Category: Super Bowl

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: Guardians get their $285m public payout, Coyotes to play in teensy college arena for now

access_time personNeil deMause

What is the deal with these five-day workweeks? Why isn’t Juliet Schor president by now? Four days work for five days pay! Sorry, where was I? Oh, right, sports stadium scams siphoning off public money to rich dudes, same thing as every day, Pinky:

  • Cleveland Guardians owner Paul Dolan has officially extended the team’s lease through 2036 as part of a deal to provide $285 million in public funding toward a $435 million renovation of their 28-year-old stadium, two months after the Cleveland city council approved the annual tax subsidies. (Dolan was probably looking for a pen that worked.) Cleveland and Cuyahoga County can extend the lease for another five years by agreeing to pay for another $112.5 million in upgrades; getting your city landlord to pay you to play is truly the wave of the future, or the present, or whatever we’re living in these days.
  • Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is reportedly in talks to play home games temporarily at Arizona State University’s new arena, which only holds 5,000 people, which, sure, cue up your favorite “that’s more fans than the Coyotes have anyway” jokes. “We would be glad to help the Coyotes by providing a temporary home while their new arena is built just a couple of miles away,” said ASU CFO Morgan Olsen, which is maybe getting the cart a little before the horse given that the current Tempe city council lost interest in providing $200 million toward an arena once Meruelo was revealed to have been failing to pay his city taxes in Glendale, managing to get his team evicted from there. Could the Coyotes’ saga end up with them stuck in a tiny temporary home for years while continuing to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot over new arena plans? Probably not, but it would definitely be on-brand.
  • Greenville Triumph owner Joe Erwin wants a new $38.6 million soccer stadium, and are offering to pay, let’s see, they’ll “donate land they already own in the area” and “plan to bring upwards of a million dollars of equipment over from [their] temporary pitch.” The owner of the USL League One club is selling the stadium as multipurpose, enthusing, “We can play lacrosse on that field, American football on that field, rugby on that field. Heck, we can play ultimate frisbee on the field.” In my experience, USL League One teams can barely play soccer, but it’s nice to have self-confidence.
  • Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee says he’d be willing to talk about making a “significant investment” to host a Super Bowl in Nashville, and is “engaged in talks” about public funding for NASCAR, and thinks it would be “awesome” for and MLB team to come to Nashville but says that would take “partnerships.” He didn’t mention spending state sales tax money on Tennessee Titans stadium upgrades this time, but maybe that’d be part of the Super Bowl “investment”? Either way, move over, Glenn Youngkin, there’s a new contender for the crown of Governor Most Eager to Give Public Money to the Local Sports Team and/or Other Corporations.
  • Buffalo’s Investigative Post looks at how a Buffalo Bills stadium could be made to help the community it’s built in, and lands on the idea of community benefits agreements, which can “ensure the public receives some return on its investment.” Or, you know, not, as is often the case, especially in New York state.
  • The Tampa Bay Times is conducting a reader survey of where the Rays should build a new stadium and who should pay for it, which is going to be unscientific as hell — I just filled it out, in hopes that this would let me see the results so far, but no dice — but that’s modern journalism for you. At least team owner Stu Sternberg will be happy that the local paper is still flogging his new-stadium dreams, rather than moving on to some other news or issues that might also be able to use public money.
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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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What time was the Super Bowl superspreader event?

access_time personNeil deMause

The NFL held another Super Bowl last night, and as was discussed in the run-up to kickoff, there were widespread concerns that doing so with fans in attendance in Tampa’s stadium — and fans gathering elsewhere for Super Bowl parties — might set off a spike in coronavirus infections just like that other recent big mass gathering event did. How did America do?

Let’s start with inside the stadium, where the NFL allowed in 22,000 fans while augmenting them with 30,000 cardboard cutouts. There are roughly a billion articles today saying that this made the game look more crowded than it was; so how crowded was it?

That’s pretty crowded, even if you account for the few cutouts visible. Not to mention pretty sporadically masked. And while one of those two things might be acceptable in an outdoor space, the one proven way to spread the virus even outdoors is to be unmasked, close together, and singing or shouting.

But 7,500 of those fans were vaccinated health care workers! They’re just like cardboard cutouts, right, because now that they’re vaccinated, they can’t catch or spread the virus? Well, no:

“Currently, we do not have enough data to be able to say with confidence that the vaccines can prevent transmission,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci said in a tweet during an online Q&A session. “So even if vaccinated, you may still be able to spread the virus to vulnerable people.”

The important distinction here is that while the available vaccines have been shown to be extremely effective at preventing people from getting extremely sick, they don’t actually prevent people from getting infected. And people who are infected but not sick can still spread the virus — there’s some early evidence that at least one of the vaccines dramatically reduces the number of people with active virus in their noses, which is a great sign that they’ll spread it less, but that still makes those vaccinated health care workers at best 67% cardboard.

Outside the stadium, meanwhile, things were if anything much worse, especially once the hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers won:

Now, all this is outdoors, and the vast majority of coronavirus spread has been indoors, so maybe things will be more or less okay despite the lack of masks and close quarters, much like they were after last spring’s Black Lives Matter protests, though the protestors then seemed to be on the whole more consistently masked. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks, once we see whether virus levels spike in Tampa. (And other cities where people gather to watch the Super Bowl, which I understand happens even in cities without teams in the game!) And if it does, it could have a major impact on whether other sporting events like the MLB season or the Tokyo Olympics are considered safe for fans — assuming that either the leaders of sports leagues or elected officials use epidemiology and not businesses’ profit concerns as their guide, which is probably not a safe assumption at all.

Plus, of course, how much the virus spread last night will determine whether a whole lot of people get infected and die: not just the people at the game and the street parties, but the people who then get infected by them, and the people who get infected by them, and so on. One of the problems of public health and infectious disease vectors is that “I’m willing to accept the risk” is seldom a reasonable justification for risky behavior — your behavior can end up bringing sickness or death to someone you never even meet, just like that one poor person who went to a biotech conference in Boston last February and ended up leading to the infection of at least 245,000 people. If we’re lucky, that didn’t happen last night in Tampa; if we’re unlucky, allowing fans to celebrate the Super Bowl up close and maskless could end up costing us a shot at an earlier end to this pandemic.

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Friday roundup: We have entered the Golden Age of minor-league stadium scams

access_time personNeil deMause

Welp, that was another week. I know from comments that some of you think that the stadium and arena subsidy racket is about to come grinding to a halt, either because of the Covid economy or everybody already having a new enough stadium or something, but it sure looks like team owners didn’t get the memo — my RSS feeds are as hopping as they’ve ever been with tales of sports venue funding demands, and it’s still a rarity when local governments say no or even hmm, really? Check out this week’s roster, which, as yours truly predicted a couple of months ago, is especially jam-packed with minor-league baseball stadium plans:

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Friday roundup: Tokyo Olympics back on, NFL doesn’t understand vaccines, and other hygiene theater stories

access_time personNeil deMause

It was yet another one of those weeks, where you finally look up from the news that’s obsessing everybody only to find that while you weren’t looking, monarch butterflies had moved to the verge of extinction. There doesn’t seem to be an end to this anytime soon — which is pretty much the motto of this website, so let’s get on with it:

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Friday roundup: Jacksonville council holds screaming match about Jaguars subsidy, Braves to charge county for fixing anything that wouldn’t fall out of stadium if you turned it over, plus Texas cricket wars!

access_time personNeil deMause

I admit, there are some Fridays where I wake up and realize I have to do a news roundup and it just feels like a chore after a long week, and, reader, this was one of those Fridays. But then I looked in my inbox and there was a new Ruthie Baron “This Week In Scams” post for the first time in months, and now I am re-energized for the day ahead! Also despondent about how the fossil fuel industry is trying to catfish us all into thinking global warming isn’t real, but that’s the complex mix of emotions I have come to rely on “This Week In Scams” for.

And speaking of complex mixes of emotions, let’s get to this week’s remaining sports stadium and arena news:

  • Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry on complaints that Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $200 million development subsidy deal is being rushed through the city council: “What does that mean, it’s rushed? What does that mean? We are following the process we follow as a city. The administration has put forth legislation that includes the development of Lot J. The City Council will take their time and do their work. And then they’ll ultimately have to press a green button or a red button — a yes or a no.” Now I really want to know if the Jacksonville city council actually votes by pushing a green or red button, and if so what they do if a city councilmember has red-green color blindness, and oh hey, what happened at yesterday’s council hearing? “Finger-pointing, name-calling and what some members say was a big embarrassment for government”? Excellent, keep up the good work.
  • The Atlanta Braves owners have tapped their first $800,000 from their $70 million stadium repair fund, half of which is to be paid for by Cobb County, to pay for … okay, this Marietta Daily Journal article doesn’t say much about what it will pay for, except that one item is a new fence, and there was dispute over whether a fence counted as a repair (which the fund can be used for) or an improvement (which the team is supposed to cover). It also notes: “Mike Plant, president & CEO of Braves Development Company, described capital maintenance costs in 2013 by using the example of taking a building and turning it upside down. The items that would fall out of the building represent general maintenance, which is the responsibility of the Braves, while the items that do not fall out, such as pipes, elevators and concrete, fall under capital maintenance.” This raises all kinds of questions: Would elevators really not fall out of a stadium if you turned it upside down? What if furniture, for example, fell off the floor but landed on an interior ceiling? Would you have to shake the stadium first to see what was loose and just stuck on something? So many questions.
  • The Grand Prairie city council has approved spending $1.5 million to turn the defunct Texas AirHogs baseball stadium into a pro cricket stadium, which the Dallas Morning News reports “could cement North Texas as a top U.S. market for professional cricket.” (If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of nearby Allen, Texas, which thought about building a cricket stadium a couple of years ago but then thought better of it.) I went to a pro cricket match in the U.S. once, years ago, and there were maybe 100 people in the stands, and later the league apparently folded when none of the players showed up for a game, but surely this will go much better than that.
  • Angel City F.C. has announced it will be playing games at Banc of California Stadium, which made me look up first what league Angel City F.C. is in (an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League) and then what stadium named itself after Banc of California (the Los Angeles F.C. stadium that opened in 2018, I’m pretty sure at no public expense but you never know for sure with these things, and which is not supposed to be called Banc of California Stadium anymore since Banc of California bailed on its naming-rights contract in June) and then why Banc of California insists on spelling “Banc” that way (unclear, but if it was an attempt to put a clean new rebranding on the bank after its creation in a 2013 merger, that maybe didn’t go so well). So now, burdened with this knowledge, I feel obligated to share it — if nothing else, I suppose, it’s a nice little microcosm of life in the early Anthropocene, which may be of interest to future scholars if the cockroaches and microalgae can figure out how to read blogs.
  • The Richmond Times-Dispatch says that even if the Richmond Flying Squirrels get eliminated in baseball’s current round of minor-league defenestration, “Major League Baseball’s risk is our gain” if the city builds a new stadium that … something about “a multiuse strategy”? The editorial seems to come down to “Okay, the team may get vaporized, but we still want a new stadium, so full speed ahead!”, which is refreshing honesty, at least, maybe?
  • When I noted yesterday that the USL hands out new soccer franchises like candy, I neglected to mention that a lot of that candy quickly melts on the dashboard and disappears, so thanks to Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier Journal for recounting all the USL franchises that have folded over the years.
  • Six East Coast Hockey League teams are choosing to sit out the current season, and that’s bad news for Reading, home of the Reading Royals, according to Reading Downtown Improvement District chief Chuck Broad, who tells WFMZ-TV, “There is lots of spin-off, economic development, from a hockey game for restaurants and other businesses.” Yeah, probably not, and especially not during a time when hardly anyone would be eating at restaurants anyway because they’re germ-filled death traps, but why not give the local development director a platform to insist otherwise, he seems like a nice guy, right?
  • In related news, the mayor of Henderson, Nevada, says the new Henderson Silver Knights arena she’s helping build with at least $30 million in tax money is “a gamechanger” for downtown Henderson because “it’s nice to have locations where events can happen in our community.” This after she wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun saying how great it will be for locals to be able to “attend a variety of events that create the vibrancy for which our city is known” — a vibrancy that apparently Henderson was able to pull off despite not having any locations where events can happen, because that’s just the kind of place Henderson is.
  • In also related news, the vice president of sales and marketing at New Beginnings Window and Door says that the Hudson Valley Renegades becoming a New York Yankees farm team could be great for his business (which, again, is selling windows and doors) because “the eyeballs are going to be there” for advertising his windows and doors to people driving up from New York City who might want to pick up some windows and doors to take home with them, okay, I have no idea what he’s talking about, seriously, can’t anybody at any remaining extant newspapers ask a followup question?
  • And in all-too-related news, here’s an entire WTSP article about the new hotel Tampa will have ready for February’s Super Bowl that never even mentions the possibility that nobody will be able to stay in hotels for the Super Bowl because Covid is rampaging across the state. Journalism had a good run.
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Friday roundup: San Diego okays $1B arena complex, Manfred floats neutral-site World Series, and that time the Twins ran stadium ads featuring a kid who’d died from cancer

access_time personNeil deMause

I am way too tired this morning from waiting for tranches of vote counts to drop to write an amusing intro, so let’s get straight to the news:

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The NFL’s plan is to keep poking at the virus until people start getting sick

access_time personNeil deMause

So this happened:

Before anyone gets too excited and/or horrified, the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Jacksonville Jaguars have all said they’re going to continue to operate at 20-25% capacity for the time being. This was just Gov. Ron DeSantis making clear that he lifted all restrictions on outdoor sporting events two weeks ago, when he also prohibited local governments from enforcing tougher restrictions or even fining people for not wearing masks. (If you’re wondering how that’s working out, virus rates in Florida haven’t surged so far, staying fairly level — though still high — but then, it generally takes more than two weeks for a surge to take hold, and also when you’re dealing mostly with stochastic spread via superspreader events, there is a lot of randomness involved as to whether and when a surge kicks in.)

So, props to the NFL for not immediately opening the fan floodgates in Florida, sure. But that’s hardly an indicator of a league that is concerned with safety above else. As we’ve seen this week — and as Barry Petchesky adeptly recounted yesterday at Defector — the league is currently dealing with a cascade of outbreaks on teams that has now caused a couple of games to be postponed, and could end up with even more. And, writes Petchesky, it was all totally predictable:

We don’t know a lot about COVID-19, but we know a few things about sports. We know bubbles, deployed by the NBA and NHL, and by MLB for its postseason, can work. We know that not-bubbling, like MLB tried for its abbreviated regular season, doesn’t work, at least not if your goal is to avoid having to cancel or postpone games. We know the NFL, due to the sheer size of its rosters and the massive logistical undertaking that staging a football game requires, probably can’t enter a bubble. We also know that it can’t afford to postpone many more games before a backlog pushes the Super Bowl into June.

That caveat re: MLB’s non-bubble is important: If the goal of “let’s let baseball teams all play in the home stadiums while still seeing their families and going to the grocery store and whatnot” was to keep anyone from getting infected, yeah, it was a disaster. But if the goal was to find a way to limp through a season with lots of postponements and makeup doubleheaders because players weren’t willing to be separated from their families for three months — the NBA and NHL were already up to playoff season, so their bubbles didn’t have to last as long — then it worked exactly as planned.

The NFL, of course, can’t stage doubleheaders, and can’t easily reschedule too many games without adding additional weeks to the season. And with 64-player rosters (48 active, 16 on a practice squad), plus a sport that involved a lot more contact than baseball (though we’re still not clear whether that’s the main risk or it’s just gathering indoors in clubhouses that mostly spreads the coronavirus), that’s a lot more dice being rolled every week than for other sports, so it’s absolutely no surprise that we’re seeing outbreaks.

Unlike MLB, though, which after some initial stumbles realized that you need to quarantine entire teams for a week or more after each new case turns up, the NFL seems to be charging ahead on a policy of Well, hopefully nobody else caught it. After New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton tested positive on Friday, Sunday’s scheduled game between the Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs was delayed — all the way to Monday night. But it can take four or more days for an infected person to test positive, while they become infectious in as little as 48 hours. So even if Patriots players all tested negative before their Monday night game, someone on the team could easily have still been incubating the virus, and spreading it to their teammates. Which may in fact have happened.

The NFL has already been heavily invested in hygiene theater, touting its disinfecting drones and temperature checks for fans, even though neither does much at all to protect anyone from Covid. (All evidence is that the virus doesn’t spread much via surfaces, and while most people with Covid symptoms run a fever, nearly half of infected people don’t have any symptoms.) Hygiene theater is based on the idea that the easier something is to do, the more one should focus on it; the decision to hold the Pats-Chiefs game on Monday after just a 24-hour delay seems to have been the inverse: If it’s too hard to do, let’s decide it doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately, in a sport where doing much of anything to combat the spread of the coronavirus among players is really hard, that’s a recipe for, if not necessarily disaster, a whole lot of extremely risky behavior. And the NFL has another decision coming up that is going to be equally hard, if only for economic reasons: The Super Bowl is scheduled to be held on February 7 in Tampa, and DeSantis has now said that it’s okay by him if they sell out the place, and that would be worth tens of millions of dollars to the league. Even if the image of a packed Super Bowl that turns into another biological bomb may give league planners second thoughts, you know that somewhere in the league offices they’re wondering: Could we get away with 30% capacity? 40%? What if we have disinfecting drones hovering over every fan? How close can we get to the precipice of a superspreader event without going over?

And that appears to be the NFL’s policy, really: Keep inching up to the limits of what’s considered safe, see who gets sick, then inch up a little further if it’s not too embarrassing a number. As I’ve noted before, this makes for a very useful experiment about how many fans can be in one place outdoors before disaster strikes — if the NFL really wanted to do it right, it should dictate that some teams allow more fans and others allow fewer, to see what the threshold is for sparking outbreaks — but it’s an experiment with human lives, which when conducted without the humans involved knowing the risks and consenting to them is generally considered a crime against humanity. But then, playing with human lives is pretty much the NFL’s jam, so why quit now while you’re massively ahead?

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Friday roundup: Coyotes late with arena rent, Winnipeg move non-threats, and good old gondolas, nothing beats gondolas!

access_time personNeil deMause

If you missed me — and a whole lot of other people you’ve likely read about here, including economist Victor Matheson and former Anaheim mayor Tom Tait — breaking down the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal in an enormous Zoom panel last night, you can still check it out on the Voice of OC’s Facebook page. I didn’t bother to carefully curate the books on the shelves behind me, as one does, so have fun checking out which novels I read 20 years ago!

And on to the news, which remains unrelentingly newsy:

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