Category: Washington Commanders

Will the Commanders name their stadium after Trump? A mini-investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

I was traveling yesterday and missed the big (?) news (?) about how “a senior White House source” has been in touch with Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris about having Donald Trump’s name on the Commanders’ new stadium, something that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “would be a beautiful name, as it was President Trump who made the rebuilding of the new stadium possible.” (Citation needed on both of those facts, Karoline.)

That Trump wants his name on a football stadium should come as no surprise, as he wants his name on pretty much everything. That Harris is talking to him about it is also unsurprising, as it’s clearly good politics to meet with Trump and at least pretend to listen to him until his attention wanders elsewhere. Actually calling it “Trump Stadium” is another story, for a bunch of reasons:

  • Naming rights are worth a lot — as much as $30 million a year, which even spread over 30 years can be worth almost half a billion dollars in present value — and that’s money Harris won’t eagerly give up. He could try for some kind of hybrid name, like “[Corporate Name Here] Stadium at Trump Field,” but he’s likely to be limited to a smaller group of potential buyers if the official brand is saddled with an unwanted partner, especially one as polarizing as Trump.
  • ESPN reported that “a source with firsthand knowledge of the process” said Harris “doesn’t have the authority” to choose a name on his own, and “the city would be involved in that decision, and the Park Service would be involved.” That’s not necessarily true: D.C.’s term sheet with Harris grants the team “exclusive rights to manage, operate, market, and control the Stadium,” which presumably includes the right to name it. (Harris is explicitly guaranteed all the proceeds from stadium naming rights.) The city and Park Service could perhaps present some roadblocks in the case of a name they didn’t like, but then so could Trump if he doesn’t get his way.
  • Stadium names, to put it mildly, come and go. Unless Trump is successful in getting it contractually guaranteed that his name will be on the stadium in perpetuity, there would be nothing stopping Harris from quietly removing it once he’s out of office. (Or, more hilariously, printing it in the smallest type size imaginable.)

So this is all firmly in the category of things to wait and only take seriously if anyone at the White House still remembers it a month from now, like the time Trump said he wouldn’t allow the stadium to be built unless the Commanders changed back to their old name or the time he threatened to take away NFL tax breaks if players kept protesting racism. Or, you could run story after story about what D.C. residents think and what people on the internet think and what Tip O’Neill would think, that’s also a choice.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Pritzker endorses “infrastructure” spending for Bears, Royals could soon propose Kansas vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, which means I had to take valuable time away from reading about the Mafia luring rich people into playing in rigged poker games in order to hang out with NBA players who scored 6.6 points a game so that I could instead sum up the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, for you, because I care.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: D.C.NFL stadium comes with nine-figure Metro cost, Mets owner likely to win casino on city parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a nice talk yesterday with Chris Francis of Straight Arrow News (owned by the union-busting Joe Ricketts, sigh) about ballooning hidden public costs of sports stadiums and arenas, and the resulting article is up this morning. Key quote: “I think the team owners and the officials who work with them have realized that it sounds worse to give a check, a taxpayer check, to the team for the stadium than to say, okay, we’re not going to give you that, but we will give you money for infrastructure. We will give you tax breaks. We will give you a break on land costs.” We were talking about the Denver Broncos at the time, but really it goes for all modern sports subsidy deals: All the real costs come in the fine print.

Speaking of the fine print, let’s see what it holds this week:

  • When Washington, D.C. agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and $6 billion or so in future rent breaks to Commanders owner Josh Harris for a new stadium, did everyone forget to mention it would come with a major expansion of the Metro station near the stadium site and perhaps a new station nearby as well? That could cost “in the ballpark of hundreds of millions of dollars,” says councilmember Charles Allen, but “we cannot afford not to do it.” Remember when Allen was saying “D.C. has a responsibility to scrutinize the proposal & demand a better & fair deal” with a “billion-dollar industry”? Yeah, neither does he.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is set to be awarded a casino license for the city-owned Citi Field parking lots he controls, after it turned out the state senator opposing it was the most disliked woman in Albany. There’s no public money involved, only public land, and that was effectively given away when then-mayor Mike Bloomberg gave Cohen a 99-year lease on the property as part of his stadium deal, but if you want to be annoyed at a multibillionaire sports team owner getting his way over community opposition, don’t let me stop you.
  • The main opposition group to next month’s referendum on giving the San Antonio Spurs around $150 million worth of future tax money toward a new arena is splitting its recommendations, urging a no vote on Prop B (which would provide the arena money) but remaining neutral on Prop A, which would devote tax money to redoing the area around the old arena to attract more rodeo events. COPS/Metro wants to see the county’s money from hotel and rental car taxes spent on “a range of community projects” guided by a citizen committee; it’s not entirely clear what happens to the arena plans if Prop A passes and Prop B does not, but that’s looking like a possibility.
  • The Cleveland Browns owners have started moving dirt at their new stadium site even before figuring out how it will all be paid for. All the kids are doing it!
  • The Athletics have filed for $523 million worth of construction permits in Las Vegas; getting those still won’t guarantee that the vaporarmadillo comes to pass, but it’s edging closer to decision time.
  • Heywood Sanders has elaborated on why the $2.6 billion plan to expand the Los Angeles Convention Center in advance of the 2028 Olympics is a terrible idea, saying in a Q&A with Torched’s Alissa Walker that other similar centers are seeing attendance drop even when they expand, and are having to offer discounted rates to lure a dwindling number of events. Key quote from Walker: “[Bangs head on desk].”
  • The organizers of the New York Marathon claim that it and other running events add almost a billion dollars a year to the city economy; it doesn’t look like they even bothered to hired a consultant to write a report justifying the number, but Crain’s New York Business published it anyway, this is fine.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Fire stadium wins Chicago approval, A’s set MLB record for alienating all their new fans already

access_time personNeil deMause

With all the ginormous stadium and arena wrassles like the Washington Commanders stadium and the San Antonio Spurs arena project and the never-ending Tampa Bay Rays saga, it’s sometimes easy to forget about all the other deals that are somewhere in the vicinity of the back burner. Let’s check in on some of those this week, along with some old favorites:

  • The Chicago city council voted yesterday to approve the Chicago Fire‘s plans for a new stadium at the The 78 site, which since Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’ll build with his own money, so there should be no public funding involved. The Chicago Tribune, though, notes that “some details still need to be ironed out” for the larger redevelopment, including what to do about a new Red Line CTA station and relocating Metra train tracks after developer Related declared the original plan too costly. And what about the rumored parking garage that would, like the now-scrapped transit improvements, possibly use kicked-back property taxes via a TIF? Maybe it’s best to say there probably won’t be any public funding involved, fingers crossed, knock wood.
  • Sacramento Athletics fans are already fast on their way to being non-Athletics fans, reports ESPN, with one season ticket holder writing to the team: “Being a season ticket holder for the Athletics is embarrassing to the point that I regret telling my friends or coworkers. I cannot give away tickets, I cannot easily sell games I can’t make it to (at market rate-especially on SeatGeek), and I feel ignored by the team sales staff.” (The team responded by giving him a plastic bag of leftover giveaways that he already had.) SFGate, meanwhile, reports that an A’s fan this summer summed things up by declaring, “Fuck John Fisher. John Fisher’s a piece of shit,” while wearing a “Sacramento hates you too” cap. Things will surely improve once the team starts playing in Las Vegas in 2028, theoretically.
  • The San Francisco 49ers owners are supposed to cover the $6.4 million cost of hosting the 2026 Super Bowl, but the team’s nonprofit that is on the hook for the costs has no money, which is maybe a problem? Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter says he is “particularly concerned about the statement that the 49ers will reimburse the city for ‘approved expenses,’ with the 49ers seemingly being the judge of what is approved,” and sports economist Michael Leeds agrees, warning that “mega-events such as the Super Bowl almost invariably have costs that are higher than predicted and local impacts that are lower than predicted.”
  • A downtown site targeted for a possible new Kansas City Royals stadium was just sold to a Wichita developer, decreasing the chances that it will end up used for a ballpark. Not that Royals owner John Sherman has said much about where he might want to build a stadium as a December deadline approaches for accepting around $700 million in tax money from Kansas if he moves there, shh, he’s trying to get city or county money to go with his state money from either Kansas or Missouri, don’t bother daddy while he’s trying to concentrate.
  • Going with the headline “Brewers bolster ballpark after $500M deal” when $471 million of the money is coming from state taxpayers is a choice, Fox6 Milwaukee.
  • Marc Normandin has a good rundown on MLB commissioners Rob Manfred’s conflicting missions of doing what team owners want and doing what’s best for baseball, especially when owners themselves can’t agree on what they want: Some owners want to force the players union into accepting a salary cap at all costs, while others are more concerned about the damage an extended lockout in 2027 would do to the league’s broadcast value when it’s time to renegotiate TV deals after 2028. Explains Normandin: “Basically, he has to use this time to convince them of what they should want, so that he can then enact it just like they want him to — otherwise, he’ll have to do what they want him to, even if he thinks it goes against their best interests, because he is beholden to them in the end.” Shaking down players and cities and TV networks for money all at once is no easy feat, you try it sometime!
  • Fine, here’s an update on the Commanders stadium deal as well: The mixed-use district around the stadium will need to go through normal zoning procedures rather than being fast-tracked under a last-minute amendment, meaning they may not be ready for years after the stadium’s planned 2030 opening. That’s bad if you want to live in the promised affordable housing, but does at least also make the development rights less valuable to team owner Josh Harris, meaning the public subsidy is now more likely to be closer to $6.6 billion than $25 billion, yay?
Share this post:

How does the Commanders stadium deal suck? Let Defector count the ways

access_time personNeil deMause

Defector ran a long piece yesterday on why the Washington Commanders stadium deal sucks, and no, I’m not only posting about it because they called me “the great Neil deMause,” a title by which I expect you all to refer to me from now on. Chris Thompson’s article is an excellent summary of the record-shattering tax breaks and land subsidies the D.C. council handed out to Commanders owner Josh Harris for a new NFL venue on the RFK Stadium site, without even seeking alternate bids to help establish what would be a reasonable price. Here’s Thompson packing all the worst of it into one sentence:

The deal exempts the Commanders from property taxes on the stadium and the surrounding development; it exempts the Commanders from sales taxes on personal seat licenses; it gives the Commanders the exclusive right to develop housing and retail around the stadium, at the low price of $1 per year; and it gives the Commanders rent-free use of 24 acres of city-controlled land for a period of 26 years.

All this on top of the $1 billion in city spending on the stadium itself — though some late rejiggering of stadium revenues could reduce that to more like $650 million. The total public cost, as discussed here at length previously, will still likely be between $7 billion and $25 billion, setting a new standard for sports subsidies that will undoubtedly be used as a benchmark by other team owners, meaning it’ll cost lots of other cities more billions of dollars in the future. And this after, as Thompson notes, the D.C. Chief Financial Officer’s office issued a report finding that Harris doesn’t need the subsidies in order to make money on the Commanders, and that the district would get way more in tax revenues if it redeveloped the RFK site without building a stadium.

The whole thing went down this way, the story makes clear, because Harris’s management team lobbied the hell out of the D.C. council, including killing any proposed amendments that might have softened the blow even slightly. (One councilmember, Matthew Frumin, declared he would vote no unless Harris were required to pay penalties if he failed to fully develop the land, then when it didn’t happen voted yes anyway because “this is a time to come together.”) The final needed votes were obtained by getting the support of organized labor, which was strong-armed into supporting the deal by the threat of losing construction jobs:

“They had heard from the team that if the amendments passed that the team would pull out,” [councilmember Brianne] Nadeau explained to Defector. “In which case, all of those union jobs would go away. So I think they felt pressed to send a letter, saying, ‘Please don’t support any amendments, we don’t want the bill to go away.'”

Of course, the unions would still have gotten construction jobs if someone else had developed the RFK land, but there wasn’t anybody else offering to develop the RFK land, because D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser specifically decided not to ask any developers if they were interested before offering the land to Harris, and the D.C. council didn’t push her to. The whole mess is a perfect example of what happens when you have political leadership prioritizing making local billionaires happy over figuring out what’s best for your city, and political opposition largely just wanting to show that they got concessions for various constituencies (union jobs, local hiring) even if those come to pennies on the dollar of what D.C. is giving up.

It’s all a terrible system, and not likely to end unless either someone finds a way to limit the lobbying power of wealthy corporate owners (not likely, the way the Supreme Court is going) or the federal government steps in. As one Defector commenter suggests: “One thing we could maybe do at the federal level is treat all local and state tax breaks for specific businesses and projects as taxable income, and maybe even tax them at 100% of value.” Great idea, and one that was tried almost 30 years ago, and it never even made it out of Congressional committee. “We can’t reform government without action by the government that won’t take it because it’s in need of reform” is probably the preeminent Catch-22 of our times, and if anyone has any ideas for a workaround, democracy is all ears.

Share this post:

DC passes final $6.6B Commanders stadium subsidy, there is much media rejoicing

access_time personNeil deMause

The Washington, D.C. city council cast its second and final vote yesterday on the Commanders stadium deal that will involve a record-shattering $6.6 billion (or more) in public subsidies, and as expected passed it again, this time by an 11-2 margin instead of last month’s 9-3. Let’s see how our news media, which are not at all influenced by their corporate leadership or by other political pressures, described the decision:

  • Washington Post: “Transformative $3.7 billion Commanders stadium deal passes D.C. Council”
  • USA Today: “The stadium is set to open in 2030, just in time to host big events like the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup and potentially the Super Bowl.”
  • WTOP: “The Washington Commanders are coming home.”

Not everyone was just feeling the excitement, admittedly: WUSA9 reported that the vote was “met with celebration by fans and concern by some neighbors in the surrounding community,” noting that local residents had asked for accommodations like guarantees of affordable housing, public transit, and preservation of green space. But proposed amendments on those and other matters — including the team having to repay the city if it failed to fully develop the stadium property as promised — were rejected after Commanders president Mark Clouse sent a letter to the council expressing his “deep concern” that any changes would make the project “unworkable and impractical,” at which point a councilmember who had vowed to vote no if the changes weren’t approved flipped his vote to yes anyway.

There was also some more critical coverage, including Greater Greater Washington‘s “Wednesday’s Council vote gets us a lousy RFK stadium deal,” which noted that D.C.’s CFO had declared the $6.6 billion in tax and land breaks to be “not financially necessary for the Team.” But that’s going to land far fewer eyeballs than Jeff Bezos’s WaPo calling the deal “transformative” — a word lifted from Commanders owner Josh Harris’s statement on the vote and not even dignified with quote marks in the paper’s headline (notably, it doesn’t appear in the accompanying article), something that could certainly never have been influenced by the fact that Bezos and Harris share both a socioeconomic status and a pal in the White House.

Very little of the news coverage bothered to describe the last-minute amendments (though almost all detailed Harris’s objection to them), and even less went into any detail about the $6.6 billion in stadium and garage construction payments, property tax breaks, and 26 years of free rent on 24 acres of prime city-owned property, all without even going through the motions of seeking competitive bids for the former RFK Stadium site. It all made for a shameful day for the media — okay, an even more shameful day — and prompted sports economist J.C. Bradbury to repost the Journalist’s Resource’s four tips for covering sports stadium deals, which include basic stuff like “interrogate economic impact statements or fiscal estimates from franchise owners” and “Understand how states and localities finance stadium construction.” Or, you know, you can just reprint team owner claims about all the Super Bowls this will bring. Journalists, think carefully: One may risk pissing off your publisher, while the other will get you done by lunchtime. It’s a knotty ethical conundrum!

Share this post:

As DC prepares for final vote on $6.6B+ Commanders stadium subsidy, all the debate is around the edges

access_time personNeil deMause

The Washington, D.C. city council is set to cast its final vote on the Commanders stadium deal tomorrow, because D.C. has one of those council systems where stuff has to be voted on twice to be sure that legislators are serious. Given that the council already voted 9-3 last month to approve the deal, nobody expects anything different here, but everyone and their sister is still scrambling to get in some last-minute lobbying:

Ignoring Bowser, who’s gonna Bowser, these are clear signs that we’re deep into the haggling over the price phase of the Commanders deal, which is all too often the only phase many stakeholders get involved in. If you’re going to hand over $6.6 billion or so in subsidies to a billionaire private equity goon, yes, it is absolutely preferable that at least district residents get some well-paying jobs, and that neighborhood residents get some say in how it affects their immediate surroundings. But when details like these — and not the $6.6 billion or so in subsidies, most of them hidden in the fine print as is standard these days — end up being the main or even the only thing that unions and community members focus on, that’s some serious missing the forest for the trees, not to mention an open invitation for sports billionaires to buy off opposition by throwing some cheap community benefits at the problem.

How we got to the point where advocacy groups are mostly just concerned about getting theirs is a long, long story, and probably needs to start with that time the U.S. government decided to break up unions that took a bigger-picture view of social change by trying to deport their members to countries they weren’t even from. There are definitely exceptions: Some community groups aren’t just NIMBYs, and some unions do try to make the world a better place for more than their own members. But so long as we live in a world where construction workers turn up to testify on behalf of any development project that’ll employ them, even when it means less public resources available for their union and non-union neighbors, stopping rich people from siphoning off tax money is always going to be an even more uphill battle than it would be just from all the other rich people supporting them.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

Share this post:

DC council okays record-shattering $6.6B+ stadium subsidy for Commanders in exchange for local hiring promise

access_time personNeil deMause

The D.C. city council voted on Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Washington Commanders stadium plan on Friday, and it went as expected, approving the revised agreement 9-3. Needing five votes to block a two-thirds majority, opponents were only able to muster three: Matthew Frumin, Brianne Nadeau, and Robert White. Councilmembers Charles Allen, Zachary Parker, and Janeese Lewis George all signed on to the deal once the Commanders agreed with local unions to guarantee using union labor and 51% local hiring on the mixed-use component of the project. Frumin, who had been a potential yes vote, switched to no after team officials refused to agree to financial penalties if housing on the site isn’t built on time.

Commanders owner Josh Harris is now set to get $1.058 billion in city cash plus at least $5.6 billion in free rent and tax breaks, which will be the biggest public sports subsidy in U.S. history by a mile. (The previous record depends on how you calculate the value of tax breaks, but all the contenders are well under $2 billion.) There’s still another council vote to be held in September, but D.C. has apparently told Harris to go ahead with stadium work regardless, apparently on the assumption that D.C. won’t be hit by any hurricanes in the interim.

For a team owner who had no other tangible offers in place from other local governments, and a site that was a potential gold mine for the district but which will now be in Harris’s control on a 90-year sweetheart lease, $6.6 billion is a pretty incredible get. Maybe savvy enough negotiators don’t need leverage? Or maybe it’s as simple as what one councilmember, hiding behind a veil of anonymity, told ESPN: “The alternative is we’re still talking about this in 10 years.” Got some bad news for you, buddy: You may yet be talking about this again in 10 years.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Commanders vote, Bengals lease, A’s stadium cost all up in the air at this time

access_time personNeil deMause

The D.C. council’s verdict on the $6.6-billion-plus Washington Commanders stadium subsidy still seems to be up in the air at this time: The council now plans to vote today, giving councilmembers a whole 24 hours to read the final stadium bill, which was just released yesterday, after the council had concluded hearings about it without most councilmembers themselves being present, as one does. Councilmember Robert White has already said he plans to vote against the bill and hopes he can get four others to go along with him and block the needed two-thirds majority; council chair Phil Mendelson seems confident that he has the votes to pass the thing, but we’ll all find out together in a few hours.

Meanwhile, let’s pass the time by taking a spin through the other stadium and arena news that unfolded, or didn’t, this week while we were all waiting for the denouement to Bowser‘s Folly:

  • The Cincinnati Bengals‘ new lease remains up in the air after Hamilton County commissioners yesterday approved it, but Bengals execs haven’t signed it yet because they’re still reading the final version. We’ll just have to wait and see whether team officials are willing to accept $700 million–plus in county stadium upgrade funding, or if they plan on asking for even more.
  • The Las Vegas A’s stadium cost is still up in the air, with estimates now around $2 billion, up from $1.75 billion, according to owner John Fisher. Does Fisher have the money to pay to do more than move some dirt around? Did he before? Only he and his accountants, and maybe Rob Manfred, know.
  • The legality of Missouri’s offer of state money for Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums is up in the air, after two Republican Missouri state legislators and one citizen activist have sued to block it, arguing that it has too much stuff in it and is unconstitutionally targeted to benefit specific companies and is “a bribe” to keep the teams from moving to Kansas. Whether any of that is actually illegal, it’ll be up to the courts to decide.
  • Denver Broncos stadium plans are still up in the air, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said yesterday, “We’re working hard on a deal, and I think we’re close.” Where the stadium would go and who would pay how much for it remains up in the air.
  • The final city cost of repairing the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is still up in the air, with current estimates standing at $59.7 million plus whatever it costs for new video production equipment, plus tariffs, plus any other sundries. Will the St. Petersburg city council keep approving additional costs? You already know the non-answer to that.
  • The economic impact of a new San Antonio Spurs arena development remains up in the air after consultants said it would be worth $18.7 billion over 30 years, then it turned out they were only clown consultants. Whatever fools the San Antonio Express-News is good enough for government work!
Share this post: