Category: NFL

Friday roundup: Vegas stadium board approves Raiders cash after “fastest meeting in the history of $75m giveaways”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another programming week, one that was way busier than you’d expect for the dregs of summer. Let’s get through the rest of the week’s news and get you out of here for the long weekend:

  • Also eager to get out of town for the long weekend, apparently: The Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which voted unanimously Wednesday to give $75 million from a “waterfall” reserve fund of hotel tax money to the Raiders, to be used mostly toward a $158 million upgrade of an entry plaza. The authority took this action after just two public comments and none from the authority board members themselves, in what local podcaster Dayvid Figler called “the fastest meeting in the history of $75 million giveaways.” Board chair Steve Hill presented the plan as in response to the “need to keep driving all those great results that Jeremy presented,” referring to Jeremy Aguero, the paid sports team consultant and hotel management degree holder who for some reason gets to do all the economic analyses of sports projects in Nevada. (Hill, of course, is an unregistered sports team lobbyist too, Las Vegas is truly a growth coalition at its finest.)
  • The Kansas City council put off a rezoning vote for a new Royals stadium district again, because they want to wait first to get all the city’s mega-TIF districts finalized first. The council could have waited to figure out how it’s going to pay for its $1.1 billion share of the project before approving the money, but there was democracy afoot, had to nip that in the bud.
  • The Royals deal is still facing not only a potential April public vote — plus a likely lawsuit over whether the city can move ahead regardless of the results since it already approved the Royals deal — but a lawsuit charging that the state money being used for the project was passed illegally; the Missouri state supreme court is currently mulling whether that suit can move forward.
  • Chicago Bears officials are finally getting around to asking fans if they would still buy tickets if the team moved to Indiana, and are they taking the opportunity to sell fans on a “surrounded by restaurants, entertainment, and green space, creating a true gameday destination” with “one of the most robust gameday tailgating environments in the NFL”? You bet they are!
  • New Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski says his new $2.3 billion stadium, built with the aid of $2 billion in public money, will enable him to move the team’s payroll into the top 10 to 15 in MLB, after years at the bottom. That’s never really happened before with past MLB stadiums — there are some lovely charts showing this in J.C. Bradbury’s new book, wait for it — but there’s a first time for everything.
  • Speaking of Bradbury, he has a nice article over at The Conversation analyzing why we’re seeing so many new NFL stadiums being built with public money right now when economists and taxpayers alike think they’re a bad idea. Tl;dr: It’s the leases, stupid (and the stupid leases).
  • The NHL’s attempts to pit Houston and Austin against each other to compete for a expansion franchise have at least started to pay off, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire saying this week that “We’ll definitely be a better location than Austin” and “If you talk to the sports franchises in town, I think they’d tell you we’re great partners.” Still no word on what kind of money Houston (or Austin) might offer toward a new hockey arena, but you know that’s what Gary Bettman is waiting to hear.

 

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Tampa council approves plan to give $2B in public money to Rays stadium, says it’s not really public money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa city council spent all day meeting yesterday about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, but honestly they could have saved time and just voted first thing in the morning. Public speakers were split in their opinions — public speakers are always split — and as for councilmembers themselves, there was little actual discussion for most of the day, with elected officials mostly talking past each other, knowing that everyone’s vote was already decided going in. The only reason you drop a half-finished bill on legislators’ desks less than a week before the vote is to avoid robust public debate, waiting till you know you have a slim majority then calling a snap vote while you know you have a W. The final vote was 4-3 in favor, same as had been since councilmember Bill Carlson used the leverage of his being a swing vote to win effectively no concessions whatsoever while patting himself on the back for doing so.

(WUSF claimed that the swing vote was councilmember Naya Young, but she’d already voted yes to the deal the first time it came up for a vote, leaving open the question of whether the NPR station doesn’t know what a swing vote is or just can’t remember as far back as March. The Tampa Bay Times, meanwhile, parroted Carlson’s line that Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will “cover” $100 million that previously would have come from city property taxes, even though Zalupski’s loan will still be repaid with city property taxes. This has not been a banner week for Tampa area journalism.)

The closest the council came to open debate was at the tail end of the meeting, whcn councilmembers took turns giving statements. I didn’t listen to all of it, but did hear councilmember Luis Viera claim that two-thirds of the stadium is being privately paid for because it’s “revenues from the project” — notwithstanding that it’s tax revenues that anyone other than Zalupski would be paying to the city treasury if they built such a project, but that instead will be kicked back to pay for the stadium costs; if that’s your criterion, everyone should get to write their yearly IRS checks to themselves, on that grounds that it’s tax money that “wouldn’t exist” without them. Councilmember Lynn Hurtak countered that the deal — what we know of it so far, given the many documents that remain unresolved — would put Tampa taxpayers on the hook for an unknown amount of future upgrade costs and called on councilmembers to “show we’re the smart city”; Carlson and council chair Alan Clendenin (yep, this guy) then mansplained at her to read the stadium funding agreement, something she’d already made plainly clear she had done, in detail.

There’s still a Hillsborough County Commission vote today, and while anything can happen, the council was universally seen as the higher hurdle here. For now, Tampa elected officials just voted to approve at least $180 million in future city property tax money plus $400 million or so in future city property tax breaks plus unknown amounts of future property tax kickbacks for additional upgrades, plus $1.5 billion or more in county and state subsidies, all to build a stadium for a billionaire team owner with no other offers on the table from other cities, after hardly any debate and before all the documents have been finalized. If there’s any upside, it’s that the interminable Rays stadium saga appears to be nearing an end, at least for the next couple of decades until the team’s lease at the new place gets close to running out; the cost is only the most expensive taxpayer stadium subsidy in MLB history.

Will other cities be the smart city? Let’s see how stadium and arena matters are going elsewhere:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’s explanation for spending an extra $7 million a year on bond payments for a Royals stadium is that it’s not just to get around a public vote, it’s also that the more expensive bonds would be easier for the city to default on. With a sales pitch like that, the city may end up having to offer an even higher interest rate than 5.725% to get anyone to buy their stadium bonds.
  • The Beacon News, meanwhile, says that even though Royals owner John Sherman will only be putting up $55 million for a community benefits agreement against $600 million in city funding, that’s fair because tithing one-tenth of your income to private charity is a Christian tradition. That’s not even true, but it wouldn’t make any more sense if it were, just let it go, it’s been a bad week for journalism all around.
  • NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said he has talked to some Illinois legislators about getting a Chicago Bears stadium done in that state. “We want to make sure that Arlington Heights and Illinois have an opportunity, as well as Indiana, to put their best foot forward,” said Goodell, presumably because “The bidding is now open!” would sound too crass.
  • The Alpharetta City Council approved zoning changes that could lead to an NHL arena in Atlanta’s far northern suburbs, if Atlanta’s far northern suburbs got an NHL team, which nobody is predicting will actually happen.
  • There could be a bidding war for the Oakland Arena between arena management titans Legends Global and Oak View Group, though both parties appear to be offering roughly the same amount of money (roughly $100 million), instead competing on which company can provide better “long-term stewardship” for the venue.
  • Sports teams are really expensive when you’re bidding against billionaires, film at 11.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: KC approves $1B+ in Royals stadium subsidies over calls for public vote, independent analysis

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Kansas City council voted on a proposed city funding package for a new Royals stadium yesterday, and as expected, it sailed through, with councilmembers voting 11-2 to approve a series of agreements promising $600 million in cash plus at least $500 million in tax breaks toward a new $1.9 billion stadium at Crown Center.

The council vote came amid more protests from members of the labor group Missouri Workers Power, who vowed to move ahead with plans for November ballot measure on the plan, which if it goes against the council’s verdict will likely spark a legal battle over which vote takes precedence. Councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of the two no votes yesterday, said the council shouldn’t have voted without waiting for independent economic analyses of the plan; Mayor Quinton Lucas retorted that there will soon be a TIF district analysis made available along with other studies, and “if for some reason the third party financial review says, ‘this doesn’t work,’ then these things don’t go forward,” though it’s not clear what council action would be necessary to undo yesterday’s decision.

Kansas City Star columnist David Hudnall summed up the situation before the council vote: “Huge financial questions remain unanswered. Some pages in the agreements are literally blank. … They don’t want us to vote on this stadium, and pushing it through like this is their best chance of making sure the public doesn’t have a say.”

Fran Marion, a fast food worker and Missouri Workers Power leader, said in addition to the proposed ballot measure, “we see how our mayor and council members voted, and we know elections are coming up in April and June, and we will remember what they did today.” That’s absolutely been known to happen, though it’d be cold comfort for Kansas Citians to get revenge on local councilmembers (Lucas is term-limited out in 2027) while still being stuck with a huge public tab, just as it was for residents of Wisconsin and Cobb County and Miami before them.

And in other news of the week:

  • Tampa Mayor Jane Castor now says that a revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan could see the city of Tampa fronting $80 million while the Rays ownership would take out a $100 million loan, all of which would be repaid out of future property tax receipts. That would still 100% be replacing city tax money with city tax money, with the Tampa Bay Business Journal acknowledging that there’s “not much” difference between a Community Redevelopment Area district (the old plan) and a Tax Increment Financing district (the new one). Castor promised, “We’re not going to rush into an agreement just for the sake of time,” while also saying that a council vote could come as early as next week despite no one knowing yet exactly how the financing would work.
  • The Federal Railroad Administration has approved two grants totaling $659 million for relocating an Amtrak facility in Chicago, which could clear the way for the 14th Street rail yard to be used by incoming Chicago White Sox owner Justin Ishbia to build a new stadium there. Who would fund that project still remains very much an unknown, but it seems like we’re headed toward finding out.
  • After receiving $750 million in state money for his Las Vegas stadium, Raiders owner Mark Davis is now asking for another $75 million to fund a new entry plaza in advance of hosting the 2029 Super Bowl. The money would come out of a “waterfall” fund set aside for Raiders stadium upgrades from the same hotel tax money that paid for the first $750 million — but that’s still not without its costs in terms of draining funds you might need later for other repair needs, as Cleveland could tell you.
  • “I don’t think the Steelers have any plans of leaving” their 25-year-old stadium, said Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor this week, but “the reality is both stadiums need upgrades” and “I think to compete, we’re gonna have to have those conversations long term with the Steelers and the Pirates.” Left unspecified: What kind of upgrades the stadiums need, who would pay for them, and who O’Connor thinks he’d be “competing” with exactly.
  • Speaking of needs and wants and competition, Boston Celtics owner Bill Chisholm said this week that he doesn’t need a new arena to compete with other teams financially, but “I do think we need to have an arena that is consistent with the quality and the excellence of the Celtics.” Chisholm added, “if we can make it work, we’d love to stay where we are,” all of which sounds very much like gamesmanship with his current landlords, Delaware North, whose owner also owns the Bruins.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Plano residents to vote on $700m Stars arena subsidy, Bears still playing hard to get with IL and IN

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you missed it, sports economist/meme master J.C. Bradbury has a new book on sports subsidy deals due out soon: This One Will Be Different details the latest in stadium and arena deals and why they never pay off for the public, with a particular focus on the Atlanta Braves‘ extraction of money from Cobb County for a new stadium just 17 years after getting their last one, which he had a front row seat for. And for the run up to the publication date, Bradbury has been building out his sports economics website with all sorts of fresh goodies: FAQs on stadium economics and how stadiums are funded, links to academic studies and presentations, and even a series of YouTube shorts on the lessons of past deals and the prospects for future ones. Check it out, it’s entertaining and eye-opening rabbit holes all the way down!

But don’t go just yet, because first we have another week of stadium and arena news to get through:

Share this post:

New taxpayer-funded Bills stadium features record number of state-of-the-art obstructed-view seats

access_time personNeil deMause

Buffalo Bills ownership held an open practice on Sunday to show off their new $2.1 billion stadium (public cost: $1 billion and change), and it did not go well:

Other Bills fans pointed out that many of the new stadium’s seats are not obstructed, but that didn’t do much to quell the online furor, especially after Buffalo residents had to both help pay to build the thing with state and county tax dollars and then cough up for personal seat licenses, only to discover that the designers appeared to have paid somewhat less attention to detail than your average Minecraft stadium builder.

After the Sunday evening newscasts were full of photos like the above, Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli told reporters on Monday, “So far, we’ve heard from less than 1 percent of our PSL holders about anything sight line related,” and also that “seats with truly obstructed views have not been sold as a PSL or for any football games,” which would make just under 1% of fans still griping seem pretty bad, actually. Guelli said some of these seats might only be sold for concerts that take place only at one end of the field, but it’s kind of hard to imagine what that bottom-right image would be good for a ticket to, unless it’s a band you desperately don’t want to see.

Guelli went on to say that complaints would be addressed “on a case-by-case basis,” which presumably means if you complain enough, they’ll try to move you to seats where you can actually see the game. Still, it’s hard not to notice that the Bills had a perfectly good stadium right next door that offered 11,000 more seats, significantly fewer of which faced onto concrete, even if it didn’t feature as many ways to sell you food. In the end, enshittification comes for us all.

Share this post:

Broncos execs tired of waiting for someone to give them land and money for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been almost a year since Denver Broncos owners Greg and Carrie Penner, Mayor Mike Johnston, and Gov. Jared Polis announced plans for a new stadium to be built by 2031 at Denver’s state-owned Burnham Yard railyards, with the big remaining questions being how much the Penners would pay for the land, how they would get it rezoned for sports use, how much public money they would get for “infrastructure” like new roads, whether they would get tax increment financing to kick back sales and/or property taxes to help pay for construction, who would clean up contaminated soil at the site, and what kind of community benefits agreement to agree to. They’re still figuring most of that out, and last weekend Broncos president Damani Leech went to the hustings to tell reporters that team officials are growing annoyed that things aren’t moving faster:

“I’ve got to be honest, I wish we were further along in some areas than we are now. I think areas where we do control, particularly real estate, you mentioned Burnham Yard, real estate, engaging with the community, we’ve done site tours of the location, the design of the stadium continues to evolve, the master plan continues to evolve. All of those things are moving along really, really well, but we also understand that we can’t do this alone.

“There are certain things we don’t control. I think as an example, the community benefits process is something that we can’t control. We’ve had a lot of initial great discussions with community representatives. More recently here, it’s been on more of a staff level. We’re eager to engage with those community members directly, understand what they’re looking for, what needs and interests they have on the development. Things like that, we have to continue to progress. We said many months ago, this is an ambitious timeline, so for that to happen, we need everybody to be involved. We can’t do it alone in order to get to 2031.”

Leech said opening the stadium by 2031 is “still achievable for sure,” but that “everybody has to be involved.”

Is there frustration with the process?

“I’ll be honest, there are days when I have concern,” Leech said, “there are days when I have frustration because you can’t control it all, so I think that’s fair.”

This all starts off reasonably enough — shit takes time, damn that bureaucracy — and it’s unclear from NBC Sports’ Mike Florio’s recounting whether it was reporters or Leech who introduced the word “frustration.” (Denver Sports’ longer quote makes it seem more like the latter.) Still, taken as a whole, this becomes a clear message to city and state officials and community negotiators: Why doesn’t anyone else share our urgency about giving us what we want so we can open our stadium by our chosen date? It’s like you all have other priorities or something!

The Penners did win an agreement in May with the state Department of Transportation for a right of first refusal to buy the rail yards for $45.8 million, $23.6 million less than the state paid for the land and a track easement between 2021 and 2025. (Under the deal, the team will pay for cleanup costs.) But the sale isn’t finalized yet, nor are the rezoning or the TIFs or the infrastructure money, so the total public cost is still very much up in the air.

Meanwhile, Leech also called requiring fans to buy personal seat licenses in order to buy tickets to be “a pretty likely thing to happen,” which is both unsurprising — most other NFL teams do it, as a way to monetize their season ticket holder waitlist while hoping nobody notices that fans often end up holding ticket rights that nobody wants to buy — and likely to be unpopular given how fans of teams like the Buffalo Bills are growing concerned that they’re being priced out of affording tickets. This is absolutely something that city and state officials could be making part of their negotiations, but negotiating is so tiresome, can’t we get to the fun part already where we get to build our stadium? Go write that down, reporters, we’re trying to build a narrative here!

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Blazers arena staredown escalates, haggling continues in Rays stadium standoff

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! There’s nothing in the latest batch of stadium and arena news that can quite compete with the European and North/Central American soccer federations vowing to start boycotting FIFA events as soon as this September if FIFA sells operating rights to the World Cup to Jared Kushner’s brother, but it was still a pretty eventful week:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Tampa council slams brakes on Rays stadium approvals, A’s find an investor (maybe sorta)

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of other news this week while we were off on Portland Trail Blazers watch:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: On being a fan of the World Cup without being a fan of the FIFA World Cup 2026™

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we start with this week’s roundup, a note about the World Cup: I’m enjoying it! The one-game knockout format, even in its dumb expanded iteration, is great for generating drama, and when you mix in international politics and colonial history, you get even more opportunities for hilarity.

But I enjoy most sports, even the dumb ones. The issue about sports mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics isn’t whether they should exist, but whether they should exist in their current form, as means for extracting tons of money from host cities and delivering it to corrupt oligarchs. The reports just keep coming in confirming that any claimed economic benefits of hosting the games are overwhelmed by the public costs — look, here’s another one from Atlanta about vendors trying to get their money back after being suckered into joining a city-sponsored program for World Cup-related booths that turned into what one called “a financial nightmare” — and while big public watch parties are fun, you don’t actually need to have the World Cup in your city, or in your country, to hold one. The World Cup, like pretty much all sports at this point (I may be willing to make exceptions for curling and Ultimate Frisbee), has been weaponized to transfer money from the many to the few, which is why we keep complaining about it here every week. If we have to live under toxic capitalism, the least we should get to do it the joy of pointing and laughing.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s gone on recently that is likely to cost you money on the grounds that sports are fun, please enjoy ridiculing it:

  • Washington, D.C. is preparing to sell $975 million in personal seat licenses allowing fans to buy Commanders tickets and use the proceeds for stadium construction, which momentarily excited me until I realized it looks like the PSLs will be funding the team’s share of costs, notwithstanding the city’s involvement in doing the sales. Anyway, some quick long division determines that team officials are presumably planning to ask for an average of $15,000 per seat for the mere right to spend hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets, though it’s always possible the team will have to take a loss on the whole transaction if fans aren’t willing to pony up that much.
  • Congratulations, everyone in the United States: You now get to help pay for $25 million in road work around the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, after that city won a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “reconfigured freeway ramps and streamlined local roads [that] will lead to the stadium and the surrounding entertainment district.”
  • The city of Oakland may try to sell the Oakland Coliseum and its neighboring arena in separate deals after concerns that wavering plans for redevelopment of the stadium site are holding up the arena sale. The Coliseum is set to finally be entirely empty next year, after the announced departure of the Roots USL Championship club to, uh, somewhere, they’ll get back to you on that.
  • Two contrasting headline styles in reporting on the return of corporate stadium names after FIFA decreed them unallowable during the World Cup because they might compete with their own sponsorship contracts: “Lumen Field returns as Seattle says bye to World Cup and Seattle Stadium” vs “Praise Be: ‘Philadelphia Stadium’ Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords.” Well played, Philadelphia sports site Crossing Broad, even if you do appear to be mostly an excuse to run lots of posts promoting sports gambling.
  • Not sure which is more on the nose for 2026, a proposal to have the Bay Area’s Cow Palace host a data center now that it’s been superseded by the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena or a related proposal to have it host a helicopter landing pad. No word yet on whether these would require public money, but given that a data center is involved, probably.
  • New Dallas Stars vaportecture renderings, though they’re mostly unspecific and from a great distance, aside from the one that appears to show fans watching a Stars playoff game on a giant video screen atop a new team store, which is maybe even more on the nose for 2026.
Share this post:

Indiana gov to Porter County: If you want to miss out on fun of giving $250m in tax money to Bears, your loss

access_time personNeil deMause

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun says he isn’t sweating Porter County leaders’ opposition to raising food and beverage taxes for a new Chicago Bears stadium the next county over, because really it’s Porter County that would be missing out on all the fun of taking part in shoveling money at the Bears owners:

Under the law, Porter County would have to approve a one-percent food and beverage tax to have representation on the stadium authority. The governor said if it doesn’t get approved, the biggest impact would be on Porter County itself.

“If they choose not to put any skin in the game, they’re not going to have any say-so for what happens from all the economic benefits we’re going to get from it,” Braun said.

Maybe you’re the one up a stump, Porter County! Does a county get a chance to fund a stadium deal every day?

The whole Porter County kerfuffle points up one of the weirder things about the Indiana Bears stadium deal: Though it was passed by the legislature back in February, it didn’t precisely spell out who would be spending what on a stadium, or even where exactly it would be. A newly created sports authority will be able to offer the Bears owners money from a whole bunch of taxes, only some of which actually exist yet:

  • All new property tax, income tax, and sales tax for the next 35 years from an omni-TIF district encompassing the stadium and an undetermined number of square miles around it. This could certainly amount to billions of dollars, much of it potentially cannibalized from spending that has nothing to do with the Bears, but just as we saw in Kansas, it’s impossible to say exactly how much without knowing the size of the district.
  • A doubling of the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10%, which would provide at least $90 million.
  • Those 1% food and beverage tax surcharges in Lake and Porter counties, which would be worth about $250 million each, if approved.
  • A 12% ticket tax, which would be worth about another $200 million, though as established ticket taxes are unlike other taxes in that they tend to come out of team owners’ revenues.

The best guess at the total public cost is “easily past $4 billion,” but that could go up or down depending on what gets approved in terms of that tax diversion district plus the new taxes. And a quarter-billion dollars from Porter County seems like a significant amount of money, though I suppose Braun is right in that if county leaders balk at that, the state could always compensate by running the omni-TIF district all the way to the Ohio border.

All this makes Indiana’s bid for the Bears a bit of a moving target in the state’s bidding war with Illinois, which is no doubt very much to Bears owner George McCaskey’s liking. (“You’re willing to give us $1.5 billion in property tax breaks and infrastructure money, you say? Well, what if I told you Indiana was offering a TIF district the size of the entire Local Group?”) Right now you have a three-way — or more, given the various Illinois factions — game of chicken going on, and nobody’s showing each other their cards, and … okay, maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be writing extended metaphors. If anyone says they know how much money Bears execs could get out of either Indiana or Illinois, they’re lying, that’s the upshot here.

Share this post: