World Cup economic impact still hard to find, but at least we’ll always have the “togetherness”

access_time personNeil deMause

The U.S. Men’s National Team is now extremely out of the World Cup, joining co-hosts Canada and Mexico on the sidelines, but North America still has two more weeks of the sweet, sweet international tourism that comes with hosting the tournament. Or, you know, not:

As Toronto’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 hosting duties come to an end, data shows that the city saw little economic gain during the first two weeks of the tournament…

Data from payment processing company Moneris between June 12 and 26 — the first two weeks of the World Cup in Toronto — showed that debit and credit card spending at restaurants and bars in the city rose by just three per cent compared with the same time last year.

A 3% increase isn’t actually terrible in a city the size of Toronto, which can swallow 40,000 or so soccer fans without much noticing. The bigger problem, notes the CBC, is that Toronto taxpayers spent about $380 million on hosting six World Cup matches, which is tough to earn back one debit card charge at a time.

In Texas, meanwhile, the news site Border Report interviewed our old frenemy, sports economist Andy Zimbalist, and learned that “events like the World Cup generate little or no net economic benefit because FIFA keeps most event revenue while host cities absorb major expenses.” Then the site ran this under the whiplash-inducing headline “Impact of World Cup in Texas goes beyond the dollars and cents,” because Zimbalist said the games were maybe “worth it because there was so much togetherness.”

But anyway, who are you going to believe, some pointy-headed bean counter or a respected international sports business entity? Philadelphia’s 6abc digital staff doesn’t need any “experts” or “numbers” when it can just reprint the official press release:

With the final match at the Philadelphia Stadium in the books, FIFA is releasing new details about the World Cup impact locally.

More than 409,000 people attended the six matches — five of which were sold-out. …

Fans consumed 290,000 beers and more than 55,000 hot dogs.

After each match day, any food from the stadium that was not consumed was given to local food banks, totaling 15,000 pounds of food.

Getting 15,000 pounds of leftover food for a mere $380 million — who can put a price on that? Other than $380 million, sure, but that’s the bean-counter way of looking at things, whereas if you count up all the actual unused beans … I’ll see myself out.

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Indiana gov to Porter County: If you want to miss out on fun of giving $250m in tax money to Bears, your loss

access_time personNeil deMause

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun says he isn’t sweating Porter County leaders’ opposition to raising food and beverage taxes for a new Chicago Bears stadium the next county over, because really it’s Porter County that would be missing out on all the fun of taking part in shoveling money at the Bears owners:

Under the law, Porter County would have to approve a one-percent food and beverage tax to have representation on the stadium authority. The governor said if it doesn’t get approved, the biggest impact would be on Porter County itself.

“If they choose not to put any skin in the game, they’re not going to have any say-so for what happens from all the economic benefits we’re going to get from it,” Braun said.

Maybe you’re the one up a stump, Porter County! Does a county get a chance to fund a stadium deal every day?

The whole Porter County kerfuffle points up one of the weirder things about the Indiana Bears stadium deal: Though it was passed by the legislature back in February, it didn’t precisely spell out who would be spending what on a stadium, or even where exactly it would be. A newly created sports authority will be able to offer the Bears owners money from a whole bunch of taxes, only some of which actually exist yet:

  • All new property tax, income tax, and sales tax for the next 35 years from an omni-TIF district encompassing the stadium and an undetermined number of square miles around it. This could certainly amount to billions of dollars, much of it potentially cannibalized from spending that has nothing to do with the Bears, but just as we saw in Kansas, it’s impossible to say exactly how much without knowing the size of the district.
  • A doubling of the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10%, which would provide at least $90 million.
  • Those 1% food and beverage tax surcharges in Lake and Porter counties, which would be worth about $250 million each, if approved.
  • A 12% ticket tax, which would be worth about another $200 million, though as established ticket taxes are unlike other taxes in that they tend to come out of team owners’ revenues.

The best guess at the total public cost is “easily past $4 billion,” but that could go up or down depending on what gets approved in terms of that tax diversion district plus the new taxes. And a quarter-billion dollars from Porter County seems like a significant amount of money, though I suppose Braun is right in that if county leaders balk at that, the state could always compensate by running the omni-TIF district all the way to the Ohio border.

All this makes Indiana’s bid for the Bears a bit of a moving target in the state’s bidding war with Illinois, which is no doubt very much to Bears owner George McCaskey’s liking. (“You’re willing to give us $1.5 billion in property tax breaks and infrastructure money, you say? Well, what if I told you Indiana was offering a TIF district the size of the entire Local Group?”) Right now you have a three-way — or more, given the various Illinois factions — game of chicken going on, and nobody’s showing each other their cards, and … okay, maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be writing extended metaphors. If anyone says they know how much money Bears execs could get out of either Indiana or Illinois, they’re lying, that’s the upshot here.

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Friday roundup: Portlanders balk at giving Blazers owner $600m, KC gives initial okay of $235m to expand 2-year-old soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Too damn hot! Gonna see how few words I can use today, to save electricity, y’know. That headline already caused voltage reductions across Brooklyn!

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Chiefs owners claim report they won’t show you says stadium will create $8.4B in something or other

access_time personNeil deMause

The Kansas City Chiefs (actually the owners of the Kansas City Chiefs, but journalists like to refer to team management metonymically this way, even though, like calling the current leadership of the United States “the United States,” it causes all sorts of problems, sorry, where were we?) released an economic impact report claiming that their new stadium will create a huge benefit for the Kansas state economy, and … ugh, do we really have to do this? You know where this is going, I know where this is going, there’s a whole category full of analysis of these clown documents, can’t we just take it as given that they’re not worth the pixels they’re printed in and move on with our day? Though then the Chiefs execs get away with putting out their take in the media and on the socials with no dissent other than the economists who show up in the later paragraphs of the news coverage at best, so fine.

Who did team officials hire this time? Is it the LOLconsultants at Convention, Sports & Leisure? Some bespoke firm with a name like Fiscalmetrics or Lucresolv and a CEO with a degree in business marketing?

According to a report from Econsult Solutions, Inc.

Checks out! At least they have an actual economist on board, that’s something. So how many billions of dollars did they project the Chiefs stadium will bring in to make up for its $4.1 billion in public costs?

The one-time capital investment of $4.5 billion could generate $1.9 billion in “indirect impact,” or business-to-business spending, and $1.8 billion in “induced impact,” or spending of wages. The report describes this as a “total impact” of $8.4 billion during the construction period.

$8.4 billion is bigger than $4.1 billion! It’s also inevitably going to be if all you’re doing is adding up how much will be spent on the Chiefs stadium ($4.5 billion) and then applying a multiplier for the fact that any local businesses that the Chiefs (and taxpayers) pay for construction will then re-spend a portion of those paychecks on other things. If these were the only criteria, anything at all would be a good spending decision — Kansas could spend $4.1 billion on fake blood testing machines and it would be considered a win, because just think of all the spending on PR firms and lawyers that this would generate!

Anyway, let’s take a look at the report, maybe it has some amusing charts or something.

KMBC 9 asked, but neither the Chiefs nor their consulting firm provided a copy of the full study.

Look. I get that the 24/7 news cycle is tough on journalists, and especially TV stations, which are expected to tell you the latest news the second it happens, even if all the details aren’t known yet. And KMBC did talk to an independent economist who warned that the report “just gives us gross output numbers without proving that taxpayers are getting a return on that investment,” unlike some other local news outlets. But how many times do you need to be told: There’s no law saying that just because somebody with a fancy suit issues a press release means you have to write an article about it. Especially when you ask if you can see the report the press release is about and are told, “No.”

Instead, we get a news report that “Supporters, Critics Split Over Impact,” because when you have a secret document showing that $4 billion is $4 billion on the one hand, and an economist saying that’s silly on the other, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. So we are cursed to do this every time one of these reports is issued — or vaguely referenced in a press statement — until either we get decent journalism in this country or the sun burns out, I think you know which one I’m betting happens first.

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Royals prepare rezoning plan for new stadium district, even as $1.35B in public money remains up in air

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Royals execs have submitted a rezoning plan for their proposed new stadium development at Crown Center, which Fox4KC, citing the team’s application, describes as “a vibrant mixed-use destination that supports a wide variety of year-round activities – including professional sporting events, concerts, festivals, community gatherings, private events, sponsorship activations and other programmed experiences.” Or as that looks in an overhead schematic:

That is definitely a baseball stadium — with center field pointing just west of north, making for some potentially troublesome summer sunsets in the eyes of left-handed batters — and a lot of Areas where new or renovated buildings can go. The Kansas City Star notes that “the preliminary plan does not specify exactly what new buildings could contain, noting that would be determined in final plans,” but you can be sure that whatever they are, they’ll contain gobs of exciting sponsorship activations and programmed experiences!

A public hearing of the City Plan Commission on the rezoning is set for August 19. K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas is trying to get all the elements of the Royals deal — including $1.35 billion or so in city funds and state money that he hasn’t formally requested yet — approved before November so he can forestall a possible ballot measure allowing voters to block the stadium plan.

Presumably the Royals’ professional vaportecture artists are still at work on prettier pictures; if you want examples of those, you’ll have to turn to Washington, D.C., where only nine months after the city council passed its $7 billion-ish Commanders stadium subsidy, there are finally some renderings of what the surrounding development could look like: Fall foliage! Canoes! Not a translucent parking garage in sight! Overhead schematics are probably more realistic, but realistic doesn’t get the re-socials, we’re talking about building mindshare here.

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NC house leaders balk at spending $1.7B in tax money on stadium for nonexistent MLB team

access_time personNeil deMause

WRAL in North Carolina this weekend uncovered the financing plans for a new publicly funded stadium for an as-yet-theoretical MLB expansion team in Raleigh, and while it didn’t publish the legislative language itself, the TV station’s coverage did make clear that the project could cost taxpayers a whole lot more than just the $700 million in state development funds that was previously floated:

  • The stadium is projected to cost $1.7 billion, despite not having a site or a design, a number that the funding document reports “came from independent financial models,” per WRAL.
  • The state would provide $500 million in cash — presumably from its Economic Development Project Reserve slush fund, though the news report doesn’t specify.
  • Additional funding would come via “local revenue sources” (city and county taxes? WRAL doesn’t say), “sports gambling taxes” (a la Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s so-far dormant plan for funding a Cleveland Browns stadium), siphoning off of  income taxes from players and performers at the stadium, and “the creation of a sports and entertainment taxing district” — the last of which sounds like a TIF, though again, no specifics are provided.

The combined public money would, apparently, be enough to pay the entire cost of a $1.7 billion stadium, which would make it the most expensive stadium subsidy in baseball history. (The bill would leave the cash on the table for four years, after which it would be withdrawn if no team materialized.) It’s possible North Carolina could charge a prospective expansion team owner rent to recoup part of the cost — but given lame duck state senate leader Phil Berger, who is the lead sponsor of the stadium bill, said last week that “my understanding is most of the professional leagues discourage interest in localities that basically say, ‘We’ll take it, but only if the stadium is paid for by the owners,'” probably best not to hold your breath on that one.

Of course, maybe best not to hold your breath on any of this, since, as noted here on Friday, state house leaders hate Berger’s plan and are keeping it out of the state budget, for now at least. Still, even an abortive attempt to offer $1.7 billion for a free stadium in order to land an MLB expansion team would be quite the opening bid, and would likely make Berger’s prediction that MLB will demand massive stadium subsidies in order to consider any expansion candidates into a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are lots of signs that some MLB owners aren’t actually that interested in expansion — it would come with juicy one-time checks, but in exchange for diluting existing owners’ shares of TV and streaming revenue — but if free stadiums are being dangled, that could get enough owners salivating to tip the balance.

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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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