Category: Chicago Bears

Indiana guy wants to create commission to think about building Bears stadium, maybe, if it had any money

access_time personNeil deMause

Almost as long as the Chicago Bears owners have been angling for a new stadium somewhere in the Chicago area, people have been wondering when Indiana would get involved, given that 1) every place large and small in Illinois has already been approached and 2) Indiana, amirite? And this week, the Indiana state legislature finally took the bait … sort of:

The state legislature is considering House Bill 1292 which would establish a Northwest Indiana professional sports development commission, which would study plans to attract one or more professional sports franchises…

The commission would spend money from the professional sports development fund, which would be funded through general assembly appropriations, grants, gifts and donations.

The bill, which has already passed its first state house committee, wouldn’t actually allocate any money to that sports development fund, though. So really this is more about opening a state bank account, writing “FOR STADIUMZ” on it, and then going oh please oh please.

Bill sponsor Rep. Earl Harris Jr. of East Chicago — a former Fox Sports Midwest producer who took over his house seat from his mom, who took it over when his dad died — seemed to admit as much, saying he hoped the bill would “cause attention,” and here we are, giving him that attention. Harris also acknowledged he hasn’t talked to anyone in the Bears organization yet, you know what, let’s shut this down right now, go read something else that’s actually news, there must be some out there somewhere.

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Bears owner dies at 102, sets off speculation on how this will impact stadium talks

access_time personNeil deMause

Chicago Bears owner Virginia McCaskey died on Thursday, which will happen when you’re 102 years old. McCaskey had, understandably, not been in the public eye much of late, with her son George McCaskey serving as team chair, while president Kevin Warren took on most of the leadership duties, including trying to shake down various Chicago-area municipalities for stadium money.

Now, though, a report in Crain’s Chicago Business claims that Virginia McCaskey’s death could impact not just the team’s ownership — her roughly 30% of the team will pass down to her heirs, some of whom are reportedly eager to sell them for cash — but the team ownership’s stadium plans as well:

The team’s proposal unveiled in April for a new $3.2 billion stadium just south of Soldier Field calls for $2 billion of that to come from the Bears. While the team hasn’t specified the sources of that funding — large portions could come from things like personal seat license and naming rights revenue, for example — splintered ownership stakes could factor into their ability to finance the project. Nuances of ownership would matter to state lawmakers if they were to sign off on a large public subsidy to help, as taxpayers will need to know with whom they are doing business.

That’s pretty handwavy: If Bears ownership figures out how to pay for a stadium, and Illinois lawmakers are asked to contribute, they might care who owns the team. State elected officials are already on record as caring more about not contributing state money or at least not if the Bears keep sucking, but sure, who owns how many shares could matter, maybe.

Take that at put it through the bad 2025 journalism filter, and we get Sports Mockery’s headline:

We Finally Know Real Reason The Chicago Bears Stadium Has Stalled

Danny Ecker of Chicago Business finally revealed a new wrinkle that explains a lot. According to what he’s gathered, one reason the state is dragging its feet is the uncertainty surrounding Bears ownership. It stems from the McCaskeys giving so many shares to family members rather than just a concentrated group. That has led to reservations about whether they can finance the project as planned.

That’s not what Ecker’s article says at all: It doesn’t mention anything that could remotely be construed as a “reason the state is dragging its feet.” So Sports Mockery — which is actually a real news site, sort of, despite its name — has made up that headline out of whole cloth. All indications are that the reason the state is dragging its feet is that state leaders, not least Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, are not currently inclined to cut a billion-dollar-plus check to any Bears owners, fragmented or not.

Back in Crain’s, Ecker concludes his article with the unassailable conclusion that “the team’s moves in the weeks and months ahead will offer clues and signals about what will change and what won’t in a new era of ownership for the Monsters of the Midway.” Ah, the old “one thing’s for sure: no one knows” kicker. Now there’s some fine journalism tradition.

 

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Friday roundup: Moreno re-ups Angels lease, plus sports leaders mumbling incoherently

access_time personNeil deMause

So this happened:

That’s it, I’m done, I can’t top that. RIP comedy (???? – 2025 AD), reality has finally become too absurd even to laugh at.

If anyone still cares about the rest of the news, here’s some:

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Friday roundup: Hamilton County spends $30m on Bengals parking land, Oakland Coliseum may get second life as soccer venue

access_time personNeil deMause

Note to reporters seeking help with your research into sports economics issues: I’m more than happy to talk with journalists from all over the political spectrum, as the great stadium swindle is, as has been discussed here time and again, one that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on. But if you’re asking for my assistance, maybe don’t include a link to a page with a report your site did saying anti-trans legislation is about “banning males from competing on female sports teams” — if you can’t keep at least one foot on the ground of factual accuracy, what you’re doing isn’t journalism.

Speaking of factual accuracy, here’s your weekly news roundup, fact-checked as well as I can do myself while my fact-checking department is, apparently, out on a long lunch or something:

  • Hamilton County may still be negotiating a lease extension with the owners of the Cincinnati Bengals, but that hasn’t stopped the county from spending $30 million to buy a parcel of land next to the Bengals stadium to use as additional parking and green space. “The Bengals have forgiven us for our [game day] payments,” explained Hamilton County Commission president Denise Driehaus. “It’s about $30 million total. That happened to be the asking price for this property. And so, in essence, the Bengals are paying for the property, and the county owns it.” That “in essence” is doing a lot of work there: From what I can tell from this report, it was back in 2018 Bengals management first agreed to hand over the disputed game day payments, which is money the team owners wanted the county to provide to cover operational costs of holding home games, in exchange for parking — though if they were “disputed” it’s not clear that this was ever team money to begin with.
  • Remember how, just last month, the owners of the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer teams said they wanted to build a temporary stadium before maybe eventually moving to a permanent stadium at Howard Terminal? Forget all that, they were just pulling our legs, now they want to remain at the Oakland Coliseum for “a longer stay.” Guess resident opossums are only an existential threat to baseball teams, not soccer teams?
  • Your occasional reminder that when the Los Angeles Dodgers owners do renovations to their stadium, they spend their own money on it. That likely has something to do with the fact that they have some of the highest attendance numbers and highest ticket prices in baseball, so they benefit the most from upgrades — though it does raise the question of whether, if less popular teams are asking to be subsidized for renovations that won’t pay for themselves, if that’s really about needing renovations or just wanting an excuse to ask for taxpayer money.
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren has upgraded from “steadfast” to “adamant” that his team will break ground on a new stadium in 2025. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
  • The St. Petersburg city council has approved funding for the repair of … Al Lang Stadium! The Tampa Bay Rowdies, who play at Al Lang, are owned by Rays owner Stu Sternberg, so at least St. Pete officials can’t be said to be holding a grudge.
  • The Super Bowl’s coming to New Orleans, everyone get ready to benefit from that cushy NFL spending that will provide … $12/hour jobs to assemble the stage for the $10 million halftime show? Well then.
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Friday roundup: City sues Browns over Brook Park vaporstadium, Broncos go all Bears on suburban move threats

access_time personNeil deMause

Weeks keep happening, and we keep making it to the end of them! (Well, most of us.) If you ever need a break from the general state of everything, you might want to check out this other project I’m involved in, where you can immerse yourself in great live music of the recent past to gird yourself for the present. Or just experience whatever exactly this is.

Back now, all musicked up? Good, because there’s some news waiting for you and it’s not going to stay hot forever:

  • As promised, the city of Cleveland officially sued the Cleveland Browns under Ohio’s Art Modell Law this week to force team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to offer the team for sale to local owners before trying to move it to the suburb of Brook Park. The Haslams already preemptively sued to block the Modell Law, so now this will be in the hands of the courts, though it’s also in the hands of the state legislature that is being asked for maybe $1.2 billion to help build a Brook Park dome, hey guys, I think I came up with a way to save a bunch on lawyers’ fees!
  • Denver Broncos co-owner Greg Penner said Wednesday that “We haven’t ruled out anything at this point” in terms of a new or renovated stadium to replace or upgrade their 24-year-old one, adding, “We’re still looking at options on the current site, around Denver.” If that sounds suspiciously like “We’re kicking the tires of local governments to see what our leverage is,” congratulations, you’ve passed Chicago Bears 101!
  • Speaking of the Bears, Illinois house speaker Chris Welch said he might consider having the state pay for some infrastructure costs of a new NFL stadium, so long as the team owners build one at the Michael Reese Hospital site that they first rejected before saying they might reconsider. Fox 32 Chicago further reports that “Governor JB Pritzker is open to talks with the Bears regarding the Michael Reese site” (according to “sources); if the Bears execs’ plan is really “keep throwing things at various walls until we see what sticks,” this might be just the opening they’ve been hoping for — now, how to define an entire stadium as “infrastructure”?
  • The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal … I probably shouldn’t even finish this sentence, but in the interest of the completeness: Mr. Bowtie says that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg needs to find a way to get a stadium built in his current city or else sell the team, and that the situation is “not identical” to the Athletics moving out of Oakland, because Tampa-St. Pete is a large market and the Rays have a stadium offer in hand while the A’s … well, they’re just different, okay? This is probably just Rosenthal going off for his own reasons, but he does spend a bunch of time discussing how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is taking a “different approach” with the Rays than the A’s, so there’s some chance the consummate baseball insider is sending a message on behalf of MLB leadership, in which case maybe Sternberg will take the hint and stand down from his “Thanks for the billion dollars, what else you got?” gambit.
  • Retiring Miami Mayor Francis Suarez gave a farewell speech in which he stood before the under-construction Inter Miami stadium — as well as an American flag and two John Deere tractors, because Florida — and declared the “the best sports deal in America.” Mmm, maybe not quite that actually, but we have some lovely parting gifts.
  • Remember that time San Diego almost had a floating ballpark? Wait, that was never really going to happen? Shh, it makes a great story.
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Friday roundup: Chiefs hire clown consultants for fan poll, Bears try to conjure stadium money with magic words

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”

We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:

  • Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
  •  Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
  • The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
  • Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
  • Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
  • The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
  • There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
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Friday roundup: More Rays scuttlebutt, Sixers arena advances, nobody’s buying pricey Bills PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been three whole days since we checked in on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation! Do you feel bereft? Do Rays execs and Tampa Bay–area elected officials feel bereft? If a press statement falls in a forest and there’s no one around to aggregate it, does it make a sound?

None of this, and more, will be answered in this week’s news roundup:

  • The Tampa Bay Times sports desk has certainly been chiming in on the Rays situation, with columnist John Romano, who first reported on Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s threats to move the team if he didn’t get stadium bonds approved ASAP, declaring that what is needed is “a hero” or “a savior” or “a fairy-tale knight” to “step up and purchase a large hunk of the franchise and pay for a stadium, or at least provide a stadium financing plan that does not involve more than a half-billion in public dollars.” Why a half-billion? Who knows! Where does Romano think Sternberg will go if no buyer steps in? Dunno, though he predicts the team will “be on the move, at least temporarily, when 2026 rolls around and Tropicana is still not fixed and the Rays do not want to be stuck in an 11,000-seat spring training stadium.” (The number of cities that could have significantly larger stadiums ready to go by 2026 is zero, or maybe one if neither the Athletics nor San Francisco Giants have territorial rights to Oakland.) The most logical short-term solution is for Sternberg and local electeds to get together and agree to pay the $55 million it would cost to repair Tropicana Field for the short term, with Sternberg agreeing to extend his lease a few years in exchange; it would take a lot of pride-swallowing, especially on Sternberg’s part, so it probably won’t happen, but the alternative looks like it’ll be a whole lot of baseball seasons in minor-league parks somewhere.
  • The group that wants to bring an MLB team to Orlando — formerly led by former Magic executive Pat Williams before his death this summer — also chimed in, saying that while they would never interfere in the business of St. Petersburg, if the Rays did want to move to Orlando, they’re confident that Orange County political leaders “can provide an attractive public/private partnership stadium financing structure that benefits all stakeholders involved.” The last time they brought this up, the “public” part involved $975 million in hotel tax money, one of the same revenue sources that St. Petersburg had been looking to use on its new Rays stadium. (Though it’s often said that Florida counties can spend this on tourism promotion and building things like stadiums and convention centers, it can also use some of it for zoos and beaches and river cleanup and even transportation and sewer infrastructure, something lots of Floridians would like to see counties do.) The Orange County Commission has passed on this idea in the past; we’ll see if it goes over any better with the Rays as a potential target.
  • The Philadelphia city council voted 10-3 to approve creating a tax-kickback district for a new 76ers arena and a new “arena district” to manage neighborhood impacts, which are expected to be extensive. More arena votes are scheduled for the next council meeting on Tuesday.
  • Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are each being asked for $20 million for Guardians and Cavaliers stadium and arena repairs, with another $30 million ask on the table right behind that. If there’s a small silver lining, it’s that this is money the city and county already agreed to spend, it’s just that the cigarette and alcohol taxes that were supposed to fund it are coming up short, so now taxpayers will have to dig into another public pocket.
  • How are those super-pricey Buffalo Bills PSLs selling? Extremely poorly: Only 10% have sold so far, and the rate of purchases is slowing. If they don’t sell out, the Bills owners are on the hook for coming up with the money elsewhere, at least, so at least it won’t be an additional public disaster like the 1990s Oakland Raiders PSLs were.
  • The Chicago Bears owners and Arlington Heights have finally agreed on a property tax valuation for the land the team wants to build a stadium on in that Chicago suburb, but also they say they still really want to build a stadium in Chicago, raising the question, as the Chicago Sun-Times puts it, of “whether the Bears’ latest announcement is [just] a push for leverage in stadium negotiations that have now stretched over three years.”
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Bears execs are going to keep throwing stadium sites at the wall until one sticks

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Chicago Bears owners’ stadium dreams going nowhere with state officials and going backwards with the public, how to create some positive momentum? How about have someone leak news off the record to the local business rag that you’re looking at a new potential site maybe possibly perhaps?

After publicly labeling the former Michael Reese hospital site as unsuitable for the new venue, the team is said to be reconsidering the 49-acre property south of McCormick Place in hopes of jump-starting discussions with politicians to keep the team in Chicago, according to sources familiar with the talks.

So let’s start with this: “To keep to team in Chicago” is bald-faced propaganda, since Bears execs have never even threatened to relocate the team out of the area, and no other cities are offering them a stadium. (If Crain’s Chicago Business means “keep the team from moving to the suburbs” it should say that, but even then the Bears have no serious offers there either.)

As for this alleged new site, it’s actually an old site on the South Side near the lake that was suggested last May by Chicago’s nonprofit Civic Federation and summarily rejected by Bears CEO Kevin Warren as “too narrow.” (It’s also long been targeted by the city as the site of a new mixed-use neighborhood, no word on how adding a football stadium would pair with that.) It’s now being thrown back into the mix by [source needed] on the grounds that state officials from Chicago might like it better, though the public subsidy required is still unknown; Crain’s reports, citing nobody at all, that “the Bears understand a larger private investment is needed,” but also Civic Federation president Joe Ferguson previously noted that the Reese site is “eligible for TIF funding,” though also it’s owned by the city of Chicago, would it even pay property taxes that would have to be refunded via a TIF? So many questions for whoever is floating this idea now, too bad they’re anonymous so we can’t ask them any questions!

 

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3,000 Chicagoans vote “no” on public money for Bears stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

There was one other stadium-related issue on the ballot on Tuesday, and it was a weird one: Voters in eight precincts on Chicago’s West Side were offered a chance to decide on the question “Shall the people of Chicago provide any taxpayer subsidy to the Chicago Bears to build a new stadium?” and overwhelmingly said “no”:

With five of eight precincts reporting, “no” garnered 79 percent of the referendum vote compares to 21 percent for “yes,” according to the Chicago Board of Elections…

Just over 3,000 votes were cast on the ballot referendum with five of eight precincts reporting.

What impact does this have on the Bears‘ stadium plans, and why only five precincts? Nothing, and that’s a bit of a story: Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn first tried in March to get a citywide nonbinding referendum put on the ballot, but the city council didn’t approve it. So instead he gathered signatures around his West Side home to put it on the ballot locally, making it symbolic as well as nonbinding.

That said, Quinn, who has spent his time in office since leaving office in 2015 mostly pursuing referendum drives, says it’s an indication that voters don’t want to give public money to the Bears’ owners, which we pretty much already knew from polling, but sure, now we effectively have a more in-depth poll of 3,000 West Siders as well. Not that this matters much since the current governor has already been polled and is 100% against the plan, and the city doesn’t seem to have the money to do it on its own, but there are worse ways to use an election, I suppose.

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Friday roundup: Special Tampa Bay Rays roof crisis edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Seems like all anybody wants to talk about today is what the Tampa Bay Rays will do now that their stadium roof blew off and also how insensitive it is to be talking about what the Rays will do when millions of people are still without power, so let’s get right to answering your questions and/or offending your sensibilities:

  • Rays management put out a statement yesterday saying “our priority is supporting our community and our staff” and “over the coming days and weeks, we expect to be able to assess the true condition of Tropicana Field,” which is PR for “dunno yet.” Playing without a roof apparently isn’t an option because the stadium doesn’t have a drainage system for when it rains, so it looks like the Rays and the city of St. Petersburg are going to have to look into a rush job of repairing the roof on a stadium that is set to close in three years regardless. Just in case, sportswriters are over are rushing to publish their lists of other places the Rays could play the start of next season, including various minor-league stadiums in Florida, the Oakland Coliseum, the Texas Rangers‘ still-standing old stadium next door to their new one, or, sure, Montreal, maybe its roof will be fixed before Tampa Bay’s is.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium got off without much damage after being flooded during Hurricane Milton, but the first responders using it as a shelter did have to evacuate. All of this should be having people rethink the whole “stadiums can double as emergency shelters” thing, maybe?
  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says a Chicago lakefront stadium is still “the focus” but his stadium architects are designing a building that would be “agnostic” with regard to location, which doesn’t really make sense — you have to at least know which direction fans would be arriving from and where the sun would be, for starters — but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to play off against each other multiple cities that have all shown little interest in throwing money at you.
  • If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Diamond Sports Group’s ongoing bankruptcy and its effect on MLB TV rights, Marc Normandin has a good writeup in Baseball Prospectus. Tl;dr: Two more teams have been dropped by Diamond (the Rays and Detroit Tigers) and the Texas Rangers had their contract expire, meaning it’s likely that MLB is going to end up running TV rights for a bunch of teams in 2025. For now it sounds like the league will be paying teams based on what they were getting from Diamond, but if you want to dream on a future where MLB holds NFL-like control over the whole league’s broadcasts and doles out money evenly and market size no longer matters, I’ve got you covered.
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