Los Angeles Chargers – Field of Schemes

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

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

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

Ahem. And now, the news:

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

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

August 14, 2020 Neil deMause

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

In other newses:

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

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Friday roundup: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it for 150 years edition

June 19, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy Juneteenth, the most quintessentially American of holidays, in that it celebrates both the nation’s ability to right seemingly intractable horrific historic wrongs through grassroots action faster than anyone ever could have dreamed, and also its ability to then revert to virtually the exact same horrific wrongs in all but name for the next century or so. We got issues.

And speaking of issues — if that’s not too inappropriate to compare the enslavement of an entire people with the siphoning off of tax dollars for sports, which it probably is, but segues gotta segue — here are a bunch regarding stadiums and arenas that reared or re-reared their heads in the last week:

Plans for a minor-league hockey arena in Palm Springs have “stopped” thanks to the pandemic, according to city manager David Ready, but it’s not immediately clear whether that means just the timeline has been delayed or the entire project is up in the air, if that’s even a distinction anymore.
Also up in the air: exact plans for David Beckham’s Inter Miami stadium complex, details of which were released this week but without any actual details. It looks like Inter will be playing in its “temporary” stadium in Fort Lauderdale for at least the next several years, if not indefinitely, which is absolutely par for Beckham’s Miami stadium campaign ever since he opened that cursed mummy’s tomb.
Hidden in this Newsday article about Nassau County worrying about losing revenue with the Nassau Coliseum shut down is the fact that arena operator Mikhail Prokhorov is trying to defer $4.4 million in annual rent payments while he tries to unload his lease on the now-squeezed-out-of-the-arena-market place. Which makes a kind of sense since his business has ground to a halt, but what about everybody else?
So few people buy tickets to Miami Marlins games that the team could make more money this year by playing fewer games and paying its players less, which should come as no surprise since that’s been the team’s business model for years.
The NBA and MLS are both preparing to return to play this summer entirely in Orlando, and Orlando is in Florida, and Florida is set to become the nation’s new coronavirus epicenter with new cases going through the roof the last two weeks even as testing has largely leveled off, so that’s all gonna be interesting. But NBA players won’t be allowed to share snorkels, which should totally take care of any problems.
Over in Texas, meanwhile, which is seeing its own spike in virus cases, college football players are testing positive in bunches, which could put the season at risk, though I suppose there are always more people in Texas who want to play football if they wanted to go to 200-player rosters.
Also seeing a spike in positive coronavirus tests: construction workers at the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium. None of this should be surprising — obviously reopening work sites is going to increase the spread of the virus, and equally obviously more people are going to show up sick to work (whether they have symptoms yet or not) if there are more people in the general community who have it. The plan was supposed to be to first mitigate the number of infections through lockdowns, and then once cases were at a low level keep them under control via widespread testing and contact tracing, but since apparently most states have decided to reopen before waiting for that second part, it looks like much of America is going to have to prepare for the roller coaster.
On that note, Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t see how the NFL season will be able to be played as usual if a second wave of infections hits, which seems to kind of overlook that many states are still in the first wave, but whatever. Maybe the NFL can play its whole season in New Zealand — okay, maybe not New Zealand. Vermont?
Major League Baseball, meanwhile, is inching its way toward a late July restart, with games to be played at teams’ home stadiums, or in the case of the Toronto Blue Jays, probably their single-A ballpark, because Canada is still requiring two-week quarantines for anyone entering the country, though they did lift that for hockey. Location of the Blue Jays’ single-A ballpark? Florida, of course.
And yes, it’s looking more and more like outdoor transmission of the virus is a smaller risk than was initially feared so long as everyone wears masks — a conclusion reached in part from noting that there’s been no measurable spike in infections after last month’s police violence protests — but also note that Columbia University virus expert Jeffrey Shaman tempers that optimism by saying, “Beaches—you’ve got open air, sunshine, people spread out on blankets—that’s OK. A baseball stadium—people lined up shoulder to shoulder, semi-indoors, for hot dogs and beer and for crowded restrooms—I’m not so crazy about that.”
And as a reward for sitting through all that epidemiology news, here are a couple of fresh New York Islanders Belmont Park arena vaportecture images, which are mostly notable for conveying “loud” and “intimate” not through any actual innovations in arena geometry — the cheap seats still look a million miles from the action — but rather via having all the little CGI people raise their fists in the air in excitement! CGI people are so much easier to please than real people, even if they seem even less willing to wear their damn masks.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento faces cuts to pay arena debt, Henderson approves arena debt, music festival to be held in phantom Yankee Stadium parking lot

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020 Neil deMause

Sorry, getting a late start today, let’s get straight to the news without delay:

The city of Sacramento is facing having to make cuts to city services in order to pay off its Kings arena debt, and since I’ve previously argued that it’s silly to act like public sports subsidies are a particular problem during economic crises, maybe now is a good time for a reminder that spending public money on stuff that doesn’t benefit the public is always bad if you want to have money left over for stuff you actually need! Sacramento officials acted like the arena payments were free money because they were supposed to come from hotel taxes and parking meter fees; that was never true, but it’s thrown into starker relief now that those taxes and fees aren’t coming in and the city will have to dip into the general fund — you know, the general fund that only isn’t getting those taxes and fees in the first place because the city carved out those revenues and handed them to the Kings. Is firing police and librarians to pay for a sports arena worse than never getting to hire them in the first place? So many ethical dilemmas in this pandemic!
Not running short of money, meanwhile: The NFL, which just approved increasing its G-4 loan for the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium from $400 million to $900 million. plus given the teams’ owners a longer time in which to pay it back, which they can do with club-seat and ticket-sales money they normally would have had to share with the league. Maybe the NFL could loan some money to Sacramento on these terms? Or at least not complain too loudly about how they’ll go broke if they aren’t allowed to play games this fall.
The Henderson, Nevada city council approved moving ahead with city subsidies for construction of a minor-league hockey arena for an affiliate of the Vegas Golden Knights, and the motion included yet another number for how much public will be involved: $42 million, or half of the $84 million total construction cost. Henderson had previously approved $60 million in bonds, with $30 million of it to go to arena construction, or maybe it was $25 million from the bond plus $17 million from other city funds, and then there was that economic impact report that seemed to involve just overturning a big box of random numbers and dumping them on the floor. What we do know is that the team will pay $150,000 a year rent on the arena, which will somehow produce a 106% annual return on investment because we’re in a national crisis, okay, there’s no time for math!
Speaking of math, you know what would be a good way to help with the economic impact of a pandemic that’s expected to stretch into 2021 or 2022? Spending a whole lot of government money now to hold the Commonwealth Games in Hamilton in 2026! Definitely nothing wrong with that logic.
Here’s an article, and another article, and another article, and another article, and another article about how a Bronx events company is planning to hold a drive-in food and music festival in Yankee Stadium’s “largest parking lot” this summer, notwithstanding that Yankee Stadium doesn’t actually have any open-air parking lots. (It has parking garages, but an indoor drive-in sounds logistically difficult, and possibly epidemiologically unwise.) Nobody at Time Out, CNN, USA Today, WCBS, or Gothamist seems to have asked MASC Hospitality Group where they’re actually planning to hold this thing, but journalism is all about one outlet reprinting the press release and then everybody else quoting the first outlet, right? Pretty sure Edward R. Murrow said that.
This is all too depressing, what’s a good way to lighten the mood and also get some good SEO going? Sex dolls! There, mission accomplished — Monday’s something called a “holiday” whatever that means anymore, see you all Tuesday!

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Friday roundup: Sports remains mostly dead, but train subsidies and bizarre vaportecture live on

April 24, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s been a long, long week for many reasons, so let’s get straight to the news if that’s okay:

Inglewood, California has now raised $328 million — $233 million in local sales tax revenue and $95 million from the California State Transportation Agency — toward the $1 billion cost of an “automated people mover” (read: an elevated trolley) to carry fans the 1.8 miles from the Inglewood subway station to the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium and proposed Clippers arena. On the one hand, this could be seen as a worthwhile public investment to reduce car use and provide a valuable service to local residents; on the other, spending a billion dollars in public money to build light rail on a route that’s already covered by city buses is pretty clearly mostly a benefit to the teams. We might have to add “free trains” to free land and tax breaks as among the more popular ways to subsidize sports venues in the 21st century while looking like you’re not.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a motion by Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke to have a lawsuit over his move of the team out of St. Louis moved from a courtroom to arbitration. That’s bad news for Kroenke and good news for St. Louis, which is hoping for monetary damages from the team and league for skipping town in violation of its own relocation guidelines, but mostly it’s an opportunity for KMOV in St. Louis to employ such terrible football metaphors as “The Supreme Court’s response represents an incomplete pass on the Hail Mary heaved up by Kroenke and co.,” which really should win an anti-Pulitzer, if that were a thing, which it really should be.
Two New York City baseball fans have sued MLB and several ticket agencies to recoup money they spent on 2020 tickets that the teams are refusing to refund on the grounds that the games are just “postponed,” not canceled. The pair sued in California, where the consumer laws are stronger, and are seeking class-action certification for their suit, which if successful could draw millions of additional plaintiffs (including me, since I have a pile of now-almost-certainly-useless Mets tickets for this season).
Taiwan is playing baseball in front of cardboard fans, and South Korea has started exhibition games with umpires (but not players) wearing masks and gloves, but before you get any hopes up that this could mean the resumption of pro sports in the rest of the world, keep in mind that Taiwan used its experience with SARS to quickly use quarantines, testing, and face marks to contain the virus before it ever became widespread, and South Korea quickly snuffed out an outbreak using similar measures. South Korea saw only 14 new cases yesterday and Taiwan only one, so until the rest of the world is down to around that level, it’s unlikely we’ll see much in the way of sports.
Back in pretend land, the NHL is talking about finishing its season in four empty arenas, and MLB could maybe play games in Dallas in addition to Phoenix and wherever, and college athletic directors think there will be some kind of football season this fall, and the independent minor baseball league American Association has a “target date” of starting play before paying fans in July, and European soccer leagues are slowly restarting practices while trying to figure out how to stage games with between 50 and 300 people (including players and staff) total in stadiums, but this is all just wishful thinking and reshuffling deck chairs for the moment — we could see some play resume starting in May, or July, or not until 2021, as the error bars on virus projections are still just too big to say for sure.
Now that the XFL has folded, the Texas Rangers‘ old Globe Life Park is set to be used for high school football this fall, if anyone thinks that there will be high school football this fall and that if so it will take place before enough fans to fill a 49,000-seat stadium, or any fans at all. Financial terms for the Arlington Independent School District to pay the Rangers for using their 26-year-old stadium that Arlington replaced with a new one because it didn’t have air-conditioning were not disclosed.
The Atlantic Schooners have put plans for a Halifax CFL stadium on the back burner, partly thanks to the pandemic but also because one of its three founding partners took a job with the Ottawa Senators and anyway they weren’t getting very far at getting money out of the Halifax regional council, so yeah. Looks like Cab-Hailing Purse Woman will have to find her sportsball somewhere else for the time being.
Moody’s may downgrade Atlanta’s $150 million in bonds used to finance renovations of the Hawks arena because the car rental taxes scheduled to pay them off are through the floor thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This doesn’t change my conclusion the other day that sports projects aren’t particularly threatened by the economic crash — bonds get downgraded all the time, and Atlanta is still extremely likely to pay off the arena debt in other ways if it can’t come up with enough car-rental tax revenue — but it’s a worthwhile reminder that sports subsidies are never free, even when elected officials insist that they can pay for themselves.
Guangzhou Evergrande is building a new $1.7 billion, 100,000-seat soccer stadium, in part as a push for China to host the 2030 World Cup, and while I can’t find details on how it’s being funded (the Bangkok Post cited a local journalist as saying the team is “likely” paying for it), we do know that it’s going to have a roof designed to look like an enormous lotus flower and apparently with an unearthly red glow inside and the ability to project the score onto the inside, so enjoy these visions of pro sports’ stupid future:

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Friday roundup: Stadium construction continues despite sick workers, drained city budgets may not slow subsidy demands, and other news from our continuing hellscape

April 3, 2020April 3, 2020 Neil deMause

How did everyone do during Week Whatever (depending on where you live) of the new weirdness? I finished another jigsaw puzzle, spent way more time than I thought possible trying to understand the new unemployment insurance rules, had the best idea ever, and wrote another article about how the media should stop feeding the troll. (Here’s the previous one, if I neglected to post a link to it before, which I probably did.) And, of course, continued to write this site, even if the subject matter, like all subject matter everywhere, has taken a decided turn for the microbial. Hopefully it’s helping to inform or at least distract you, because it looks like we may be here a while.

Anyway, it’s Friday again, so let’s celebrate getting another week closer to the end of this unknowably long tunnel with some stadium and arena news:

Construction is now shut down on the Worcester Red Sox stadium, but continues on the in-progress stadiums for the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Texas Rangers, even after workers on the latter two projects tested positive for COVID-19, and despite it being pretty much impossible to do construction while maintaining a six-foot distance from your fellow workers. The USA Today article reporting all this cites continued construction as a “boost to the economy,” which is slightly weird in that 1) pretty much all economic activity is a boost to the economy, but everyone has kind of decided now that keeping millions of people from dying is more important (okay, almost everyone), and 2) given that these stadiums will all have to be finished eventually regardless, shutting down construction would only push the economic activity a few weeks into the future, to a time when construction workers would actually have stores and restaurants open where they could spend their salary. It really would be nice if journalists writing about economics talked to an economist every once in a while.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin says she’s preparing for a “recession budget” that could require cutting back on planned projects including “a planned renovation of the PNC Arena, an expansion of the Raleigh Convention Center, an addition to the Marbles Kids Museum, a proposed soccer stadium in south Raleigh and a recreational complex at Brier Creek,” reports the News & Observer. Since every local government in the U.S. if not the world is about to see its tax revenues plummet, could this mean a temporary lull in stadium and arena demands while teams have to wait for treasuries to refill? Or will team owners just do like during the Great Recession and pivot from “times are good, now is when you should spend your surplus on giving us new sports venues” to “times are tough, now is when you should be spending to promote any development jobs you can get”? Hawaii officials say the latter, and they don’t even have a team owner lobbying them, so I think you know where I’d be laying my bets.
A new poll shows that sports fans believe they’ll be less likely to go to live sporting events once they’ve been “deemed safe,” mostly over fears that they won’t actually be safe. (Nearly two-thirds said they’d be concerned about “health safety,” and more said they’d avoid indoor events than outdoor ones.) There’s presumably some push-poll effect here — if someone asks you if you’re going to be concerned about your health at large events, that’s going to get you thinking about how you maybe should be concerned — but still it’s at least one data point suggesting that game attendance could suffer for a while despite pent-up hunger for live sports.
Meanwhile, ratings have plummeted for pro wrestling events before empty venues, which could be a sign that a big part of watching televised sports is enjoying the roar of the crowd, or that pro wrestling isn’t really a sport, take your pick. Where are those New Jersey Nets sound operators when you need them?
Don’t count on getting back your “sports fee” on your cable bill even if there’s no sports to watch, though maybe if your TV provider can recoup some fees they’re paying to sports leagues, they’ll consider sharing some of the savings with you.
A study by an “advertising intelligence and sales enablement platform” that is no doubt really annoyed right now that this press release didn’t get me to use their name and promote their brand projects that ad spending on sporting events will drop by $1 billion this year. And will that cost sports teams, or the cable and broadcast networks that are contracted to carry them? Sorry, didn’t study that part, we figured Forbes would report on this even without that info, and we were right!
Speaking of dumb Forbes articles, here’s one about how baseball should make up for lost revenue by expanding, which overlooks both that this is undoubtedly the worst time imaginable to get the highest expansion fee possible, and that MLB teams are all owned by billionaires so really the issue isn’t having cash on hand, it’s getting yearly income back up, and diluting your share of national revenues by one-fifteenth (if two new teams were added) is no way to do that.
But hey, at least stadiums come in handy for herding homeless people into en masse to keep them from getting sick, that’s neither disturbingly dystopian nor terrible social distancing policy, right? What’s that you say? You’re right, let’s instead spend some time revisiting cab-hailing purse woman, that’s a much more soothing start to the weekend.

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Friday roundup: If you’re watching TV sports in empty stadiums by summer, count yourself lucky

March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 Neil deMause

Michael Sorkin, who died yesterday of COVID-19, was a prolific architecture critic (and architect) and observer of the politics of public space, and so not a little influential in the development of my own writing. I’m sure I read some of Sorkin’s architecture criticism in the Village Voice, but he first came on my radar with his 1992 anthology “Variations on a Theme Park,” a terrific collection of essays discussing the ways that architects, urban planners, and major corporations were redesigning the world we live in to become a simulacrum of what people think they want from their environment, but packaged in a way to better make them safely saleable commodities. (I wish I’d gotten a chance to ask him what he thought of the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium, with its prefab walkable urban neighborhood with no real city attached to it.) In his “Variations on a Theme Park” essay on Disneyland and Disney World, he laid out the history of imagineered cities starting with the earliest World’s Fairs, up to the present day with Disney’s pioneering of “copyrighted urban environments” where photos cannot even be taken and published without prior approval of the Mouse — a restriction he got around by running as an illustration a photo of some clouds, and labeling it, “The sky above Disney World.”

I really hope this isn’t the beginning of a weekly feature on great people we’ve lost to this pandemic, though it seems pretty inevitable at this point. For now, on with the other stadium and arena news, though if you’re looking for a break from incessant coronavirus coverage, you won’t find it here:

In addition to the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium getting to continue construction during a coronavirus shutdown of all “nonessential” businesses, construction will also continue on the Worcester Red Sox stadium, and the St. Louis MLS team stadium (though the club says it will “take the necessary steps to protect every member of the team”), and the Las Vegas Raiders stadium (despite a construction worker testing positive for COVID-19), and the Phoenix Suns arena renovation, and the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium renovation. Though some more cities are at least talking about shutting down construction sites like Boston has (mostly), so we’ll see how long this lasts.
As for existing sports venues and convention centers left empty by the cessation of pretty much all sports not played on a computer (or featuring marbles as athletes), they’re being pressed into service as emergency shelters and open-air hospitals and makeshift legislative meeting rooms and coronavirus testing sites and parking lots for rental vehicles that nobody wants to rent because who leaves the house anymore?
The Tokyo Olympics has been pushed back to 2021, which is expected to add $2.7 billion to the games’ price tag, though that could come down if hotels and security companies and the like agree to take a pay cut rather than forcing the Olympic committee to re-book everything a second time. NBC, meanwhile, is hosed on its plans to launch its streaming service with Olympic coverage, if you can find time to shed a tear for a massive media conglomerate’s streaming video business model amid all this.
MLB and its players union have reportedly agreed to a deal on salaries and service time and other issues surrounding playing an abbreviated season, including the shortened amateur draft that owners originally proposed in their plan last winter to eliminate 42 minor-league franchises, back before it looked like the Coronavirus Recession would kill them on their behalf. Meanwhile, the NBA is getting ready to finish its season in the summer without fans, which is probably a best-case scenario for all sports, especially given that a Champions League match is now thought to have been the spark that set off Italy’s coronavirus epidemic, and the Chinese Basketball Association has extended its 10-week hiatus for fear of the virus flaring up again like it has in Hong Kong, and even the more rose-colored projections involve a summer where “Americans might get restaurants but no music festivals, offices but no crowded beaches, bars with spaced-out seating.” There are still a lots of ways the curves can bend here, and while a few of them involve sports in 2020, hardly any involve letting people watch live sports in large numbers — unless maybe things have been brought under control to where massive testing and contact tracing and quarantine of those infected and their contacts can be enough to let us gather en masse again, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Actual non-coronavirus stadium news! Opponents of the Oakland A’s stadium project, including shipping companies that are worried about the impact on their businesses at Howard Terminal, are suing to block the fast-tracking of its environmental impact report, which is becoming a common move in stadium battles in California. (The fast-tracking is, I mean, not the suing. Well, both, really.) The A’s ownership decried this as reeking of “cynicism and desperation” coming “at a time when our community is coming together in the midst of a global public health crisis,” something that Pacific Merchant Shipping Association Vice President Michael Jacob called “pretty cynical and desperate.” Damn, I promised no coronavirus content in this item, sorry about that.
Real actual non-coronavirus stadium news, except for it actually being news: The desiccated husk of Sports Illustrated is speculating that the Carolina Panthers could move to South Carolina, because stadiums can host the Final Four or something? If you can make sense of this word salad, please post your interpretation in comments.
Won’t anyone think of the giant flags?

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Stadium construction gets exempted from stay-home orders, because the economy

March 23, 2020March 23, 2020 Neil deMause

Good news, everybody! More and more of the U.S. may be under orders to stay indoors to stop COVID-19 from spreading out of control and forcing hospitals to decide who lives and who dies, but at least the people who are building new sports stadiums can stay on the job. Inglewood Mayor James Butts has directed that construction of the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium will continue as a “critical government service”; no official word yet on the Las Vegas Raiders stadium despite the state of Nevada ordering all “non-essential” business to close, but I for one will be closely watching the construction cam to see how many construction workers are still showing up on the job.

If this seems weird, it is in fact super-weird that in a world where supermarkets have strict attendance limits and people queuing up outside have to remain six feet apart, stadium construction work is continuing as normal. And pretty much all construction work, really — while Boston has ordered construction activity to cease (at least, except for work on government-owned property), most local governments have granted exemptions to construction projects even during mass shutdowns. Check out this excited article from yesterday about construction progress at Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, right across the street from the Jacob Javits Convention Center that may soon be pressed into service as a coronavirus field hospital!

Inglewood Mayor Butts said he was ordering construction workers to stay home if they’re sick and wash their hands regularly, but this report from Somerville, Massachusetts (next door to Boston but without a construction-halt order) is not encouraging on that front:

Construction workers at the new high school being built in Somerville are also at risk of spreading the infection, according to a tradesman on the project. It starts early in the morning when workers meet under the I-93 overpass and pile into vans and buses to get to the job site, he said. Some of them work side by side, and crowd around the canteen truck that arrives every day at 9 a.m. with pizza and Italian sausages. Many of the porta-potties don’t even have soap, he said. There’s also talk that workers who arrived from a closed job site — construction has been halted in Boston and Cambridge — had previously worked with someone under quarantine.

But aside from foremen telling workers to wash their hands and keep their distance from each other, it’s “business as usual,” he said, and there’s been no official guidance from Suffolk Construction Co., the general contractor.

“They’re not going to do anything until they’re told to do something,” he said, “and if they’re not told to do something, it’s just going to get worse.”

There hasn’t been much reporting on any reasons given for keeping construction sites open while nearly everything else is shuttered, though the Los Angeles Times did describe Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office as saying that construction work was “essential to the economy.” Which, you know, I’m pretty sure teachers and waiters and jigsaw puzzle fulfillment workers would say the same thing, but they’re increasingly staying home because they realize that unlike doctors or food providers, their work can be put on hold for a few weeks without leading to mass deaths. Construction work, though, is apparently officially considered too big to fail; it’s yet another reminder that some people’s economic activity is considered more equal than others.

UPDATE: Just saw that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio replied to a press question yesterday on continuing construction by saying that “the guidance was to continue that work because it is outdoors, because clearly any part of the economy can still allow people to have a livelihood that’s so important as we see so many other people losing their livelihood, and because a lot of what is constructed obviously is crucial to our future.” So there!

FURTHER UPDATE:

Including the new Belmont arena for the #Isles https://t.co/LGwyfyAbPM
Definitely mixed opinions on that continuing

— Norman Oder (@AYReport) March 23, 2020

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Friday roundup: Pandemic could delay Rams and Chargers stadium, drain hotel tax base for Raiders stadium (and kill millions of people, oh yeah)

March 20, 2020March 20, 2020 Neil deMause

And so we come to the close of Week 2 of Coronavirusworld, with still little way of knowing what Week 3 will bring, let alone Week 8 and beyond. (I just now started to write about this far less grim response to Tuesday’s London study, until I noticed none of the authors are infectious disease specialists and the claim that contact tracing can keep infections under control was cited to a single Chinese news story that said nothing of the sort, so maybe stay grim for the moment?) With pretty much all of the sports world now shut down, though — except for Australian Rules Football for some reason — sports journalists have begun looking down the road at longer-term effects of the pandemic, resulting in some useful and some not-so-useful reporting:

All of California is now under “shelter-in-place” orders, which looks like it will shut down for the time being construction on the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium, as construction work is not considered an “essential” work task like medical services or food provision. So it’s up in the air whether the stadium will be ready by its planned opening this fall, though of course it’s also up in the air whether the NFL will be ready this fall. (Side note: I hope Gov. Andrew Cuomo lets New York City go on shelter-in-place soon, not just because it’s the best way to avoid a healthcare disaster, but because it’s been really hard to avoid all social contact and get work done at home when there’s a crew digging up the street outside my apartment every morning starting at 7:30 am.)
The Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals are still locked in a legal battle over control of TV rights in their shared territory, which could only become more important if the pandemic results in TV becoming even more dominant as the way people watch sports (and the way sports teams make money).
Speaking of TV, the NBA is reportedly still getting paid TV rights money even though play is suspended. I bet a whole lot of contract lawyers are either kicking themselves or patting themselves on the back right now for what clauses they wrote into deals regarding acts of God. (Note: Studies of God’s responsibility for the spread of coronavirus have yet to be peer-reviewed.)
Here’s a New York Times article on how the loss of income from shutting down sports will affect various leagues, at least to the best of our knowledge without seeing all of their contract clauses.
Of course there are articles about how shutting down sports will devastate local economies, whether it’s the cancellation of spring training or of the NCAA tournament or what. Pay no mind, I guess, to the fact that when spring training attendance dropped 60% during the replacement-players spring of 1995, there was no measurable economic impact on Florida — and pay even less mind to the fact that whether people are spending money on sports is way less important than whether coronavirus lockdowns will destroy the entire economy. Bad economics may be bad, but it’s easy to squeeze an article out of on deadline!
The collapse of tourism will, however, take a particular hit on hotel tax revenues, which just happen to be what Nevada is planning to use to pay for its new Las Vegas Raiders stadium. The state has a year and a half of reserve funds, but if tourism never takes off again to the degree it was at before travel for pleasure became a distant memory, we could see some scrabbling under sofa cushions for where to find another few hundred million dollars.
A “coalition of shipping, trucking and steel companies” is suing to stop the proposed Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal from being fast-tracked through environmental review, at least if they can find any courts open during shelter-in-place.
MLB teams have finally agreed to kick in $1 million each to pay stadium workers during the delay to the start of the season, though I haven’t been able to find details on how many weeks of lost income that will cover. They’re also paying minor leaguers $400 a week each through at least April 8, with an extension beyond that likely. (Yes, that’s next to nothing, but it’s the same next to nothing minor leaguers normally have to live on, so that’s … better? Worse? Definitely one of those.)
And finally, here’s an article that won’t age well: A’s president Dave Kaval asking “a fan who has said he has tested positive for coronavirus” to throw out the first pitch at the team’s opening day, wherever that is. That’s gonna make for one crowded mound.

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Friday roundup: Congress gets riled up over minor-league contraction, Calgary official proposes redirecting Flames cash, plus what’s the deal with that Star Trek redevelopment bomb anyway?

November 29, 2019November 29, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy Thanksgiving to our U.S. readers, who if they haven’t yet may want to read the New Yorker’s thoughtful takedown of the myths that the holiday was built on. Or there’s always the movie version, which has fewer historical details but is shorter and features a singing turkey.

And speaking of turkeys, how are our favorite stadium and arena deals faring this holiday week?

Add the Tri-City Dust Devils to the list of minor-league teams in the middle of getting publicly funded stadium upgrades that may now get eliminated by MLB’s push to slash the size of the minors. The U.S. House of Representatives has formed a task force to oppose the plan, which normally isn’t exactly the kind of thing that makes anyone quake in their boots, but since this move has managed to piss off both Democrats and Republicans with minor-league teams in their home districts, there’s at least a slim chance it may actually mean something.
Meanwhile, a Minnesota state representative wants to build a new $42 million minor-league baseball stadium in Shakopee just outside Minneapolis-St. Paul. The would-be Metro Millers would join the St. Paul Saints in the independent-league American Association, except that the MLB minor-league contraction plan would reportedly shift the Saints to being an affiliated team — except that Saints general manager Derek Sharrer says MLB hasn’t yet contacted his team about it. Happy not-thinking-things-through-before-announcing-them week, everybody!
Calgary city councillor Evan Woolley was set yesterday to table a proposal to repeal the Flames arena deal and instead use the city cash that would go into it to fund light rail, a new downtown police station, and affordable housing. But I can’t find any indication in the media of whether he did so or how it went over with the rest of the council — I even scrolled through the Calgary Herald city hall reporter’s Twitter feed, so dedicated am I to bringing you all the facts — so instead let’s focus on how “table” is its own antonym depending on whether you’re speaking American or Canadian.
The mayor of Inglewood is comparing the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium to the Genesis Device in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that destroyed entire planets in order to reconfigure them for human colonization, and doesn’t seem to get the irony, but then, neither did The Wrath of Khan.
59% of Washington, D.C. residents would like the city’s NFL team with the horrible name to build a new stadium on the old RFK Stadium site, but 52% oppose using city funds to pay for it. WTOP sports reporter Dave Preston sums this up pretty well: “Of course fans want to root for their home team at home but when it comes to paying for it, people don’t want to. Why would they?”
The Arena Football League has officially gone bankrupt, putting an end to that entire “maybe we’ll just play the entire season on the road!” thing that was floated last month. I’m pretty sure no arenas were actually built or refurbished specifically for the AFL — the last six teams in existence were Albany, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Washington — but losing six home games will … okay, this clearly doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t an arena football fan, and if there were arena football fans they wouldn’t have needed the talcum powder.
The New York Yankees are again looking to refinance the debt on their ten-year old stadium, and since it’s technically city debt that the Yankees are paying off in order to get a tax dodge from the IRS, they’re having to ask the city to refinance it for them. Which, maybe the city could take this opportunity to ask for some of the $691 million it spent on the stadium? Just an idea!
Speaking of the Bronx, 161st Street BID executive director Cary Goodman — who, full disclosure, when I was in high school I briefly worked for on a presidential campaign where our candidate dropped out before getting to the primary in our state, which was a valuable lesson in the frustrations of electoral organizing in a two-party system — is proposing that any new NYC F.C. stadium in the Bronx be owned by local residents, which sounds like a great idea until you realize that stadiums don’t make any money, teams that play in them do.
Canada’s federal government has no interest in paying for a new Ottawa Senators arena, which should come as no surprise, but props to Canadian Minister of Infrastructure Catherine McKenna for putting it very Canadianly: “Well that’s not something we normally fund.”
Nobody wants to buy Golden State Warriors tickets now that the team is terrible, but ha ha too late, suckers, you already bought them last year when the team was good! The San Francisco 49ers were clearly onto something when they pioneered the “sell all your seat licenses right before your team takes a nosedive” strategy. Also, the Rams and Chargers are clearly doing this all wrong.
The wannabe MLB owners in Portland got another six-month extension on trying to figure out how to build a stadium on Port of Portland property, which good luck with that since still nobody knows how it would be paid for or how fans would get to and from games there. Maybe they can instead shoot for a more manageable target, like figuring out what the heck the people are supposed to be doing in this picture?

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