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

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.
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Friday roundup: Portlanders balk at giving Blazers owner $600m, KC gives initial okay of $235m to expand 2-year-old soccer stadium

Too damn hot! Gonna see how few words I can use today, to save electricity, y’know. That headline already caused voltage reductions across Brooklyn!

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Creating authority to own Browns stadium would push Haslam’s total taxpayer subsidy to $1.3B

Cleveland Browns update: University of Colorado Denver economist Geoff Propheter got back to me yesterday with an estimate for how much Brook Park, Ohio will give up in property taxes by setting up a public authority to own a Browns stadium, and the number is: $539 million in present value, on the low end.

(While the property tax break is money that Brook Park wouldn’t get if the stadium development isn’t built — at least not unless the land is used for something else — it’s also money that would be needed to pay for things like police and fire services and roads and schools to support the development, so not collecting it comes at a real cost to Brook Park.)

This gives us the opportunity to do a fresh estimate of the total subsidy Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is seeking as payment for moving from one part of Ohio to another:

That’s $1.3 billion right there, not counting the $178 million in county tax money and $422 million in city tax money that Haslam was talking about last year but has been quiet about since. Even without that, he’s still looking at getting half of his $2.6 billion stadium cost paid for by taxpayers, and he would be able to cover a bunch of his share with such things as naming rights proceeds or $150K-a-seat personal seat licenses.

The stadium authority plan still needs final signoff from the Brook Park city council — further votes are scheduled for June 23 and July 15 — and it’s unclear what Haslam would do if it were voted down. For that matter, it’s unclear what Haslam would do if the state backed off of (or was forced by court rulings to back off of) using the unclaimed property funds, given that he’s already broken ground in Brook Park. There’s definitely room for elected officials in Ohio to try to renegotiate a better deal for the public here, but instead they seem dead set on finding ways to make it worse.

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Brook Park gives initial okay to stadium authority to provide more tax breaks for Browns owner

The Cleveland Browns are already in the process of moving to a new $2.4 billion stadium in suburban Brook Park with the aid of $600 million in state money and $245 million in city money — they’ve even held a groundbreaking — but that doesn’t mean team owner Jimmy Haslam is done asking for stuff. In the latest, he got the Brook Park council last night to give preliminary approval to creating a stadium authority that would own the stadium and lease it back to him.

Lease-back deals like this are typically associated with property tax breaks: Since the building is owned by a government entity, it’s not subject to property taxes. I can’t immediately tell if Ohio would apply possessory interest taxes to the value of the lease itself — I’m sure Geoff Propheter will chime in soon to school me on this — but even if it does, this is a potential tax break that could increase Brook Park’s costs in exchange for no clear concessions at all from Haslam.

Mike Florio of NBC Sports also cites a savings (“apparently”) of $100 million in construction sales taxes, which was actually already approved last month as part of a development agreement between Brook Park and the team. (How Brook Park can exempt the project from sales taxes when it doesn’t have a city sales tax is an interesting research question.) Approved, but not released, as WOIO notes, so we don’t actually know what’s in the development agreement or whether Haslam would agree to pay rent or share revenues as part of the stadium authority ownership scheme.

The Brook Park council still needs to hold two more votes (the first is today) before the stadium authority becomes official, so maybe we’ll get more information before this whole thing is signed off on. Either way, demanding additional tax subsidies before a stadium has even been built is a pretty extreme example of the Grift That Keeps on Giving.

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Friday roundup: Rays may have bot-lobbied for stadium funds, OR gov says not rubber-stamping Blazers cash is “playing politics”

We’ve run off the end of April, and — spoiler alert — neither the Chicago Bears nor Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations have yet been resolved as team owners had hoped. Sportswriters often like to portray a slow approval process as dysfunction, but it can equally well be the opposite: Taking your time and driving a hard bargain are good negotiating tools, and when billions of dollars in tax money are at stake, rushing to get something approved just because the local billionaire is impatient is a great way to end up with unexpected costs. It’s still very much unknown whether residents of Illinois and Florida will end up with better stadium deals as a result of legislators taking their time, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll end up being any worse than if they’d just signed off on whatever they were presented with without reading it.

Anyway, lots of news did happen this week, even in Tampa Bay and Chicago, so let’s get to it:

  • Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal claims that somebody sent more than 2,000 bot-written emails from a single IP address in Los Angeles urging county commissioners to hurry up and approve the Rays’ stadium deal. Wostal says he doesn’t want to move forward with any stadium plan until the Rays owners provide documentation of where they’ll get the money to finance their part of the deal, which would include more than $1 billion for the stadium plus possibly billions more for surrounding development (some of which would be recouped by tax and land breaks), though the team hasn’t actually committed to what exactly it will build; a Rays statement said only that it would provide financing details “at the appropriate time as is standard with similar public-private partnerships,” which must be ownerese for “maybe after we’ve cashed your check.”
  • Bears executives held a meeting with NFL officials this week, in which everyone agreed that the best stadium options are either in Arlington Heights or Indiana. The assembled dignitaries then warned Illinois legislators that if a stadium bill to the Bears owners’ liking isn’t approved ASAP, the team and league could meet again.
  • Count Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek among the hurry-up-and-rubber-stampers: After signing a bill to provide $365 million in state money for Portland Trail Blazers renovations, she chided city and county officials for not swiftly approving their own $235 million, saying, “This is not a time to play politics. This is a time to get it done.” (“Playing politics,” in this case, includes things like not wanting to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering into arena funding talks.)
  • The Cleveland Browns held a groundbreaking for their new Brook Park stadium, even as legal questions remain about the state unclaimed funds money that is supposed to pay $600 million toward the project. Everyone involved is still moving full steam ahead, though: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that “we’re not attorneys, OK?” but after talking to actual attorneys “we do think it’ll be resolved,” while Gov. Mike DeWine reassured everyone that if this public funding plan fails, the state could always go back to his plan to raise sports gambling taxes and give the proceeds to sports teams that everyone hated. No one is saying exactly what will happen if the state — and the city of Brook Park, which is still negotiating its own $245 million in stadium spending — can’t come up with the money after stadium construction is already underway, probably because nobody wants to admit that “let the Haslams figure out how to find the rest of the money” is still an option for fear of risking the benefits of moving the Browns from Ohio to Ohio.
  • But if (greater) Cleveland doesn’t get a new stadium, how will it host a Super Bowl? Don’t worry, it probably won’t get one anyway unless it builds more hotels, says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who pointedly did not mention this during the runup to the stadium funding vote.
  • MLS has a prospective Las Vegas bidder for the Vancouver Whitecaps: a group led by Grant Gustavson, the 30-year-old son of Kentucky’s wealthiest billionaire. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Whitecaps will move if they don’t get a new arena deal in Vancouver — Vegas doesn’t have a soccer arena at all (though Gustavson said he’s ready to “privately finance” one, without providing details) and is getting dangerously close to a market glut of sports teams — but it’ll likely light a fire under officials in British Columbia, who already started scrambling the jets once the league announced its Vegas move threat earlier this week.
  • Team owner insists he needs state money for a new stadium, state says no you can’t have any, team owner finds an existing stadium to play in. Happy endings all around in the CT United F.C. story, unless you’re team owner Andre Swanston, who now has to settle for just selling tickets to watch soccer matches instead of getting $127 million in state aid to help boost his team’s bottom line.
  • Would this Comiskey Park–inspired stadium design be a better place for Chicago White Sox fans to watch a game? Undoubtedly, since it would bring back that ballpark’s close-to-the-action upper deck. Would it make more money for the White Sox owners? Probably not, because it would be missing the wall of luxury suites that are to blame for the current stadium’s unloved distant upper deck: Extra-nosebleedy cheap seats in modern stadiums are a feature, not a bug. Maybe work on reducing soaring income inequality that has created such a soaring market for high-priced tickets, and then we can get back to stadium design that actually works for everyone.
  • How did the economic impact go from the NFL Draft that Pittsburgh canceled school for? Not so hot, according to one restaurant worker who fought through draft-related bus rerouting only to have her hours cut because fewer customers than usual showed up. (Economists are shocked, shocked!) The city tourism agency responded with a statement that really the NFL Draft was less about bringing in new spending than “positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
  • In related news, New Jersey transit officials are recommending that state residents work from home during World Cup matches to avoid the transit nightmare caused by rerouting trains to take fans to matches since they won’t be allowed to drive there. This could be good news for New Jersey restaurants, maybe, unless everyone just makes their own lunches those days, see why economic impact of sporting events is harder to calculate than just adding up all the fans and declaring “> ? > profit”?
  • No, the Athletics aren’t going to change their name to the “Las Vegas Black Fire” just because they listed that as a location in a job listing, it’s just the name of a co-working space in Vegas. Thanks to SF Gate for clearing this up, maybe everyone should have done a little more research before firing up the AI jersey designs.
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Friends don’t let friends listen to what comes out of sports team owners’ mouths

Imagine you’re a wealthy sports team owner in the middle of trying to strike a stadium deal. (You go get your top hat, monocle, and snifter of cognac; I’ll wait here.) What is the best thing to say in a public statement, on the occasions it seems necessary to deign to speak directly to the public? You don’t want to make the task at hand seem impossible, because that could be interpreted as a loss of momentum for your demands; but at the same time, you don’t want to make it seem a sure thing, because that could take the pressure off elected officials to grant you the bags of cash/tax breaks until the sun burns out/land grants from here to the distant shore that you so desire. How to thread that needle?

Let’s see how some actual sports team execs do it! Contestant #1:

“It’s always been my experience when you’re doing important work, it’s not easy,” [Kansas City Royals owner John] Sherman said. “It shouldn’t be easy, and these are complicated processes. Public-private partnerships, multi-jurisdictional, dealing with multiple entities as well. But I think we’re making progress. I’m as anxious as anybody to get this behind us.”…

“We’ve got a little bit of a cushion, but not a big one,” Sherman said. “It’s time to get on with it.”

This is pretty much the same as Sherman said last month, when he described the lack of a finalized stadium deal as “from the governor on down, there’s a lot of effort being put forth” but also “when you have a window of opportunity, you better run through it because those windows close.” You’ll also note the Sherman avoided mentioning what the holdups are, or when some decisions might be reached — to date, Sherman hasn’t even identified a site or sites where he might want a stadium built, but that’s a double-edged sword, since the more you narrow down your options the fewer potential bidders you have. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, or at least nothing in a lot of words, and hope that the media wanders off and pressures elected officials for some action instead.

(Sherman also got in a statement about how much he liked the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district when he visited this past week for opening day, because “there were bands playing” and “tons of people around.”)

Contestant #2:

“We’re confident that [the $600 million is] going to come through and obviously we’re starting a stadium,” [Cleveland Browns co-owner Dee Haslam said. “We’re building a stadium. So we’re full steam ahead, but we’re pretty confident. I mean, they’ve done it in the past for economic development and this definitely fits into that criteria.”

This is in reference, of course, to the $600 million that the state of Ohio promised to give the Browns owners last summer, yet which is being held up by lawsuits over whether the state can legally use unclaimed private funds to supply the cash. Dee and Jimmy Haslam are already moving dirt for the stadium and have an official groundbreaking set for April 30, so they have to be at least a little bit antsy about how to pay the construction companies. Nothing they say is likely to sway the courts, though, so they best they can do is express confidence in the system of “economic development,” which is that governments give a lot of public money to “job creators,” and then some number of jobs are created, or not.

And contestant #3, who is not strictly a team owner but plays one in the press conferences:

“We have the legislation passed in Indiana, and they’ve been a great partner to work with,” [Chicago Bears] president Kevin Warren said. “We are going through legitimate due diligence because we have working through traffic, and construction items, and transportation and all those kinds of different things. It’s progressing right on pace.

“Illinois, they’re still working on legislation and we have a wonderful piece of land in Arlington Heights — 326 acres. So we don’t have a set deadline, but I am confident that sometime this spring/summer, we’ll know.”

“We’ll know” is a strange way of saying “We’ll make a decision that is entirely up to us,” though less so if you take it as “We’ll see what offers we have on the table, and then we can decide which one should make us the filthiest rich.” As discussed here last week, Bears owner George McCaskey doesn’t have any pressing reason to make a decision before the Illinois legislature adjourned at the end of May, so we can expect another two months of kicking the can down the road while hoping that Illinois will match or even raise Indiana’s bid. (Or at least come close: It’s always possible that McCaskey would take a lesser deal to stay in the state where most of his team’s fan base is, though if so he’s sure never going to admit it.) “I am confident that sometime this spring/summer” there will be a Bears stadium decision is an especially clever turn of phrase, given that it sets an expected deadline without actually setting a deadline deadline that anyone can hold Warren to in case circumstances change over the next two months.

What did we learn from all this? Not much in terms of the actual state of stadium talks for the Royals, Browns, or Bears, which is why it’s almost certainly bad journalistic practice for the news media to start transcribing every time the local sports team owner opens their mouth. Ask questions about the stadium deal process? Absolutely. Run an article when the owner says something newsworthy? Sure. Give the local rich guy or gal unlimited column inches to spin the situation however they like, instead of going out and investigating what’s actually being discussed or what experts have to say about whether it’s a good idea? This is maybe not what you spent $130,000 on that journalism degree for.

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Friday roundup: Can the Home Team Act save your home team, and other pressing questions

Let’s get this out of the way, since it’s blowing up on the socials: Yes, Sen. Bernie Sanders and another less famous guy (Rep. Greg Casar, a second-term representative from Austin and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus) yesterday introduced a “Home Team Act” that would require sports team owners to give one year of notice before moving or terminating a team — and also give local buyers the right to purchase the team “at a fair and reasonable price” first, with the price determined by a team of appraisers appointed by the Treasury Department. According to the bill, either private buyers or local governments themselves would be eligible to purchase the team, and any owners who jumped the gun would be subject to a $30,000-a-day penalty.

Removing team owners’ ability to threaten to yank a city’s team away if they aren’t bestowed with public subsidies would indeed be a huge step toward ending stadium shakedowns. And it’s justifiable on a couple of grounds: Not only do teams owe their livelihood to the local fan base, but leagues also routinely use their monopoly power to deny teams to cities if they, say, have one in the next state over, or just out of spite.

At the same time, though, there are plenty of questions about this bill. First off, this is Congress we’re talking about, which has not exactly shown the backbone to stand up to the sports industry — even Sanders and Casar, notes the Chicago Tribune, “acknowledge the legislation won’t get passed quickly, if at all.” The bit about governments being allowed to purchase teams could be dicey, given that leagues currently have the power to reject public ownership, or, for that matter, even private buyers they don’t like. And in terms of enforcement, a $30,000-a-day penalty only amounts to $11 million over an entire year, and no sports team owner is going to let a crappy $11 million stand in the way of moving wherever they damn well please, or at least threatening to in order to extract money from the public treasury. (Local governments could also seek “injunctive and monetary relief,” so presumably judges would have the power to impose harsher penalties, if they saw fit.)

Basically, once this has more than two co-sponsors, then we can start taking it more seriously. Until then, it goes next to David Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act as proof of concept that our elected representatives could be doing more to stop the flow of tax dollars to extortionate billionaires, they just don’t want to.

Other pressing questions from the week that just was:

  • Could there be some speed bumps for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan and its $2.25 billion in public cash, land, and tax breaks after all? Hillsborough County Commissioner Josh Wostal is demanding that the county and the Tampa Sports Authority release “all draft documents and personal notes” about the deal before a hearing is held next Wednesday — and further says if no public hearings are held before a scheduled April 15 vote, he’ll move to postpone it. “People at a minimum deserve transparency,” said Wostal. “And we are playing hide the ball?“ No word yet on whether others on the commission will support such a wild-eyed radical position as wanting to talk about what’s being voted on before a vote, but people are arguing on the internet about the Rays deal, and in particular its potential use of infrastructure money that elected officials previously pledged wouldn’t go to stadiums, so that’s a start, perhaps.
  • Will the Ohio state legislature add $45 million in road and transit upgrades around the Cleveland Browns‘ new stadium to the $600 million in state money they’ve already promised owner Jimmy Haslam for construction costs? We won’t know until they revote on April 23 following a public comment period, but given the committee that can authorize such spending unanimously passed it the first time: probably.
  • What about Haslam’s demand for $50 million in city and county money for a stadium for a Columbus women’s soccer team, will he get that too? Five out of nine city councilmembers say they’re opposed, the other four say they need more information, more lobbying is clearly needed.
  • Will the new Oklahoma City Thunder arena end up costing taxpayers there more than the $850 million they approved back in 2023? Possibly, says assistant city manager Brent Bryant, who explained that given “economic uncertainty,” the city will “add a factor to that on top of the anticipated cost, to try to plan for that.” What does that mean? Sorry, only one question per bullet point!
  • Is prospective new Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon a go-getter” with “enormous passion and spirit,” like NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he was on Wednesday, or a predatory lender who got rich by letting people take out high-interest car loans that they would inevitably default on, like Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported earlier that morning? Nothing saying it can’t be both!
  • As Anaheim officials push for the Los Angeles Angels to restore “Anaheim” to the team name, could team owner Arte Moreno or the 80-year-old’s eventual successors move the team to Los Angeles County? The L.A. Times’ Bill Shaikin writes that “the logical landing spot would be Inglewood,” only to have Inglewood Mayor James Butts tell him, “We’re maxed out when it comes to sports. We are not going to reduce the housing stock and move residents out to have a baseball team.” Welp, that’s unfortunate, but the column’s already written, too late to go back and choose a new topic!
  • Does the city of L.A. know what year the 2028 Olympics will be held? Possibly not!
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Friday roundup: Blazers threatened councilmembers’ careers if they didn’t subsidize arena, Rays stadium tax vote planned for April 1

Would love to have a witty introduction for you here, but it’s late enough already and this week’s bullet points are far too juicy to wait any longer!

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Judge blocks Ohio from giving unclaimed private funds to Browns and other sports teams until trial is complete

All the Ohio sports teams angling for a cut of the state’s unclaimed private funds pool got a dose of cold water yesterday when a Franklin County judge issued a preliminary injunction against the money being disbursed, on the grounds that a lawsuit charging that state’s use of private money was unconstitutional is substantially likely to win. The injunction replaces a temporary restraining order the court issued in December, and will now be in place for the remainder of the trial.

To recap briefly: The unclaimed private funds first became an issue last June, when Ohio state senators announced they’d be using the pool of money — dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, and other stuff that didn’t belong to the state but was sitting in its bank accounts — to temporarily fund a Cleveland Browns stadium while waiting for tax money from the development itself to roll in, after which that would be used to replenish the private funds. Then it turned out last July that the state actually planned to just raid the unclaimed cash fund and never replenish it, prompting the class action lawsuit from former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann and former state Rep. Jeffrey Crossman on behalf of those whose money was being held by the state.

In issuing the injunction, Franklin County judge Jennifer Hunt pointed to two possible violations of the state constitution by the state’s use of the unclaimed funds. First, by failing to require that the state notify property owners that it was seizing their funds, lawmakers may have violated due process requirements. Second, and even more interestingly, Hunt warned that using the money specifically for sports stadiums could be an issue, as the benefits of private sports venues aren’t enough to satisfy state constitutional requirements that private funds can only be taken for “public use.”

So what happens now with the Browns stadium? Nothing immediately — preliminary excavation has already begun, even with the state funds having been blocked already by the restraining order. If Dann and Crossman win their suit, though, things start to get interesting: Eventually Browns owner Jimmy Haslam isn’t going to proceed with construction without that $600 million in state cash. Would Ohio go back to its old plan of redirecting state taxes from the stadium district? Would it dig around for some completely new revenue stream, like Minnesota had to do when its initial plan to fund a Vikings stadium with video tablet gambling at bars fell massively short of its goal? Is it possible it could go back to the drawing board entirely and reconsider whether giving $600 million to Haslam to move his team from one part of the state to a neighboring one is really such a great idea?

All the other team owners scrambling for a piece of the unclaimed private funds pie, meanwhile — which is pretty much every sports owner in Ohio — will need to cool their jets and wait for the lawsuit to play out. The Ohio attorney general’s office is “reviewing the decision and determining next steps,” spokesperson Bethany McCorkle told Cleveland.com. Stay tuned.

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Friday roundup: Bears battle drags on, Blazers subsidy heats up, 15 teams now angling for Ohio unclaimed funds cash

It’s Friday! But because of other commitments, I’m writing this from Thursday evening! So if there’s any breaking Friday morning news, complain about it in comments, and we’ll get to it on Monday, which for me will probably be Sunday. You following all that? Doesn’t matter, just read your bullet points, they’re good for you:

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