Friday roundup: Pelicans owner seeks deal for state-funded velour, ballot measure on Royals stadium could face court fight

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.

And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:

  • New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
  • A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
  • North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
  • Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
  • A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
  • Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
  • Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
  • Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
  • Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
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Portland legislators question $600m gift to Blazers owner, who replies locals should be glad he pays any taxes at all

access_time personNeil deMause

The standoff over spending $235 million in city and county money on Portland Trail Blazers arena upgrades to go along with $365 million in already-approved state money — and $0 from Blazers’ billionaire owner Tom Dundon — continues, with Portland Mayor Keith Wilson issuing a public letter declaring it a “transformational civic project” while city and county legislators wonder aloud what exactly the city and Multnomah County would get for their tax dollars:

County Commissioner Meghan Moyer slammed the proposed use of tax proceeds because the money could be spent on other public services. She said the county is expecting a $78 million deficit in its general fund over the next four years.

“What these funds could provide are services to our most vulnerable,” she said. “They are seniors, they are people with disabilities, they are people who cannot access health care. They are children.”

“Please, Tom Dundon,” Moyer added, “strike a fair balance.”

And on the city council side:

“If the owners put up just 25% of the $600 million price tag [which would be funded by the city, county, and state] on this renovation and agree to pay rent equivalent to what the Hurricanes pay in Raleigh, that alone would cover the upfront costs being asked of the city and the county,” said Councilor Angelita Morillo.

Portland area government leaders, meanwhile, sat down with Dundon in the arena at the Portland Metro Chamber of commerce’s annual meeting yesterday to talk up the Blazers’ renovation plan, only to have it turn into a forum for more questions about why, exactly, the public should be paying for this:

As the meeting was taking place, protestors made their voices heard, yelling “hands off PCEF,” the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund.

Protestors also gathered around the Moda Center, yelling “no bailouts for billionaires.”…

Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards said, “I mean, very fundamentally, what is it that the almost $600 million in public investment is going to be buying? And we didn’t get that answered this morning. So we’re going to need that answer. There’s a lot of work that’s going to need to happen between now and the time that the county commission votes on anything.”

Mayor Wilson’s letter didn’t do much to answer what kind of return the city and county should expect on their $235 million, beyond warning that Portland could “put the brakes on the project if we don’t take our role seriously” and saying that “good process means sitting down, figuring out the math, and keeping the public informed and empowered every step of the way, not duking it out in the media or on Instagram.” No actual math was included, and posting an open letter on your website arguably counts as “duking it out in the media,” but Wilson has left it off his Instagram feed for now, so there!

Dundon, meanwhile, said that it’s totally fair for him to put nothing into a $600 million arena renovation for which he’ll receive all the proceeds, because he pays taxes, what do you want from him, blood?

“There’s lots of places that don’t have taxes at the same rate,” Dundon told the crowd. “So if you charge people taxes and invest it back into the thing that helps generate the money relative to the market, other places … it’s a huge investment. … I just know it feels like we’re making a pretty big investment by staying here and paying these tax rates and agreeing to these fees for dollars that go back into the building.”

It’s like an isoceles triangle! And what is geometry if not a form of math?

The city council has a vote on the arena term sheet scheduled for August 12, but the city and county have until the end of 2026 to vote on the arena renovation plan, so expect even more of this over the coming months. City Councilors Mitch Green and Steve Novick have proposed a November public ballot measure on the arena plan; that would have to be approved by the council by July 22 in order to happen.

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Pritzker ready to okay Illinois giving public money to Bears, even if everyone’s pretending it’s not public money

access_time personNeil deMause

Crain’s Chicago has another article quoting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as saying the ball is in the Chicago Bears owners’ court as far as coming up with a demand for an Illinois stadium bill, just like Pritzker already said last week. The governor went a bit further this time in saying that Bears execs are actually working on cobbling together a new bill — “I think they’re looking at both of the bills that passed — the one in the House, the one in the Senate — hoping to put the provisions of each of those together in a form that they think will pass” — and reiterated that he’s willing to call a special session of the legislature as soon as team officials have all their votes in a row.

That’s all old news, so instead I’d like to take the time to focus in on this paragraph from the Crain’s piece:

Even though the bill didn’t provide any public money for the stadium, many Illinois legislators were cool to the idea of providing property tax breaks to a privately owned football team at a time when constituents are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes.

Look, I get it. There are only so many minutes in the day to report and speed-type reports like these, though at least Crain’s writer John Pletz appears to have a more reasonable one-article-a-day workload. And journalism shorthand is an established thing, so wanting to say “public money” when you mean “direct cash subsidies” is sort of understandable.

Still: Saying the rejected megaprojects bill “didn’t provide any public money for the stadium” but did “provide property tax breaks” is just nonsense, and doesn’t belong in any self-respecting news outlet. Tax breaks are very much public money — they’re calculated as such in an annual “tax expenditure” report by the state comptroller, for one thing — and are equally valuable to team owners’ bottom line, as saving $700 million on your property tax bills is no different from getting $700 million worth of government checks. So while the turn of phrase may seem innocuous, it ends up misleading those readers who are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes. And that’s before even considering that one of the bills previously considered would take sales and hotel taxes collected in a stadium district and use them to pay off stadium bonds, which isn’t a tax break at all, it’s just a government check.

As for where an Illinois stadium would go, the Bears-owned site in Arlington Heights is still the most likely target, though that isn’t stopping other communities from trying to get in on the bidding: In addition to the industrial suburb of McCook, state rep Curtis Tarver has proposed a site at 85th and Lake Shore Drive on the far South Side near the Indiana border, saying that he told Bears CEO about the idea and “he certainly did not tell me that’s the worst idea I’ve seen in my life.” Hope springs eternal, and summers eternal too, at least when a special session is on the table.

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Colts owners weigh ways to get in line behind Bears for Indiana stadium subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

FoS commenter John Bladen, three months ago to the day:

I will take this notion of the Bears in Indiana slightly seriously when I hear Colts ownership demanding that ‘whatever Indiana does for the Bears, they must do for us- err, again, err….”

Good news, John, your wager may be paying off:

Experts say the Colts and the city [of Indianapolis] are undoubtedly watching the Bears’ negotiations to gauge the state’s appetite for incentives and partnerships that could expand the team’s local impact and its own revenue. … Pete Ward, chief operating officer for the Colts, said the team is interested in growing its revenue from inside and around the stadium, potentially with a stadium district. He also confirmed the team is considering a new training facility and headquarters downtown.

That’s not quite “We need whatever the Bears get,” but it’s certainly Colts owners the Irsay family beginning to jockey for position to be next in line for whatever they think they can arm-twist Indiana government officials into dishing out out. The Irsays’ lease allows them to choose in 2032 whether to extend their stay beyond 2038 or opt out in 2035, and as we have seen time and again, lease opt-outs are a recipe for fresh subsidy demands. And Ward, if nothing else, is preparing an obsolescence claim about his team’s 18-year-old stadium by talking up how it’s already less shiny than some other teams’ homes:

“It feels like it’s brand new, but where it’s lacking is in amenities and diversity of revenue streams,” he said. “We would love to see some things happen down there, but we’re not asking the city to do that. We’re not asking them right now, and we’re not saying it’s their responsibility. We’ll have to see how things evolve.”

Does that translate as “We’re not planning on asking the city for money, we’re planning to ask the state”? Or “We’re not asking the city for money yet, give us a few years?” And does “amenities and diversity of revenue streams” mostly mean team execs are eyeing a stadium district — something Indiana house speaker Todd Huston called a “huge opportunity to do some really cool stuff” — or more wine bars in their current stadium, or what? Too many variables this time for a single bet, maybe a parlay is the best move.

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Suburban Illinois mayors are pitching Bears on stadium sites again as Indiana plans falter

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Bears‘ search for the city that will lavish it with the most public stadium dollars has officially re-entered the throwing-stuff-at-the-wall stage, with fresh suburbs entering the fray. Last week, McCook, Illinois Mayor Terrance Carr and four of his top officials hand-delivered a letter to Bears execs spelling out a stadium proposal in his village west of Chicago. And while Carr wouldn’t say what was in it — no spoilers for Bears execs before they’ve read it! — he did provide some hints:

The proposed site is at the southeast corner of 55th Street and East Avenue, filled in quarry land. … [Carr’s] proposal: The Bears or the village would buy the land. Then the Bears would build a domed, 80,000-seat stadium, which the team would give to the village. In return, Carr would charge the team $1 a year in rent. As a publicly owned stadium, it would be exempt from property taxes.

That would provide the “property tax certainty” that Bears officials say they want — at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the McCook treasury, plus the cost of buying the land from its current owners for around $160 million. (Estimates of the cost of a tax break on a similar Arlington Heights stadium came to $700 million, and there the team would still be paying current property tax levels, while in McCook it would pay nothing.) “It’s not a waste of money for me to do this,” said Carr, while also saying, “This is prime real estate. If we don’t get the Bears, I’ll get some development there.” Wouldn’t that seem to indicate it would be a waste of money, if the mayor thinks he could get development without putting up $800-million-plus in subsidies? Unless Carr just means “somebody is eventually sure to snap up my get-out-of-property-taxes-free card,” in which case he’s only leaving out whether a football stadium operating ten days a year would be the best bang for $800 million in public bucks.

Random suburban officials delivering secretive manila envelopes to NFL teams wouldn’t normally be much of a news story, but all the other potential Bears stadium plans remain up in the air: Illinois officials are still in “tell us what we have to put in a tax break bill for you to commit to our state” mode, while officials in Porter County, Indiana continue to balk at a 1% restaurant tax surcharge to help pay for a stadium in Hammond, which is not actually in Porter County.

“I think there’s actually a negligible percentile of Porter County residents that support creating a food-and-beverage tax in our county and putting that money in an envelope and sending it off to Hammond,” [Porter County Commissioner Jim] Biggs told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “We have our own issues here that need to be addressed.”

Outgoing Porter County Council president Andy Vasquez, who lost his primary for reelection this spring after supporting the Bears stadium tax, added, “Evidently people don’t want it because I’m no longer going to be here after December 31st. I’m not going to be here, so we’ll leave it to the next group.” It sounds increasingly like nothing is going to get decided until next spring, when Indiana’s bill to provide a somewhat hazy amount of money for a Bears stadium expires — if you were ever inclined to take sports team execs’ pronounced deadlines seriously, this might be a good reminder to quit.

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Friday roundup: NC may earmark $700m for stadium for imaginary MLB team, Steelers could seek upgrade on “expiring” 25-year-old home

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.

Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:

  • The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
  • Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
  • Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
  • Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
  • Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ 10-year-old stadium needs a new roof because it got damaged by hail three years ago, but insurance should cover it, or at least the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority does not believe “substantial use of public funds” will be required, which is slightly less reassuring than “insurance should cover it.” Anyway, it’ll probably never hail this bad in Minneapolis again, right?
  • The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
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Creating authority to own Browns stadium would push Haslam’s total taxpayer subsidy to $1.3B

access_time personNeil deMause

Cleveland Browns update: University of Colorado Denver economist Geoff Propheter got back to me yesterday with an estimate for how much Brook Park, Ohio will give up in property taxes by setting up a public authority to own a Browns stadium, and the number is: $539 million in present value, on the low end.

(While the property tax break is money that Brook Park wouldn’t get if the stadium development isn’t built — at least not unless the land is used for something else — it’s also money that would be needed to pay for things like police and fire services and roads and schools to support the development, so not collecting it comes at a real cost to Brook Park.)

This gives us the opportunity to do a fresh estimate of the total subsidy Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is seeking as payment for moving from one part of Ohio to another:

That’s $1.3 billion right there, not counting the $178 million in county tax money and $422 million in city tax money that Haslam was talking about last year but has been quiet about since. Even without that, he’s still looking at getting half of his $2.6 billion stadium cost paid for by taxpayers, and he would be able to cover a bunch of his share with such things as naming rights proceeds or $150K-a-seat personal seat licenses.

The stadium authority plan still needs final signoff from the Brook Park city council — further votes are scheduled for June 23 and July 15 — and it’s unclear what Haslam would do if it were voted down. For that matter, it’s unclear what Haslam would do if the state backed off of (or was forced by court rulings to back off of) using the unclaimed property funds, given that he’s already broken ground in Brook Park. There’s definitely room for elected officials in Ohio to try to renegotiate a better deal for the public here, but instead they seem dead set on finding ways to make it worse.

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Brook Park gives initial okay to stadium authority to provide more tax breaks for Browns owner

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland Browns are already in the process of moving to a new $2.4 billion stadium in suburban Brook Park with the aid of $600 million in state money and $245 million in city money — they’ve even held a groundbreaking — but that doesn’t mean team owner Jimmy Haslam is done asking for stuff. In the latest, he got the Brook Park council last night to give preliminary approval to creating a stadium authority that would own the stadium and lease it back to him.

Lease-back deals like this are typically associated with property tax breaks: Since the building is owned by a government entity, it’s not subject to property taxes. I can’t immediately tell if Ohio would apply possessory interest taxes to the value of the lease itself — I’m sure Geoff Propheter will chime in soon to school me on this — but even if it does, this is a potential tax break that could increase Brook Park’s costs in exchange for no clear concessions at all from Haslam.

Mike Florio of NBC Sports also cites a savings (“apparently”) of $100 million in construction sales taxes, which was actually already approved last month as part of a development agreement between Brook Park and the team. (How Brook Park can exempt the project from sales taxes when it doesn’t have a city sales tax is an interesting research question.) Approved, but not released, as WOIO notes, so we don’t actually know what’s in the development agreement or whether Haslam would agree to pay rent or share revenues as part of the stadium authority ownership scheme.

The Brook Park council still needs to hold two more votes (the first is today) before the stadium authority becomes official, so maybe we’ll get more information before this whole thing is signed off on. Either way, demanding additional tax subsidies before a stadium has even been built is a pretty extreme example of the Grift That Keeps on Giving.

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LOLWorld Cup report: Long lines, high prices, sea of red ink for host nations, windfall profits for FIFA

access_time personNeil deMause

The World Cup is now finally underway, and aside from the endless string of matches with no winner, how’s that going? A stadium workers’ strike in Los Angeles was averted, and the great water bottle kerfuffle died down, but have there are least been the promised travel nightmares and budgetary fiascos?

Early signs are mixed, but not great:

  • A KUOW analysis of World Cup spending concluded that Washington state is spending $120 million on hosting six matches, mostly for transit costs but also for such things as widening the pitch at the Seattle Seahawks‘ stadium. The Seattle tourism bureau only predicts $95.8 million in new tax receipts from hosting World Cup matches, meaning even the local agency inclined to take an optimistic view and ignore warnings that World Cup visitors will displace many regular tourists thinks that the public will end up taking a bath on hosting matches this summer.
  • Canadian economist Moshe Lander estimates that that country will end up spending more than $1 billion to host just 12 World Cup matches, including $145 million in federal money for security alone, and there’s no indication local governments will make more than a fraction of that back in new tax receipts, leaving the entire event a “toxic money sinkhole.”
  • FIFA itself is expected to bring in anywhere from $9 billion to $11.5 billion from the World Cup, though those are gross revenues, not net, and we’ll likely never know where all the money goes, because FIFA.
  • As for the experience of those attending the games, hundreds of fans at New Jersey’s opening match between Brazil and Morocco (ending in a 1-1 draw) were stranded for hours outside the stadium after authorities limited the number of rideshare drivers who could make pickups, presumably to leave traffic lanes open for shuttle buses. There were reportedly no lines for the shuttle buses, though, so it sounds like the stranded fans were just those averse to taking public transit, which seems to have worked fine right up until authorities parked those buses in midtown Manhattan and celebrating New York Knicks fans promptly set fire to them.
  • Fans attending the Uruguay-Saudi Arabia match in Miami (ending in a 1-1 draw) complained about parking passes costing upwards of $175 and then still leaving them with a mile and a half walk to the stadium. “I took an Uber just to save some money because that’s ridiculous,” said one Saudi Arabia fan.
  • Tens of thousands of Scotland fans made it to their opening match vs. Haiti (not a draw! Scotland won 1-0) in Foxborough okay, after renting their own school buses to get around exorbitant train fares, but then got stuck in hours-long lines to get into the stadium because of poor crowd management. “There were three gates for 65,000 people,” said one Scotland fan. “It was a bit of a joke really.”
  • Guadalajara avoided traffic nightmares for the South Korea-Czechia opener (a 2-1 South Korea win) by the simple expediency of ticket prices so high that there were thousands of seats left empty even in the tournament’s smallest host stadium. World Cup officials insisted that the missing fans were all standing and watching elsewhere, which, hmmm.

The World Cup story so far, then: Nobody has yet set any statues on fire, and the matches are coming off more or less as planned, although “as planned” included sky-high prices for fans and costs for taxpayers, and massive profits for FIFA. Maybe a series of games with no winners really is the best metaphor for the World Cup after all.

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Introducing Field of Schemes: the Expanded Universe

access_time personNeil deMause

Fairly regularly I get asked, “When are you going to write another book on sports stadiums?” I get the impetus behind the question: The first edition of Field of Schemes came out almost 30 years ago at this point, and while the book has been updated twice since then, a lot of stadium and arena shenanigans have gone down in the interim that are worth talking about in greater detail (or at least a more organized format) than the rambling ongoing conversation that is the 28 years of posts archived on this website.

There are two reasons why I haven’t pursued it, though. One is that, to be blunt, writing a book is a hell of a lot of work — I should know, I’ve done it twice — and there’s no way it would generate enough additional sales over what Field of Schemes still sells each year to make it a sustainable use of my time. (Not to mention that Joanna Cagan, who shouldered half the workload the first time around, is otherwise occupied now.) And second, a hypothetical Field of Schemes II wouldn’t look that different from the original book, thanks to the fact that the sports subsidy game is alarmingly unchanged over the last three to four decades: In the most recent revised edition of Field of Schemes, it was amusing to update the “Art of the Steal” chapter on the standard stadium playbook as “Art of the Steal Revisited” and conclude “Yup, owners are still deploying the same six gambits” while providing a few more recent examples, but how many more times does anyone really want to read the same conclusions written in slightly different ways?

That said, there are a few new developments that have cropped up over the years that are worth expounding on in a little more length than the daily news cycle really allows. The state-of-the-art clause dodge. The weird and wonderful world of sports venue vaportecture. The Casino Night Fallacy. I would genuinely enjoy writing more definitive essays on these topics — and even if that won’t amount to the word count (or the required work hours) of a book, it should make for a nice collection for subscribers to this site, especially now that I’ve run out of numbered cab-hailing lady art prints to send you all. Call it Field of Schemes: How It’s Going. (No, please let’s not actually call it that, though that is the working title of the Google doc that currently contains all my notes.)

Here’s how it’s going to work: Every month or so, I’ll complete a chapter on a topic that has come up since the last edition of Field of Schemes. It will immediately be made available to all monthly Patreon subscribers at the $5/month level and up. Once enough of these chapters have been completed — I have a list of seven to 10 topics I’m hoping to hit that are informative, funny, or both — I’ll package the whole thing into either a zine or a minibook (depending how many pages I have and what the most cost-effective binding option is) and send out both physical copies and an ebook version to both monthly and one-time donors, to sit alongside your copies of the real book on your real bookshelves.

The first installment, “The Grift That Keeps on Giving,” is available now as a free sample. If it looks like something you’d like to read more of, and you’re already a monthly FoS supporter, you don’t have to do anything: You’ll be receiving future chapters via email over the next year. (Supporters at the Cheapo level will want to upgrade for access.) If it’s something you’d like to read more of and you’re not currently a monthly subscriber, you can either sign up now, or wait until the whole project is finished and then make a one-time donation that’ll get you a copy. (And, yes, it will also get you fridge magnets, there will always be more fridge magnets.)

It’s a bit of a weird hybrid project, but then, these are weird times, for publishing as for everything else. If you have any questions, suggestions, or requests, please post them in comments below. This should be a fun excursion, and I’m looking forward to getting started.

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