans?
Have you been missing sports columns about how your city needs to replace its arena despite not having a major-league team to play in it because the old one is a “graying ghost that is all but begging for a retirement cake” and besides even Tulsa has a newer one, oh the shame? The San Diego Union-Tribune is on it!

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