…strikes again, after claiming stadiums in Atlanta and Arlington, this time in Cleveland, maybe:
Digging deeper, the replacement for old Municipal Stadium was simply plopped onto the original footprint of MS, with little regard for issues like sewage, meaning that apparently a bunch goes right into the lake after games. Either way the city is likely looking at close to 1 billion.
The proposed design is ugly as sin, the sports equivalent of the Tesla Cybertruck. It would be just a few miles from my current digs tho.
I’ve been wondering what the people of Brook Park think of it. Most of the people in the Cleveland subreddit think it’s dumb to move it (everyone agrees the cost of doing anything at all is ridiculous), but are the people of Brook Park happy with the prospect or not?
If cities absolutely must give billions of dollars of welfare to billionaire owners and millionaire players, they need to start putting clauses into their contract that the billionaires won’t demand another handout for at least fifty years.
Won’t happen. The owners (in most instances) have all the leverage. Losing a professional franchise is generally a political killer, and both sides of the negotiation know it.
The city has more leverage than the team owner; they just don’t realize it. A city can survive without a sports team, but a sports team can’t survive without a home city.
Can the political leadership survive the outcry of “losing the sports team to another city?” Because the calculus isn’t about the abstract common good, it’s about political advantage to the incumbent.
OTOH, I haven’t looked at the fate of municipal politicians after sports teams called a city’s bluff and absconded.
That leverage can only be used if the party in power is okay with losing several election cycles. If so, then yeah, they can tell the owner to pound sand and the city would be just fine.
Versus the outcry of “why is our city spending so much to help a billionaire team owner, when it could be better spent on infrastructure repairs, education, and public safety?” Also, “why did they raise my taxes, to help a billionaire team owner?”
Sports stadiums have become insanely expensive, and fewer cities are willing to mortgage their budgets to pay for them (in addition to St. Louis, see Oakland, San Diego, etc.)
Fair point, and I should have repeated my earlier qualifier that this is typical but not universal. A beloved franchise is one where the owner has the leverage. My Philadelphia Eagles, as an example, would create a horrible and long-term uproar were they to leave the city. The mayor who permitted that would be vilified, fairly or not.
Oh, I remember it well. There would have been riots.
I remember one of the sports writers saying something to the effect of, “If you can’t run a profitable football franchise in Philadelphia, you couldn’t run a profitable Budweiser franchise in hell.” Someone else angrily wrote that we were going to lose our Eagles because Tose kept taking hits on 17.
It would be fascinating (if not completely unrealistic) to see what would happen if Congress passed a law that says that the owner of the team must report the public financing and pay taxes on the initial amount and the interest paid on the bonds as income (and not capital gains) - with a 5 to 7 year window to amortize the principal. I suspect that would end this dance real quick.
They more or less already effectively do that by including lease agreements that usually are for about 30 years. If the team wants to break the lease, there is usually a penalty clause whereby the team has to reimburse the city for their share of the cost of the stadium. That’s all generally speaking, of course, every lease agreement is going to be different regarding how much a team would have to reimburse, term of occupancy, sliding scales, etc.
With as many NFL and MLB teams as there are, just about all the major cities already have franchises. So it would seem to me that for all but a few teams, any move would be to a noticeably smaller city. And I would think that that would give the existing city the edge by calling the owner’s bluff: sure, move to Knoxville or Omaha or Birmingham, send us a postcard.
The largest US city without a major league sports team (NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, WNBA) is El Paso, TX at ~675K population. But, I am not sure population size is the only factor in determining where a sports franchise thinks they can locate to make money - tax breaks and give-aways by mid/large-size cities probably figures into the calculus as well and helps make them competitive with the larger cities.
It’s probably more important to look at the population of the metropolitan area, since that’s where the fans will be drawn from. Some may even drive in an hour or two to attend games.