Category: Dallas Cowboys

Arlington council approves $273m in tax money for Cowboys stadium upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Lost a bit amid all the Kansas City news was that down I-35 by Dallas, the Arlington city council voted 7-2 yesterday to approve $273 million in public money for upgrades to the Cowboys‘ 17-year-old stadium. In exchange, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones will extend his lease from 2040 to 2055, making this an $18.2 million per year lease subsidy, well short of the Carolina Panthers‘ $43 million a year record; on the other hand, paying the owner of the most valuable team in the NFL $18.2 million a year to keep playing in the building that remains the gold standard for stadium design can hardly be seen as too much of a bargain.

KRLD’s report says that “council members authorized the use of existing voter-approved venue taxes — a half-cent sales tax, hotel occupancy tax and rental car tax — with no impact on the city’s general fund or new taxes.” If this seems like a neat trick — raising $273 million out of thin air, magic! — it’s because it’s not true: Either extending the local tax surcharges (which aren’t “venue taxes” except inasmuch as they’re being used to pay for a venue) counts as new taxes, or it counts as old taxes that otherwise could have been used for something else.

What is true is that the Arlington council didn’t need to go to the voters to get approval of extending the taxes because that was already allowed in the original stadium deal, which is no doubt why Jones chose to go this route to help pay for his upgrades. “There’s nothing more I agree with that this is something that the voters need to have a say in this,” Arlington Mayor Jim Ross told yesterday’s council hearing. “I’m just confident that they’ve already had that say.” Too late, Arlington voters, you should have known you were approving additional stadium subsidies in perpetuity!

The total renovation cost is expected to run $1 billion, and neither Jones nor the city has revealed what they would include for s stadium that already got $350 million in upgrades for this summer’s World Cup. The Real Deal reports that team officials said the improvements would “touch every area of the stadium” and adds that they could include “enhanced security systems, traffic flow upgrades and pedestrian safety measures.” A billion dollars seems like a lot for that, unless Jones is planning on building his own Golden Dome defense system, so you have to figure there will be some added wine bars thrown in there somewhere.

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Bucs, Cowboys go back to public trough for upgrade money for taxpayer-built stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the standards of the sports subsidy playbook has been the grift that keeps on giving: Once a team owner gets a new stadium or arena at public expense, their next step is to go back and ask for more money to renovate it once the new car smell is gone. And one big decision is how long is the right amount of time to wait before going back to the taxpayer trough?

One option is to wait until your lease is about to expire, and demand upgrades in order to stick around longer. (The unstated threat is that the team would leave if the subsidies aren’t approved, but it’s far more common that team owners just sign short-term extensions while continuing to negotiate for stadium cash, especially since for many of them the only other option would be to go play in the street.) That’s the approach taken by Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, who opened Raymond James Stadium 28 years ago at public expense, and now are seeking unspecified city and county money in exchange for extending their lease another five years:

“I can confirm that we met recently with the Tampa Sports Authority, Hillsborough County, and the City of Tampa to discuss developing a long-term plan that supports the stadium’s ability to continue hosting major events which contribute to the success of our region,” Bucs chief operating officer Brian Ford said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times. “As Raymond James Stadium enters its 29th year, our goal is to ensure it remains a competitive premier sports and entertainment venue for the Tampa Bay community well into the future.”

Ford didn’t say what the Bucs stadium needs to be “competitive” with, though it’s possible that a new Rays stadium in Tampa could compete for hosting concerts, maybe. (The football stadium currently has 11 concerts scheduled for the rest of 2026, including three by BTS and two by Bruno Mars.) Spending tax money to upgrade Tampa’s football stadium so it can compete with a new Tampa baseball stadium built with tax money may seem like an odd way to run a railroad, but this is where we are.

Or maybe you’re Jerry Jones, who opened the publicly funded AT&T Stadium just 17 years ago, and you don’t want to wait a whole 30 years until your lease is expiring. Well, good news, everyone, there’s no rule against just asking for renovation money now:

Arlington’s city council could soon be asking its residents to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys.

The agenda for next week’s city council meeting includes a proposal to contribute what will be $273 million in upgrades to the stadium.

The Cowboys’ portion will be $750 million.

A $1.023 billion renovation would be more than half again as much as the $650 million it cost to build the stadium in the first place, half of which was approved as public money by Arlington voters. The city’s next $273 million would come from the same taxes as last time, but no public vote would be required, as the last vote allowed city officials to extend the tax surcharges established then into perpetuity and keep on giving the proceeds to Jones. (No explanation has been provided how this will work when the Cowboys’ car rental tax surcharge is already being used to pay off Arlington’s new Texas Rangers stadium.)

One way to evaluate taxpayer-funded stadium renovations is by how many years of lease extension the city would get in exchange — the record for least bang for your buck there is the $43.3 million per year of new lease that the Carolina Panthers got in 2024. The Cowboys would be extending their lease from 2039 to 2055, so a $273 million expense would come to only $17 million per year of lease extension; for a five-year Bucs lease extension, as noted here in February, it would only take about $220 million in Tampa spending to break the record. Does that make Arlington’s plan to upgrade a stadium that was considered so state-of-the-art just 17 years ago that it set off a wave of other NFL teams demanding new or upgraded stadiums less bad by comparison? Discuss.

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium deal falls apart more completely than their roof, San Antonio considers massive tax subsidy for new Spurs arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry that this has turned into Tampa Bay Rays week here, but stuff keeps happening. And last night, perhaps the most happeningest stuff happened, with the St. Petersburg city council meeting and 1) voting 4-3 to approve spending $23 million toward repair of the Tropicana Field roof; 2) voting 5-2 to put off selling $450 million in bonds for a new stadium and surrounding infrastructure; then 3) voting 7-0 to undo the vote to spend on fixing the roof, after Rays co-president Brian Auld declared “our agreement effectively died” with Tuesday’s county commission vote to delay issuing bonds and “I don’t believe we can make the economics around this arrangement work any more.”

A new council vote on the city bonds is now possible for January 9, assuming the county re-votes to approve its own bonds on Dceember 17. But even in the unlikely event that that happens, two new anti-stadium city councilmembers will have taken office by then, making city approval unlikely. Plus there’s increasing expectation that Rays owner Stu Sternberg will officially cancel the stadium plan anyway in the interim; Auld said that he didn’t even care about the roof repair vote, saying wasn’t confident repairs could be completed by 2026 he would “have more certainty” working out a settlement with the city instead. (Auld also apologized for “the tone” in which team execs’ letter before Tuesday’s county vote declaring the stadium deal “suspended” was received, saying it wasn’t meant to be a threat — whatever it was, it clearly backfired.)

This is crazytown, especially when you consider that this whole thing was set off by the four county commissioners who joined two prior stadium deal opponents in voting to delay the stadium bond sale in October, in order to be all respectful of the losses to Hurricane Milton and everything, apparently without considering that they might lose their pro-stadium majority on election day before their next meeting. As unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, it looks like unless Sternberg and his cronies can find a way to flip one county commissioner by December 17 — and threatening to move the team sure didn’t do the trick — everything is going back to square one now, with Sternberg shaking trees to see if anyone else wants to give him $1 billion for a stadium somewhere, while MLB has to go back to sitting on its hands waiting for this mess to be resolved before discussing expansion. Not to mention that without a repaired Trop, the Rays could be playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Tampa, even as the Oakland A’s are playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes at you fast.

Meanwhile, that wasn’t even the only big city council meeting about sports venues yesterday: In San Antonio, the city council held hearings on using tax money to help fund a potentially $4 billion redevelopment including a new Spurs arena. I didn’t watch the meeting, but fortunately University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoff Propheter did and liveposted about it on Bluesky, so let’s just revisit some of his highlights:

Leading finance mechanism for the district will be a hotel tax and sales tax TIF that will span 3 mi from the district center. The zone can capture all of the 6% hotel tax and 6% sales tax. Holy sh*t that's a lot of money that can be captured. Doesn't mean they will use the full amount.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:02:39.800Z

Without evidence, the assistant city manager says that most people that went to a Bad Bunny concert at the Alamodome weren't from Bexar County. Did they survey every attendee and double check their addresses against IRS or DMV records?

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:12:25.690Z

"locals bring visitors because of the authenticity"…I don't understand what this means.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:17:22.930Z

Showing potential funding sources…and as usual, tax expenditures aren't on the list. When you give tax breaks, you are spending money. We know the team and others will end up with tax breaks. Those should always be part of funding discussion.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:18:51.102Z

courage: how does more tourists lead to better homelessness solutions? better housing solutions? better paying jobs–not just low wage ushers or retail workers? How many residents will be able to attend a spurs game compared to today or stay at a hotel in the district? great questions.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:30:35.069Z

courage strikes me also as cautiously optimistic, which puts the council tally at 8-3 if a vote were held today is my guess. I'm assuming the mayor would support.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:33:16.645Z

and the special session is over. Overall thoughts: lots of ideas, nothing concrete, and a lot of silly reasoning. A sport entertainment district is not a novel idea despite some members believing so. Members seem to believe that diverted tax dollars to the project don't hurt existing services.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:38:41.620Z

 

After all that, do we still have the stamina for the week’s bullet points? Let’s try a couple, at least:

  • Athletics owner John Fisher pulling out of his stadium deal with Oakland to instead move to Las Vegas (maybe) might have blown up his plans to get discounted land in Santa Clara for a San Jose Earthquakes practice facility as well, with the city board of supervisors slamming the brakes on the deal after retiring supervisor Joe Simitian said he’s “not convinced [the Earthquakes] would be a good-faith partner” and warned that the sweetheart land deal represented “essentially a $100 million giveaway to a private enterprise.”
  • Speaking of Oakland, the city finance department issued a warning last Friday that the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and can’t count on money from the on-hold sale of the Oakland Coliseum to bail it out — then reversed course and quietly replaced that report on the city’s website with a new, less apocalyptic one.
  • This week was so nuts that a piece of the Dallas Cowboys roof falling off barely even makes the small print. Team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t want a new stadium, at least, or else we know where this would be headed.
  • And we haven’t even gotten to voters in Forsyth County, Georgia approving a TIF district to kick back tax revenues to pay for $225 million in bonds toward an NHL arena, assuming Forsyth County, which is 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, can land an NHL team. We will revisit this if an Atlanta expansion team gets past the dreaming stage, or if this firehose of Rays stadium news ever stops, whichever comes first.
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Friday roundup: SF mayor really wants to build a stadium for some soccer team, just not sure which one

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time this morning, so let’s dive right in for a quick tour through this week’s remaining news:

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Friday roundup: Fighting stadium ignorance is taking longer than we thought

access_time personNeil deMause

And so this brings to an end another programming year, and what a year it was: The Buffalo Bills owners got more than $1 billion in public money by doing an end run around democracy, the Tennessee Titans owners went down the middle of the legislative process but are now in position to score their own billion-dollar-plus taxpayer-funded payday, the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles got over a billion dollars in state money parked in a slush fund that doesn’t have an easy football metaphor to go with it, and the owners of the Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Royals, Philadelphia 76ers, NYC F.C. all launched campaigns for new buildings and the public checks that come with them. Sure, the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal fell apart after the mayor who negotiated it turned out to be under FBI investigation for fraud and bribery, but overall it’s still undeniably a great time to be a billionaire who owns a pro sports franchise, or, you know, owns pretty much anything else.

Oh yeah, and this happened:

As economist J.C. Bradbury said in May in an interview on this site — which I’ve just made free for all readers rather than a subscriber exclusive — “It is quite eye-opening to talk to … policymakers, elected officials, business executives. They absolutely do not want to hear that this is a bad idea. And they cling to it in ways that you cannot imagine: This has to be good because I want it to be good.” And as I said back to him: Even if fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought, we can at least try to help readers laugh to keep from crying.

Here’s to another year of that ahead, and thanks in advance for your support of this site’s work. And now let’s wrap up the final news of 2022:

  • The New Orleans Pelicans owners don’t plan to demand a new arena when their initial 25-year lease expires in 2024, but rather will just be asking for state-funded renovations in exchange for a five-year lease extension while considering a “long-term plan.” This is yet another reminder that owning a sports venue is seldom a good thing for the public unless they actually own the rights to the venue revenue — if that all goes to the team owner, you’re just setting yourself up for a subsidy that keeps on subsidizing.
  • Dallas Cowboys fans are really upset that the team’s new-ish stadium lets the sun shine in the eyes of its players sometimes — and also opposing teams’ players, but nobody wants to mention that — but the most amusing part is how SB Nation reports that “designers essentially banked on AT&T Stadium leading to mass development in Arlington, with the belief that new construction would eventually be built up and block out the sun problem inside the stadium.” You’d think Jerry Jones of all people would have been around long enough to know that stadiums that only host eight or so football games a year aren’t going to do much to spur surrounding development, or at least could come up with a simpler solution.
  • Somebody noticed that Phoenix city council members who voted for Suns arena renovations are now getting use of free luxury boxes in the arena, but the city says elected officials bringing business friends to NBA games for free is all part of standard “economic development” policy, which isn’t actually all that reassuring.
  • The owners of the Kane County Cougars minor-league baseball team have been stiffing Kane County on rent and are now being threatened with eviction in 2024 if they don’t pay up; it is exceedingly unlikely that this will end up with a tractor being parked on home plate, but one can always hope.

Happy new year, and don’t forget to write off your ape NFTs as a business loss! Definitely a good time to be rich.

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Friday roundup: NFL funds its teams’ stadiums too, but still wants plenty of public cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It was the NFL owners’ meetings this week, which meant a whole lot of headlines about how the league is providing money toward new or renovated stadiums for a bunch of its teams: $295 million for Dallas Cowboys upgrades, $200 million toward a new $2.1 billion Tennessee Titans stadium, and $100 million for Denver Broncos upgrades. All this is coming via the NFL’s G-4 program, funding that is often termed loans but, since it gets “repaid” with ticket sales money the teams would normally have to share with the league, it’s really grants.

If you’re wondering why the NFL goes through the trouble of shuffling money around this way — asking for a cut via revenue-sharing and then handing it back for stadium projects — it’s complicated. G-4 evolved from G-3, which was originally created way back in 1999, when Robert Kraft was threatening to move the New England Patriots from Boston (well, Boston-ish) to Hartford. The NFL, which had recently seen the Houston Oilers move to Nashville and the Los Angeles Rams move to St. Louis in search of new stadium deals, appointed a committee to see if there was a way to discourage owners from abandoning larger cities for smaller ones, thus hurting the league’s ability to demand top dollar for national TV rights. To lead this committee, the league appointed one Robert Kraft.

You can probably see where this is going: Kraft’s committee approved a plan whereby the NFL would allow teams to withhold some revenue-sharing money if it used it to build new stadiums — but only for teams in the top six markets. The 6th-largest market at the time just happened to be Boston, and Kraft became the first recipient of funds under the league’s new G-3 provision.

Immediately, other team owners claimed it wasn’t fair that the Patriots, one of the richest teams in a league full of rich teams, were getting to use their money to build a new stadium that would benefit mostly them, and so G-3 (and its successor, G-4) was expanded to the entire league. This didn’t make a ton of sense in terms of keeping teams in big markets, but it did make for lots of spending on upgrades, so it was in the league’s interest, maybe, at least if the upgrades brought in more money than they cost, which was more likely to be the case when there was a pile of public money involved too.

To that end, G-3 and G-4 were designed to require “public-private partnerships,” meaning the NFL would only kick in if local taxpayers did first. But somewhere along the way, the league started bending that rule: While the Titans, for example, are supposed to get more than a billion dollars in tax money for their new stadium, the Broncos are getting just $12 million, and the Cowboys nothing — so a more accurate reading of the rule might be “public-private partnerships, or be Jerry Jones.”

And that’s The Story of G-4, or How NFL Stadium Funding Got Weirder Than Mere Billionaires Ripping Off Taxpayers Would Have You Expect. It’s not great news, exactly, since it doesn’t mean team owners are asking for any less public money, but it does go to show that sports leagues do have ways of funding new venues without demanding tax dollars, if they wanted to, which they don’t, because why wouldn’t you want tax dollars? Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

Was there other news this week? You betcha:

  • The Buffalo Bills stadium still hasn’t gotten a final environmental signoff from the New York state legislature or a community benefits agreement between the team and the county, but it has over a billion dollars in state and county money, so the rest can (and will) wait till 2023 sometime, don’t you worry.
  • The state of Ohio just got around to approving its $30 million share of spending on stadium upgrades for the Cleveland Guardians, to go along with $255 million from the city and county. That’s been expected all along, but it’s still worth taking note of, especially when building the stadium in the first place only cost $350 million (in 1994 dollars, but still).
  • Speaking of the Titans, their newfound antagonist, metro councilperson Bob Mendes, has proposed reducing the state’s spending on their stadium from $500 million to $450 million and spending the other $50 million on children’s services. That’s probably mostly a rhetorical gambit to show that, no, this isn’t money that has to be spent on a stadium, it could go to kids if the state decided to do that, but also a way of pointing out that if a stadium would really generate $3 billion in future tourist taxes like its advocates claim, why not spend the upfront money on more pressing needs and give the Titans owners any surplus that comes in later? That’s not likely to go over well with team execs, but like I said, rhetorical gambit, it’s more to make a point than actually get approved, so well enough played, Bob Mendes.
  • We Are NY Horse Racing released an economic impact study claiming that upgrades to Belmont Park will produce “billions of dollars in economic impact” and I’m sorry, I can’t finish this sentence without laughing, go read the stenography journalism yourself.
  • More new Tampa Bay Rays stadium renderings, this time for a proposed stadium on the Tampa side of the bay, though they’re not detailed enough to make much fun of. The roof does have some weird wrinkly thing going on, which presumably has something to do with skylights, but given that we’re extremely likely never to hear of this proposal or this design ever again, I’m having a hard time getting into it.
  • And finally, enjoy this story of a St. Louis suburb that destroyed its bond rating by building a practice rink for the Blues then ran out of money to pay for it, because of COVID or something, definitely not because a $55.7 million hockey practice arena could never possibly pay for itself. (If the article is paywalled after the first few paragraphs, just let a bot write the rest for you, it’ll probably be as reliable as most local newspaper reporting anyway.)
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NFL billionaire says new stadium for fellow NFL billionaires is “wonderful opportunity” for taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

If you don’t follow the NFL closely, know this: Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is a big deal in the league. He owns the league’s most valuable team, co-owns a company that is gobbling up stadium management contracts for half of pro sports, and somehow managed to convince the league to give the Los Angeles market to Rams owner Stan Kroenke on the grounds that he has “big balls.” He’s a power broker, in other words, and when he talks, people listen.

So it should probably come as no surprise that The Athletic has devoted an entire article to Jones saying things like this about the Buffalo Bills stadium campaign:

“Without a question, the Pegulas have proven that they have Buffalo’s best interests at heart,” Jones told The Athletic on Monday. “They are committed with their resources and are willing to risk that to participate in a partnership to build this stadium for the fans. That, to me, is everything.

“You literally got an ownership that you can bet on, that is unequivocal in its commitment.”…

Literally an ownership that you can bet on. What kind of odds does FanDuel offer for a $100 wager on the Pegulas’ commitment, I wonder?

“They don’t want a free lunch here,” Jones said of the Pegulas. “They have made a huge investment in the Bills and are willing to make more. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is a wonderful opportunity for the State of New York and for Buffalo to use the most valuable thing there is on television to promote that area and to show the country and the world what Western New York is. That’s priceless.”

So, the Pegulas aren’t asking for “a free lunch” because they’re willing to pay for maybe something less than half the cost of a new stadium, and New York state has a chance to show the world what Western New York is by promoting it on TV, after already doing so for the last 61 years. Unassailable logic!

The Athletic didn’t indicate why they were talking to Jones — did he ring them up to talk their ears off about why a Bills stadium would be great, or did their Bills beat reporter figure phoning the Cowboys owner would be a good way to find a story to file — but they give him a ton of space, and ask zero tough questions like “Is only asking for $700 million in taxpayer money really not a ‘free lunch’?” The rest of the article is a fact dump of any other Bills stadium information lying around, like where a stadium is likely to be built (probably suburban Orchard Park, but maybe downtown Buffalo, who can really say?) and what role personal seat licenses will have in providing funding (they “will be part of the new fan experience”). Speaking of PSLs, Jones has this to say about them:

“The PSLs that were used to build the original Texas Stadium, by the time I bought the team 20 years later, were worth over 10 times what people paid for them. Those PSL bonds were selling not for the original $2,000, but for $25,000.”

And those same PSLs are now worth nothing, because Jones got the city of Arlington to give him $325 million to help build a new stadium, with all-new PSLs, which will be a hot ticket up until Jones decides he wants an even newer stadium. I so wish I had the opportunity to ask Jones some followup questions, but I guess reporters who ask followup questions don’t get the privilege of an audience with the Cowboys owner. Ah, access journalism!

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Jerry Jones spews hot air from mouth over everyone about Cowboys stadium being safe for fans

access_time personNeil deMause

There’ve been a bunch of small news items about plans for allowing fans to return to live sporting events — here’s an article on Britain considering allowing fans back into soccer matches, for example, and here’s one on the Carolina Panthers receiving special permission to host a couple thousand fans more than the legal limit because they asked nicely or something — but then Jerry Jones, as Jerry Jones will do, parachuted into the conversation and made it all about him and the crazy things coming out of his mouth.

The 78-year-old billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner has his own radio show, because of course he does, and yesterday he used it to say a whole lot about allowing more fans in the stands even while putting team coaches in a bubble after a player testing positive:

“I see a continued aggressive approach to having fans out there.”

“Aggressive” is the word for Jones’ approach to attendance this season: After five home games, the Cowboys are averaging just over 25,000 fans per game, by far the highest number in the NFL and about a fifth of the entire league’s attendance so far this season. (Jones called it “almost a third of the attendance in the NFL, the whole NFL in our games” and added, “I’m proud of that.”) Here’s what it looked like last week against the Steelers, with 31,700 fans in attendance:

There appear to be a decent number of empty seats between fan groups (though here it looks like fans were closer together on the field level), but also four of the five fans visible in the shot aren’t wearing their masks, which isn’t great. Especially with record-breaking levels of Covid cases in the state, is that something to be concerned about, Jerry?

“That’s not being insensitive to the fact that we’ve got COVID, an outbreak, some people say, ‘well maybe it is,’” said Jones. “No, not when you’re doing it as safe as we are and not when you’re having the results we’re having. We’ve had literally, literally we’ve had no one report that they’ve had contact and gotten any contact with COVID from coming to our football games; no one.”

According to the NFL, there haven’t been any reported cases of coronavirus transmission via Cowboys games or any games at all, with league spokesperson Brian McCarthy saying this week, “No local case clusters have been reported traced back to NFL games.” That’s tentatively good news, but also fairly inconclusive given that it takes a large number of cases before epidemiologists can spot a virus-spreading event, especially with contact tracers in Texas often not bothering to call people who’ve tested positive. The vast majority of superspreading events so far have been in indoor spaces, but it’s worth noting that one of the outliers is that Milan soccer match in February that infected a staggering 7,000 people. (Jones bragged that “our stadium is particularly suited for airiness, openness, air circulation,” though its roof has been closed three games out of five so far this year. Also, a whole lot of attending football games involves sharing spaces indoors.)

“Don’t let your guard down because tomorrow all of that could change,” Jones said. “And that’s a fact. Don’t let me think for one second we’ve got the key to how to not have this COVID outbreak. We don’t. But the things we’re doing are working here.”

“Working” is more than a bit of an overstatement, but it’s fair to say that Jones has been able to inch up in-person attendance week by week without catastrophe. That’s been pretty much the NFL’s entire approach to playing football amid the pandemic, and it’s a strategy that by design works fine until it suddenly does not. Right now the Cowboys and the league as a whole are playing Russian roulette, while soaring Covid case rates are putting more and more bullets into the chambers; with the season more than halfway over, there’s a chance that they make it through without sparking a major outbreak, but also a chance that some future game becomes Sturgis 2.0. The most important thing, Jerry Jones wants you to know, is to not let your guard down, but also not keep too many fans from sitting near each other at football games, because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance so long as it doesn’t interfere too much with selling tickets.

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NFL and MLS about to start letting fans in, is this a terrible idea or what?

access_time personNeil deMause

So far, the restart of sports in the U.S. has gone reasonably well: Sure, there were a few embarrassing pratfalls like the Miami Marlins having to stop playing games for a week after they had a dozen players test positive for Covid when they played a game right after initial positive tests because their shortstop said it was okay, but overall, things are working out much better than one might have feared. No league has actually had to stop play entirely (yet) as the result of outbreaks, and leagues playing in “bubbles” like the NBA and NHL have avoided even interruptions for individual teams.

The one thing that major North American leagues haven’t tried yet, though, is allowing actual fans to attend games. That’s about to change big-time, though, as two MLS teams — Real Salt Lake and Sporting Kansas City — are about to join FC Dallas this week in holding games before limited-capacity crowds. (FC Dallas played its first home game before a reported 2,912 fans two weeks ago, though it didn’t look like no 2,912.) And then the floodgates are set to open September 10, when the NFL season kicks off with the Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts, Dallas Cowboys, Miami Dolphins, and Jacksonville Jaguars all set to play before about one-quarter-capacity crowds, with a dozen other teams either considering letting fans in or not yet having announced plans. In each case, there will be rules in place to protect fans — staggered entry times, mask requirements (except when eating or drinking), buffer zones between groups of seats, etc. — or at least to make fans feel more reassured that they’re being protected.

The question everyone wants to know the answer to: Is it safe? The answer, unfortunately, isn’t easy to determine: Sure, lots of overseas sports leagues have readmitted fans without ill effects, but those were all in nations with very low Covid rates — if you collect 13,000 people in one place and none of them are infectious, that’s not much of a test of how fast the virus can spread at a sporting event. The new-case rate in the U.S. has fallen by about a third over the last three weeks, but it’s still higher per capita than anywhere other than Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, or Spain. And certain states remain far worse than that: Texas would have the third-worst numbers of any place on the planet if it were its own nation, yet the Cowboys are preparing to reopen to fans for their first game, and the Houston Texans possibly for their second home game starting in October.

The science behind viral transmission at sporting events remains the same as it’s been since the spring: The more time you spend near someone, the closer you get, the more indoors with poor ventilation, and the less effective mask wearing, the more likely you are to get sick. So in theory, all the measures being taken by sports teams should help reduce risk, though item #1 suggests that if the NFL is really serious about fan safety, it should reduce the length of games to one quarter.

Trying to determine the exact risk level from attending one of these games is impossible, and in any case kind of beside the point. Will you get sick from Covid by going to an NFL game, even if fans don’t strictly obey all the new rules? (Sporting K.C. is talking about a “three strikes you’re out” rule, which isn’t exactly reassuring given that security will have to be policing more than ten thousand people while also keeping track of their card count.) Probably not — even during the Atalanta-Valencia disaster plenty of people didn’t get sick.

But in epidemiology, what’s important isn’t whether you get sick but rather whether somebody gets sick, and sticking 13,000 people in one place, even one socially distanced place with masks on, is a whole lot of dice to roll at once. And the risk then isn’t even just if you go to the game — check out the Maine woman who died after a Covid outbreak at a packed indoor wedding that she didn’t even attend, after she caught the virus from one of the 30 people who caught it there.

Really the question, then, is less “Is it safe to go to an NFL game in the middle of a pandemic?” than “Is it safe for a nation in the middle of a pandemic to allow people to go to NFL games?” The only way to know for sure is to do a huge experiment, with human subjects — and for better or for worse, that’s what we’re about to get.

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Friday roundup: Austin MLS vote, Rays demand $650m in subsidies, Islanders renderings, more!

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m busy trying to figure out whether Congress is really going to rewrite the tax code to give a couple of trillion dollars to rich people or will melt down at the last second like it did with healthcare repeal, so this’ll be in superbrief mode this morning:

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