Category: Los Angeles Rams

Friday roundup: Everyone’s building soccer stadiums, no one’s sure how to pay for them

access_time personNeil deMause

This was a rough week for anyone in the U.S. who is an immigrant or looks like they might be, is trans, might ever need an abortion, is Palestinian, is a federal government employee, is a local government employee, is an employee of anything that depends on international trade, lives near sea level or in places that get hot or are at risk of hurricanes, likes democracy, or cares about a relative, friend, or neighbor who does. Not that it would have been an amazing week for most of those people if the presidential election results had gone another way, but a whole lot of folks are somewhere on the spectrum from anxious to terrified right now, so if you need to check in with each other right now before getting back to life as we know it, that’s not only reasonable, it’s a fine tradition.

And now, whenever you’re ready, back to sports stadium and arena life as we know it:

  • The owners of Sacramento Republic F.C., who now include the Wilton Rancheria Native American tribe by are still led by minority owner Kevin Nagle, announced plans for a new stadium, and almost none of the news coverage bothered to provide details of how it would be paid for, even those that reported on how it was announced to the tune of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Finally, way at the bottom of a KCRA-TV report, we learn that the city of Sacramento is expected to put up $92 million in infrastructure money from property taxes on 220 acres surrounding the stadium, plus provide free police, fire, EMS, traffic, and other services for the next ten years. The city council is set to vote on the plan Tuesday, so that leaves three whole days to gather feedback, two of which are weekend days and the third is a holiday when city offices are closed, this is fine.
  • Bridgeport is considering a minor-league soccer stadium that would cost at least $75 million and which would likely include public funds, and Baltimore is considering a minor-league soccer stadium with no known price tag or details on how to pay for it, and Fort Wayne is considering a minor-league soccer stadium that is promised will be “100% privately financed” but we’ve heard that before.
  • Cleveland and Cuyahogo County are continuing to look for ways to fill their budget gap for paying for future upgrades for the Guardians and Cavaliers, and county executive Chris Ronayne says options are “not yet concrete” because “it’s a conversation that’s probably also going to have to include the public.” Signal Cleveland speculates that this could include going back to voters to approve another tax increase, unless Clevelanders go back to drinking and smoking at their old rates, which might not be as likely as you would think.
  • Nearly 95% of campaign donations by U.S. sports team owners went to Republican candidates or causes, according to a Guardian review of donor filings, which, duh, Charles Barkley could have told you that.
  • How are Inglewood business owners around the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium and Los Angeles Clippers‘ new arena loving all the new foot traffic? Not so much! “One of my lowest sales days was on Super Bowl Sunday” because of street closures, said a local bakery owner at a press conference this week. “I literally made under $600 for the day. I had to send employees home, and you’re just looking around like, ‘What in the world?'” Checks out!
  • Did a major news site just run an item reporting wild economic impact projections for a proposed Buffalo soccer stadium without saying who conducted the study, while the byline partly credits a City Hall press release? Sure did! Please give to support your independent nonprofit or collectively owned news media, we might just be needing them the next year or four.
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World Cup final may move from Rams stadium because someone forgot to bring a ruler

access_time personNeil deMause

Okay, so it’s not quite as bad a violation of “measure twice, cut once” as ordering trains that won’t fit alongside the platforms or crashing a spaceship into a planet because you forgot to convert to metric. But Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium maybe not being able to host the final of the 2026 World Cup because the field is too narrow is still not the best:

Sources close to the 2026 organising committee say in order to comply with Fifa’s regulations, the width of the field would have to be increased — possibly by as much as 63ft — which would mean removing some of the seats close to the pitch and raising the playing surface.

Fifa normally expects a stadium that can hold at least 80,000 people for the final, but losing seats would reduce the capacity of the SoFi Stadium to below 70,000, which may prove a step too far.

The Times of London article omits any mention of the most interesting question here, which is how Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke built a $5-billion-plus stadium and failed to take into account that people might want to play soccer there — something that’s doubly embarrassing considering that Kroenke also owns the Premier League soccer club Arsenal F.C. (Normally I would make a joke here about how it’s embarrassing enough just to own Arsenal, but Arsenal went and ruined that joke this year.) Thankfully, Inglewood got away with putting hardly any taxpayer money into Kroenke’s stadium, but there may need to be some corrections to all the hagiographic articles crediting the building with making the city the sports capital of the U.S.

If FIFA isn’t interested in providing the L.A. stadium with a waiver, next in line to host the World Cup final appears to be MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which if you’ve ever been to an event there in the summer, or really an event anytime, seems like an extremely bad idea, even if it would be very convenient for me personally. This would look to be an embarrassment for FIFA as well that it failed to notice all these problems with the host stadiums when selecting the site of the next World Cup, but then, if FIFA wasn’t embarrassed by the last World Cup, it’s probably never going to be embarrassed by anything at all.

I know, I know, you want a glib takeaway. How about: Just because billionaires have billions of dollars doesn’t mean they’re always smart about the things they do? That already seemed the case with SoFi Stadium’s mammoth price tag, and there are plenty of other recent examples of super-rich guys being completely idiotic. That would be reassuring, except that unlike in the movies, super-rich guys usually end up less being brought down by their hubris than surviving to be idiotic another day, so maybe the lesson here is … the world is broken? Sorry if you were hoping for something more inspirational, now go and eat your schadenfreude.

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Friday roundup: Half-price books make great holiday presents for elected officials who can’t math

access_time personNeil deMause

For those of you who actually spend your Thanksgiving Fridays reading Field of Schemes, here’s a special bonus: If Rob Neyer’s Facebook page can be believed (and it’s never lied to me before), University of Nebraska Press is having a 50% off sale through the end of the year. That means that by entering the discount code 6HLW22 you can get Field of Schemes the book for just $11.48, or lots of other great sports (and non-sports) books for yourself, your family and friends, or that special city councilmember in your life. Buy now and buy often!

And if you just want the usual free weekly content, there’s plenty of that as well:

  • Nashville held its first of four public hearings on the Tennessee Titans‘ proposed $2.1 billion stadium deal on Monday, with the Tennessean reporting that speakers were about evenly split on whether they were opposed or in favor. (Advocates on both sides called for residents to come out and testify, so it was hardly an unscientific poll.) Also, according to WZTV-TV, Metro Nashville councilmember Courtney Johnston said the team owners still haven’t revealed how much it would cost for the city to maintain the current stadium to the terms of its lease instead of building new, but “it’s time to move forward” and “I’m not going to waste any more energy trying to find out what are we obligated to because we can’t afford it.” Just to be clear: Yes, she’s saying Nashville can’t afford renovation expenses that could be around $350 million, so instead must spend $1.2 billion for a new stadium. And no, cannabis isn’t legal yet in Tennessee, that can’t be the explanation.
  • In related news, let’s enjoy this guy taking to the smoking ruins of Twitter to attack sports economist J.C. Bradbury for critiquing the Titans deal without revealing his “sources of funding” and “the masters you serve that hate all Stadium deals.” Then let’s enjoy that said guy doesn’t mention that his school sports funding nonprofit gets money from the Titans. It’s not irony, it’s the other one.
  • With Pawtucket running short of local tax money to pay for its proposed USL soccer stadium as construction costs rise, local elected officials have come up with a new idea: use federal COVID relief money instead. Dylan Zelazo, the city’s chief of director of administration, told the Pawtucket city council on Tuesday that using American Rescue Plan Act and Community Development Block Grant funds to pay for $10 million in new public costs would allow stadium taxes to instead be used for the money from the stadium taxes can go directly into the city’s general fund to be spent on “relief for taxpayers [or] other city services,” which, uh, couldn’t the federal money have been used for that otherwise? Or been used to pay for other things that the city then wouldn’t have to spend local tax dollars on, which it could then use for tax cuts or city services? Anyway, expect lots more cities to take their federal windfall dollars and pour them into private sports projects so long as the feds don’t pay too close attention to how they spend it, and it sure seems like the feds aren’t keeping too close a watch.
  • Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan says the team hasn’t yet decided how the Royals moving to a new downtown stadium would affect his team’s stadium plans for when their lease expires in 2031, but did say he’ll be “starting work [on stadium plans] in ‘24, if not before,” so there’s something to look forward to.
  • Pat Garofalo has collected a set of dumb headlines about how much the World Cup helps the economies of host cities and the economic evidence that those headlines are dumb so we don’t have to, thanks, Pat!
  • St. Louis area government bodies have agreed on how to split the $790 million from Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL for skipping town with the Rams without going through the required league relocation process: The city will get $250 million, the county will get $169 million, the local sports authority will get $70 million, and the convention board will get $30 million. No, you are correct, that’s not $790 million, but it’s what’s left after $275 million in attorney’s fees, file this under “a lot better than nothing.”
  • The former Meadowlands Arena, driven out of business by arena glut in the New York-New Jersey area, has apparently found a second life as a film production studio. That’s encouraging that it can be reused without anyone demanding more public subsidies — or would be if New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy didn’t just provide a huge pile of new tax kickbacks for film production, sigh. Did New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority president Vincent Prieto argue that it’s worth it because the film production “really helps the economy with the local businesses” around an arena literally named for being built in the middle of a swamp? Do you even have to ask?
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Friday roundup: Calgary hires wolf to guard its Flames arena chicken coop, and Stan Kroenke’s no good very bad day

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to our weekly cavalcade of doom, some actual good news this week: Tom Scocca, the longtime sports-and-everything-else writer who last got mention here for his excellent newsletter Hmm Daily, which later transmogrified into the excellent newsletter Indignity, announced that he and his longtime running partner Joe MacLeod will be taking the reigns at the online publication Popula, formerly part of the same Civil network of news sites as Hmm Daily. If that was way too many obscure web/email publications for you in one sentence, here’s the tl;dr: Tom Scocca is one of the funniest and most insightful writers out there, and now he’s going to be not only easier to find an link to but he’s going to have a freelance budget to assign more articles by other (hopefully funny and insightful) writers as well. For starters, here’s a column about whether it’s okay to take advantage of the other team not having enough players to run up the score in a flag football game for 9-year-olds. This is the kind of insightful (and funny!) writing that America needs to heal its wounds.

Cavalcade of doom time!

  • The city of Calgary and the Flames owners have officially restarted talks on a new arena, nine months after team officials walked away from a previous deal because they were mad they would have to pay too much money. (This seems kinda like city officials are engaging in bad parenting to me, but okay.) Negotiating on behalf of the city will be consultants CAA ICON, best remembered around here for their terrible Buffalo Bills economic impact study; it’s tempting to say better to have them working for the city than against it, but you also have to wonder if they could have found a consultant without both feet planted quite so firmly in the “new venues are the bomb” world.
  • Stan Kroenke is reportedly going to be required to pay the NFL $571 million toward its $790 million settlement with the city of St. Louis for yanking the Rams out of town in violation of its own league bylaws. Add in the $3 billion in cost overruns he had to pay for his new L.A. stadium and it’s tempting to see Kroenke as the big loser in the Rams-return-to-L.A. saga, but it’s also hard to see exactly who the winner is — St. Louis got a pile of cash and doesn’t have to spend money on building another stadium, so I guess that’s a kind of win, at least until somebody decides the city needs the NFL back and they spend even more than that on luring an expansion team.
  • A giant tranche of public information about the Buffalo Bills stadium project just dropped, though it doesn’t appear to include that Erie County study of the projected cost of renovating the team’s old stadium that the county keeps releasing with all the important bits blacked out. (There is an “alternatives analysis” that rules out renovation on the grounds that “a renovation project of the type that would likely be necessary to encourage a long-term lease renewal would be extensive,” which is studyspeak for “the Bills owners want something real shiny.”) I haven’t dug through it all yet, but feel free to do so yourself, or just enjoy the opportunity to go around saying “tranche” a lot, I sure am.
  • Tennessee Titans fans who paid for personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at the team’s current stadium are pissed that they’ll have to pay for new personal seat licenses for the right to buy season tickets at a new one. The Titans say they’ll credit current PSL holders with however much they spent for the old ones, but given that the choice is “give us more money now or else see your entire investment go up in smoke,” I’d be pissed, too.
  • St. Louis S.C.‘s new $461 million stadium may not be ready by the team’s MLS debut next spring because some workers broke an electric line, and then it rained. I would make a “time to tear it down and build a new one” joke, but I’m kind of afraid someone would take it seriously.
  • Illinois voters are split on whether they want the Chicago Bears to stay in Chicago or move to suburban Arlington Heights, but only 12% are okay with spending tax money on building a new stadium, and only another 28% are okay with devoting public funds to infrastructure for one. None of this should be surprising, given that that’s what polls pretty much always say, though elected officials also pretty much always ignore what the public thinks.
  • This excellent Kathryn Schulz article about the history of public lotteries has nothing to do with stadium scams per se, but given that it’s about how government have ended up extracting money from people who can least afford it in order to support a giant private industry while pretending it lets them cut taxes, it at least rhymes.
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Friday roundup: Everybody hates Dan Snyder and his stadium plans, A’s could (maybe) get (some kind of) public money in Vegas

access_time personNeil deMause

Reporting in briefly from a country that blocked Google News, so the news net may let a few things slip through this week:

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What time does “What time does the Super Bowl economic impact start?” start?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Super Bowl is happening again this weekend, so I hear, and with the game taking place in the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium in Inglewood, it’s time for the nation’s news media to lose their collective shit over how transformative the new building will be for the city. Let’s watch!

The takeaway is clear: An NFL stadium makes stuff happen, for good and bad! But let’s take a closer look at some of the claims.

First off, that $477 million in economic impact can easily be dispensed with: While numbers like these are claimed by the league and sports media every Super Bowl season, when economists look at the actual figures after the game has been held, they typically find numbers only about one-tenth that size. And “economic impact,” remember, is just the amount of money changing hands in your city; the actual impact in terms of added tax revenues will be a further fraction of that fraction, likely in the single millions of dollars, less than you’ll end up spending on added policing for the game.

As for the soaring rents, that’s a tougher call without a more specific breakdown of what exactly is going on with the Inglewood real estate market. Sports venues and other splashy projects certainly can act as giant billboards for new development; that’s one reason lots of developers choose to build them. But housing prices are going nuts in all of Southern California, and the way gentrification works is that lower-income areas like Inglewood will likely see the biggest price increases as wealthier residents spill over from areas that are already full up. The Times story reports that median home sales prices in Inglewood have risen a consistent $25,000 a year since the Rams moved back to L.A. and started stadium construction in 2016, but correlation is not causation, so more research is needed to determine if it’s really a big-ass stadium open 20-30 days a year that’s causing Inglewood housing prices to soar, or if this is like margarine consumption causing divorces in Maine.

One interesting item along those lines: The Times cites a local real estate broker as saying that people are eager to live near the stadium — but then, there are those poor residents in the SI story who are trapped in their homes on game days, so which is it, is the stadium a boon or a blight? Or are people moving to Inglewood because they like the view of a giant alien structure surrounded by parking lots, but then find that it’s a nightmare because of all the cars driving to those parking lots? Or does the stadium have nothing to do with the real estate boom, beyond giving the real estate press an excuse to write about how hot the Inglewood housing market is, which of course serves to make the Inglewood housing market even hotter? The science of housing values has a lot of strange feedback loops that are beyond the scope of this post — though I hope to explore them further someday — but suffice to say that pointing at a new stadium and some yuppies moving to town at the same time and saying “Look, see!” isn’t science, let alone journalism.

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Friday roundup: Rays focused on Tampa Bay (for now), Anaheim officials say Angels stadium sale got illegal secret approval

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of news this week, starting with the continuing reaction to yesterday’s tragic death of the Tampontreal Ex-Rays:

  • While the rejection of his split-city plan by his fellow MLB owners would seem to leave Rays owner Stuart Sternberg in a position to play Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Montreal — and maybe other cities as well like Nashville or Portland — off against each other in a bidding war, he says he intends to focus on Tampa and St. Pete, at least for now, saying during yesterday’s bonkers Zoom press conference, “I’ve never threatened to move the team out of the region. That seems to be 101 in the playbook of getting stadiums and arenas built. It just hasn’t been my way to this point. And people have advised me to do that.” (Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser astutely observes that “telling someone you haven’t threatened them yet — and, indeed, have magnanimously resisted the obvious and apparently advisable temptation to do so — can read a little like a threat.”) Meanwhile, would-be Montreal investor Stephen Bronfman responded like Montreal is out of the running, saying during his own Zoom call, “It’s like a bloody eulogy. I’m just tired. I’m a little upset. We had something so good. We would have proved [to] everyone, we would have made a mark. I think a lot of people in sport would have been listening to us.” Prediction: Sternberg works on getting whatever bidding war going that he can between the two sides of Tampa Bay, since that seems to be what MLB prefers, and if that falters then he can decide which city to start ostentatiously attending hockey games in.
  • Speaking of the Oakland A’s, their Howard Terminal stadium environmental impact statement passed a planning commission vote this week, which means the environmental signoff could be headed for a final council vote in February. Of course, there’s still a potential half-billion-dollar budget gap even after the Oakland council gave preliminary approval to $495 million in tax kickbacks, all of which would need to be resolved before a final council vote later this year. Meanwhile, a new poll shows that Oakland residents oppose spending public money on an A’s stadium by 46-37% margin, though given that the maybe-billion-dollars in proposed public money is all for “infrastructure” and not the stadium per se, stadium advocates are claiming that the plan meets this provision anyway. The A’s seem to have backed away from threats to trade all their good young players this winter, which is probably a good idea as it’s tough to build support for public funding for a terrible team, but we could well see this whole threatdown reemerge after the 2022 season, if there is one.
  • That lawsuit announced back in March 2020 against the city of Anaheim for selling its stadium land to the Los Angeles Angels without sufficient public meetings is finally underway, with former city manager Chris Zapata and councilmember Jose Moreno filing testimony that the council secretly made the sale decision before holding any public hearings at all. The trial is set to begin on February 14, and man do I hope it will be televised.
  • The Buffalo Bills are currently getting about $13 million a year in state money to fund stadium operations under their current lease, while paying only $900,000 a year in rent, according to an Investigative Post report. The Bills lease, which was signed in 1998, is “not much worse than a lot of the other leases out there, but given that the average lease is pretty bad, that’s not really a compliment,” says one stadium blogger whose name you can probably guess even without clicking through to the article.
  • The new head of Charlotte’s economic development committee, councilmember Malcolm Graham, said that “Public-private partnership is one that’s obviously going to get a lot of attention over the next 18 to 24 months in terms of some of the things we are working on with some of our local partners,” and indicated that taxpayer money for the Panthers and Hornets could be two of those things. The latest ask from Panthers owner David Tepper was for around $500 million, while Hornets owner Michael Jordan hasn’t put a dollar figure on his request so far that I can tell.
  • Las Vegas’ top tourism marketer says that more than half of all Vegas visitors will add an extra visit or stay longer thanks to the presence of the Raiders and Golden Knights, citing … no actual data at all that I can tell? It’s going to be tough in any case to determine economic impact of the new teams given that the pandemic has turned both sports spending and travel spending upside down, but I hope that once we can manage a relatively normal year, the usual economist suspects will do some studies to see if the substitution effect holds for Vegas the same as everywhere else.
  • The Single-A Hillsboro Hops want a $60-100 million stadium upgrade, because all the minor-league baseball kids are doing it. No word yet on who would pay for what, but the city of Hillsboro issued an RFP for design and construction work.
  • This week’s non-sports-stadium subsidy report: West Virginia is giving $1.7 billion to a steel company for a new plant that will largely employ residents of neighboring Ohio and Kentucky, read all about it.
  • A sewage pipe burst at the Los Angeles Rams‘ stadium, time to build a new one!
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Friday roundup: The perils of just-get-things-done-ism, and a happy zombie apocalypse to all!

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the special joys of running a web news outlet is the regular stream of emails you receive from people wanting to pay you to run their “articles” (really thinly disguised ads and/or link spam) on your site. I had a whole plan for a year-end roundup of the funniest of those, but various things happened this past week and — anyway, there was only one I really wanted to share with you, and that is this:

Hi Neil,

I noticed you shared an article from CDC.gov when you talked about the zombie apocalypse, here: https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/mlb/los-angeles-angels-of-anaheim/

We recently published an article about a related topic, basement bunkers and why it isn’t just for wealthy preppers, that I thought might be interesting to your readers.

Followed a week later, when I didn’t respond, by:

Hi Neil,

I wanted to check in and see if you got my note about the zombie apocalypse?

Truly we live in the screwiest of all possible worlds.

On with the last news roundup of 2021, the year that ended up feeling like a repeat:

  • Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge is usually one of the more level-headed sports commentators — he’s even had me on his radio show — but his column this week falls into the trap of what might be called just-get-things-done-ism, arguing in the wake of the collapse of the Flames arena deal that both the city and the team owners need to “put egos aside and figure out how this can be salvaged.” Sure, if it’s just a matter of egos; if it’s a matter of this being a plan that looked pretty bad for the city and was looking worse and worse for the team as cost overruns piled up, maybe walking away from it is the better part of valor? There’s definitely a trend in urban governance punditry to credit elected officials who “get things done,” whether those things are a good idea or not — and getting things done is a skill, but also sometimes the best deals are the ones you didn’t make.
  • The city of Pawtucket, having lost the Pawtucket Red Sox to Worcester’s $150 million stadium bribe, is looking at replacing the team’s historic stadium with … a new $300 million high school? This would allow the city to sell off the site of one of its existing high schools and possibly repurpose the other as a middle school, so it’s a good lesson about how public assets are fungible, and the state of Rhode Island would reimburse most of the costs, so it’s arguably not a bad deal — still, for that price tag, I hope Pawtucket’s high school students get some crazy fancy cupholders.
  • Doesn’t look like I actually ran a link to the final environmental impact report for the Oakland A’s Howard Terminal stadium proposal, at least not before earlier in this sentence. Reading through that is another thing I didn’t get to do this week, but now that I’ve just finished canceling vacation plans for this month in the face of (waves hands around to indicate the entirety of everything), there should be plenty of time to discuss it here before planned hearings starting on January 19.
  • The Super Bowl is set to be played at the Los Angeles Rams‘ multi-billion-dollar new stadium, and already people are warning of its “notorious parking and traffic problems” and what a mess they could create. It’s tough to be notorious already at barely one year old, but I guess that’s one way of being “unprecedented and unparalleled.”

I could probably scrape up a couple more news items, but sometimes the best news item is the one you never write, right? Happy new year to all, thanks to everyone who threw money in the tip jar or joined this site’s Patreon, and I’ll see everyone back here on Monday.

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Friday roundup: A’s owner wants public to fund “some” of $1B Vegas stadium, Coyotes swear they’re not moving to Houston, and more

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy December! I was up real late last night, so let’s get straight to the remaining news of the week:

  • Nevada Gov.  says he’s “not inclined” to call a special session of the state legislature to figure out how to fund an Oakland A’s stadium in Las Vegas, says A’s owner John Fisher is looking for a $1 billion retractable-roofed ballpark, and indicated, “They wanted some public money. In what form, they didn’t really specify.” He also said that he wouldn’t further raise hotel taxes, the revenue source that paid for the Las Vegas Raiders stadium, and “I explained to them that I didn’t want to be a stalking horse. They said they weren’t doing that, and they were serious about this.” That’s what everyone says, even those proposing stalking horses! At least we know now that Fisher wants “some” public money toward a $1 billion Vegas stadium, if he’s serious about building one; admittedly it’s not much, but in 2021 we have to be happy with any morsel of facts we can come by.
  • The Arizona Coyotes front office has issued a statement that no matter what Forbes’ Mike Ozanian says, they’re not selling the team to someone who’ll move it to Houston. Either this is going to be hilariously awkward to walk back if the rumor turns out to be true, or Ozanian doesn’t know what he’s talking about again.
  • David Gilbert, president and CEO of Destination Cleveland, on the Guardians‘ freshly approved $285-million-or-more stadium renovation subsidy: “Economically, people can talk about whether or not it’s right for public funding to be part of professional sports facilities, but in our country, it is a reality.” I have misplaced my tourism-official-to-English dictionary, but I’m pretty sure that translates as “Yeah yeah, right and wrong, this is just standard business procedure, that’s all America has ever cared about.”
  • Now that the St. Louis Rams lawsuit is all over but for the shouting about how the NFL and Rams owner Stan Kroenke will split the $790 million settlement cost, it’s also time for the city and county of St. Louis and the local stadium authority to fight about how they will split the proceeds.
  • Buffalo’s Investigative Post is suing the state of New York to force the release of two studies commissioned by the Bills owners that looked into the relative feasibility of building a new stadium or renovating the existing one, and evaluated the economic impact of the Bills’ presence in the state. Please note that this is not the study of stadium renovation costs that Erie County is refusing to release without blacking out almost all of it; rather, these are two other studies that Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to release at all, though her administration admits it has copies. The odds on the suit forcing the documents’ release before Hochul puts a new stadium in the 2022 state budget seem slim, but at least maybe it will let us point and laugh after the fact.
  • The New York Islanders‘ new arena is causing a traffic nightmare for its neighbors in Elmont, with fans “parking anywhere they want, urinating and cursing,” according to WCBS-TV. Things may improve once a new arena parking garage is complete, but it’s probably best not to hope that a lot more fans will start taking the train instead.
  • “Last year, a report out of central Florida showed that only 23.9 percent of NFL senior executives are anything but white men. All of that whiteness has manifested itself, disproportionately, in the stands and in luxury boxes, where white NFL owners get brandished on every telecast as their team’s No. 1 fan. Those owners have endeavored to remake the front-facing part of their customer base in their image, and they are succeeding. Money is their foremost tool to accomplish this task.” That all is some pretty solid structural political analysis, especially from a column titled Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo.
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Friday roundup: St. Louis to get $790m Rams payoff from NFL or Kroenke or both, MSG deemed too pricey to move

access_time personNeil deMause

Not even sure how many people are out there reading this rather than still Thanksgivinging (Canadians, right?), but the news sure hasn’t taken a break for the short holiday week:

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