Category: Olympic Stadium

Friday roundup: More Bears $2.6B stadium subsidy fallout, plus Indianapolis switches soccer horses

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news: I hope that those of you who enjoy using dark mode are enjoying the new dark mode plugin I installed this week (DarkMySite, if anyone cares), which seems, unlike the old one, to actually mostly work. If you haven’t tried it out and want to, click the little moon symbol at bottom right and take a load off your eyes!

Also, a special shoutout to a couple of FoS readers (unnamed, but you know who you are) who either sent in a large lump sum of cash or upped their monthly Patreon pledge for no reason at all in the last week. As I forget if I explicitly mentioned, I quit my previous day job last month, which should give me more time to devote to this site; and while I do have a new regular gig that seems promising, every step towards making this site self-sustaining is hugely helpful, so a huge thanks to all you supporters, at any level. (And for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge: There are still about a dozen more Vaportecture art prints, get ’em before they’re gone!)

Okay, enough of that, time’s a-wasting and there’s a whole week of news remainders to dig through:

  • The fallout continues from the Chicago Bears owners’ $2.6 billion stadium subsidy demand (see the updates for the math behind the updated figure), with so much more today that we’re going to have to break out the second level of bullet points:
    • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says it’s no contradiction that he said during his mayoral race that the city shouldn’t spend billions of dollars on a Bears stadium when there were “dozens of other urgent needs” and now thinks this is a great idea, on the grounds that he, a “middle child” from a “working-class family,” got to talk to billionaires and make sure they put some “skin in the game” and also the stadium will be “transformational” and “the Bears are staying in Chicago” and “the type of economic development this project brings” and “14 more acres of space for our children in the city of Chicago to benefit from.” Is all that the best use of $2.6 billion? I’m sorry, we’re out of time for questions, thank you for coming.
    • The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board did get a chance to ask Bears CEO Kevin Warren what would happen if the team got its $1.225 billion in taxpayer money for the stadium and nobody came up with another $1.175 billion to build new underground garages and park space, and Warren replied: “I’m not going to think negatively about that now. … If that’s the conclusion that … you want to reach now, then you can say that. I’m being positive about it … and being very transparent as far as what we need from the different three phases with this stadium project.” So, optional when projecting the city’s costs, not optional in the sense that you don’t want to go there in terms of what happens if the city doesn’t come up with another billion-plus dollars, got it.
    • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated yesterday that he’s agin’ the whole kit and kaboodle, saying: “I’m skeptical of the proposal that was put forward and I’m even more skeptical of the ability to get enough votes for it in the General Assembly.”
    • Chicago Sun-Times columnist David Roeder suggests that if the Bears (and White Sox) want public money, they should give the public a cut of ownership of the team, though some stick-in-the-mud (okay, it’s me) points out that sports leagues love nothing more than to head off the possibility of public ownership, even blocking one-time San Diego Padres owner Joan Kroc from gifting her team to the city of San Diego on the grounds that that just isn’t done.
  • Way back in 2019, the Indiana state legislature approved giving $112 million toward a new soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team, provided owner Ersal Ozdemir got his team promoted from the USL to MLS. At the time, this seemed like an easy enough lift, since all the other kids were doing it, but it hasn’t happened yet, and now apparently Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett has gotten tired of waiting, announcing that he’s putting in a bid with another ownership group to get an MLS expansion team, using the same tax kickbacks that Ozdemir was looking to get. Ozdemir, who already broke ground on his stadium site last year, though it’s unclear if he’s actually started construction, is naturally enough extremely unhappy with this latest news, accusing Hogsett of “preparing to walk away” from “years of good-faith negotiations” and instead give the public money to some other soccer guy instead of him. Will there be lawsuits? Stay tuned!
  • A “hotel entrepreneur and former longtime Kansas City resident” got space on the Kansas City Star op-ed page to argue that Kansas Citians who voted against a tax subsidy for Royals and Chiefs stadiums missed an opportunity to become like Denver, where “the Coors Field development inspired a stunning downtown renaissance” where “dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs opened to serve crowds before and after the 81 hometown games each year.” I once again wish that I still had a copy of the chart someone once showed me that indicated that most of the development starts in Denver’s LoDo district actually preceded the construction of the Rockies stadium; if I can dig it up, I’ll post it here as an update.
  • The Arizona state senate is considering a bill to allow the state to approve “theme park districts” like the one Alex Meruelo wants for a Coyotes 2.0 arena, without city governments weighing in. (It did so by virtue of hollowing out an already-state-house-approved bill to give first responders access to treatment for PTSD and inserting theme park district language instead, which Arizona calls a “strike everything amendment” but “zombie bill” is a much better name.) This could make it easier for Meruelo to have the state levy a sales tax surcharge in his arena district that would be kicked back to him for construction costs; we’ll have to wait and see what the state senate thinks of it.
  • Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula may sell up to a quarter of their team to help raise money for their share of a new stadium, after construction costs have soared by a reported $600 million. In case you needed more evidence that many if not most stadiums are money losers that are only built so that team owners can cash subsidy checks, here’s your Exhibit A.
  • Arlington, Texas is spending $4.2 million to upgrade the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which the team moved out of after 2019 into a new publicly funded one, because, according to Arlington Mayor Jim Ross, “it’s a regional injection of all economic development.” The stadium is currently home to the XFL Arlington Renegades and occasional concerts.
  • What more could happen to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium after costing $1 billion to build and hundreds of millions more to fix the roof on and now $870 million to fix the roof on again? How about catching fire and needing $40 million to fix the damage? You gotta wonder if the Big Owe is just trying to put itself out of its misery at this point, but Montreal officials aren’t getting the message.
Share this post:

Quebec to spend $870m on roof for Montreal stadium nobody uses or likes, because Taylor Swift

access_time personNeil deMause

So:

Quebec on Monday morning confirmed that repairs to the Olympic Stadium’s roof and ring will come with a price tag of $870 million.

Without looking, let’s try to guess possible reasons for the province to be doing this for a stadium that is currently home to no sports teams at all: Montreal wanted to upgrade the stadium to play host to the 2026 World Cup? Someone struck oil on government land in St.-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! and the premier had to figure out how to spend all the windfall cash? A clause in the will of Canada’s richest person (probably a Labatt, or maybe some kind of maple syrup baron) requires Montreal to have an operable dome for it to inherit his money?

The answer is none of the above:

Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx said at a news conference that the Olympic Stadium would be ideal for large international concerts, pointing to mega-stars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen who didn’t tour in Quebec last year.

The government predicts that, with its new roof, the stadium will attract larger events, possibly generating as much as $1.5 billion from tourism and other sources over 10 years….

Demolishing the Olympic Stadium was simply not an option as it would have to be dismantled “brick by brick” as to not damage the surrounding park and Metro line, which would cost about $2 billion, said Proulx.

So there you have it: If Quebec spends a mere $870 million on stadium upgrades, Taylor Swift will come play there, and > ? > Profit.

Like the original stadium itself, the roof replacement has seen its cost estimate skyrocket in just a few years, from $250 million in 2017 to nearly three and a half times that today, assuming $870 million actually turns out to get the job done, which is never a safe bet especially with Olympic Stadium. As for that $2 billion demolition price tag, that’s soared as well — from a mere $500-700 million in 2017 — and seems a little crazy given the typical costs of stadium demolition, but the number must be right, as it comes from [citation needed]. (It’s also worth noting that Olympic Stadium is made of poured concrete, so “brick by brick” is a metaphor, or possibly a bad translation from French, qui peut dire?)

CBC News did find one person in Montreal to be aghast at the prospect of spending almost a billion dollars to repair a stadium that nobody likes and is almost never used, and it was economist Moshe Lander:

Moshe Lander, a professor in the economics department at Concordia University, says it would still be a better idea to “put it out of its misery and knock it down.”

Though it would cost more to do so, “it’s only once,” he said.

Lander points out that construction projects never meet their deadlines. With inflation, labour costs, delays and unexpected factors, it could take twice as long and cost twice as much to replace the roof, he said.

The Olympic Stadium also doesn’t have a tenant since major league baseball is not coming back, the Alouettes are not playing there and neither is Montreal’s MLS soccer team. As for concerts, Lander says the acoustic of the “concrete bowl” aren’t sound.

“Ask anyone who went to see Metallica there,” he said.

Oof, is the sound really that bad? Hmm, yeah, seems to be, and r/Metallica agrees. I’m sure it’ll be better for Taylor Swift, though, or Bruce Springsteen if he’s still touring at age 79 when the new roof is done. If not, maybe Quebec can just buy a new billion-dollar sound system.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: A modest economic impact reporting proposal, plus two, three, many vaporstadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

I was out sick yesterday, but fortunately nothing incredibly stupid happened with the $1.5 billion Virginia arena subsidy plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards for the first time all week, so my services weren’t needed. (Other than the whole thing remaining incredibly stupid, but that’ll still be true today, and next week, and next month, and…)

Other things, though, kept happening, and my Decemberween gift to you is to present them all, neatly wrapped and suitable for pointing and laughing:

  • Veteran sports business reporter Alan Snel’s LVSportsBiz.com has announced a new policy of not reporting economic impact claims without also including how the numbers were calculated, and while that may sound like a simple matter of reporting out all the details, it becomes much funnier when you realize that this means Snel just isn’t going to report any numbers that don’t show their math. On a Las Vegas Raiders announcement of the economic impact of their team, Snel reported that he’s waiting on Raiders officials to grant “an interview about how the economic impact number was determined before we publish that number”; about a similar UFC impact report, he wrote that “LVSportsBiz.com will publish these numbers when UFC and Applied Analysis explain how they determined these economic figures.” I truly hope this will lead to stories like “A’s Claim New Stadium Will Create Some Damn Number of Jobs, So Far As We Know They Pulled It Out of Their Ass,” which honestly would be some of the most accurate reporting out there.
  • And speaking of goofy economic impact numbers: A new roof for Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which already cost $1 billion in 1976 loonies, may or may not cost $750 million, but if it does it’s okay, says Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx, because then Taylor Swift might say “Joli toit!” and play five nights there and bring $350 million in spending that totally would be from out-of-towners who would all fly to Montreal because Taylor Swift never plays near them. [citation needed]
  • Not saying that a stadium district project called “Project Smoke” sounds like a grift, but when the guy presenting it is a Nashville pediatrician who pled guilty to billing fraud and people at the meeting were reportedly saying, “Have you Googled this guy? Can you believe this?”, it’s definitely not a good thing. Though it could make a good Avengers 5 plot to replace the one about Kang now that Jonathan Majors has been fired.
  • “Baltimore is not on the verge of landing a pro outdoor soccer team,” begins a Baltimore Sun article about the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioning a site study for a stadium for this team that, it bears repeating, does not exist and likely will not exist soon. The study cost $50,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but is maybe around $50,000 more than needs to be spent identifying places to build a stadium that likely won’t ever be built.
  • The Jackson County legislature on Monday put off a decision on whether to put a sales-tax increase for Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects on the April 2024 ballot, then the measure’s sponsor, county chair DaRon McGee, introduced a “corrected measure” that would specify that the sales tax wouldn’t take effect until the teams negotiated 40-year leases, agreed to community benefits agreements, and chose an acceptable site. We’ll see if that makes county executive Frank White hate it any less, but it is at least better than voting to collect a giant pile of money for the local sports teams and then negotiate the details later, we’ve seen how that works out.
  • Philadelphia’s law department has now denied more than 100 public records requests for information about the proposed 76ers arena, which is a lot! Activist and journalist Faye Anderson said one of her few requests was approved shows that city officials and other involved parties have been meeting weekly for more than a year on the project, but she can’t get any information about what they’ve been talking about. “What were they saying behind closed doors?” she asked. “What were they saying when they thought those conversations, those records, would never see the light of day?” An appeal has been filed with the state Office of Open Records, so we may find out next month, or later, or never.
Share this post:

Friday roundup: NFL to shop for overseas host cities, plus the attack of the no-good, terrible stadium names

access_time personNeil deMause

How’s everyone doing out there? Did you, like me, spend much of yesterday watching baseball games and wondering why MLB bothers to have mask rules if half the fans are keeping their masks off at any given time, and then wondering if this is really the right thing to be concerned about rather than all the people who are leaving the game and going to indoor sports bars, and then wondering if disregard for mask rules is a reasonable proxy for being careless about going to bars as well? I hope not, because that is very much my job, and the mission of this site remains Thinking Too Hard About Things So You Don’t Have To.

Which is one nice thing about Fridays: No thinking too hard, because all the leftover news gets boiled down to a single bite-size bullet point, ideally with a quip at the end. It’s like pre-wrapped meals of stadium facts, and here’s this week’s assortment:

  • The NFL is adding a 17th game to its season, mostly so it can charge TV networks more for the extra game but also to create more games that can be played outside the U.S. to help increase the league’s international visibility, and the operators of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and Vancouver’s B.C. Place have both said they’ll throw their hats in the rings. You can read my thoughts about Olympic Stadium here; suffice to say that it’s simultaneously perfectly serviceable and not at all what sports owners consider state-of-the-art at selling people things other than a seat to sit in. It’ll be very interesting to see whether the NFL makes its international game hosting decisions based on which markets it most wants to break into or which cities offer the snazziest stadiums. (Or which cities offer straight-up cash, that’s always a popular NFL move.)
  • Indy Eleven USL team owner Ersal Ozdemir got his approval from the Indiana state legislature this week to take more time on how to spend his $112 million in state stadium cash, and team officials replied that they will now take their own sweet to to “finalize the site” “in the coming months.” Given that Ozdemir at first asked for the cash so he could get promoted to MLS and then later decided, know what, maybe he’ll stay put in the USL and avoid all those expansion fees but still get the snazzy new digs, there is a non-zero chance that he decides to ask to use the money to build condos or a space laser or something.
  • The Henderson Silver Knights have sold naming rights to their publicly funded and owned under-construction arena (I know it doesn’t make any sense, this is just how naming rights are allowed to work in most of the U.S. with few exceptions) to the payday loan company Dollar Loan Center, which means the arena will now be called … also the Dollar Loan Center? Shouldn’t it at least be the Dollar Loan Center Arena? This seems like very confusing branding, among other things, though I guess it’ll at least be amusing when people use Google Maps to try to find places to get high-interest advances on their paychecks and end up at the Silver Knights ticket window.
  • Also in the terrible names department, we have the Miami Marlins cutting a deal with a mortgage loan company that starts with a lower-case letter, which is going to wreak havoc among sports department copy editors across the land. (Just kidding: All the sports departments have already fired all their copy editors, pUNCtuATE and spel tHiNgZ however U want!!1!)
  • Here’s some video of the under-construction Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, which when it was announced last December would be ready for 2021 I predicted would be “off-the-rack bleachers that can be installed quickly,” and which indeed looks exactly like that. No robot dog showrooms or giant soccer balls are visible, sadly, but the USL season doesn’t start for another three weeks, so there’s still time to find some off-the-rack robot dogs.
  • And finally, across the pond, Everton F.C. finally had its stadium plan approved by the Liverpool City Council, meaning the £500 million project can move ahead. The city is loaning a little over half that money to Everton’s billionaire owner Farhad Moshiri, but Moshiri is then supposed to repay it in actual cash with interest, so the only real concerns are why Liverpool needs to act as banker for a rich guy, and whether it’s a good idea to build an oceanfront stadium when the oceans are already starting to rise. Those other countries have such quaint problems compared to America’s!
Share this post:

Montreal’s new tourism minister wants to spend $250m on a new Olympic Stadium roof, just like old tourism minister

access_time personNeil deMause

What do you get for a stadium that’s already had one retractable roof replaced by a non-retractable roof when the original retractable roof failed to retract? How about a new (possibly retractable) roof!

“It’s time we gave prestige and standing back to the Olympic Park and the Olympic Stadium,” [Québec Tourism Minister Caroline] Proulx told reporters at a news conference. “For too long it has been not loved or under-loved by Quebecers.”…

“We will be working on replacing the roof, it is mandatory to change the roof,” Proulx said. “We will change the roof. The business plan will be tabled in the next few months.”

This is not the first we’ve heard of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium getting a new roof — a year and a half ago, the previous tourism minister floated spending about $250 million on one, which at the time I called “just madness.” There are certainly times when stadiums need repairs — for Olympic Stadium, this has historically been “pretty much always” — but spending $250 million on a new roof, retractable or otherwise, is a hella expensive way to provide “standing and prestige,” especially when past roofs have only resulted in scandal and ridicule.

Even if you don’t want to tear down the stadium — which is currently getting $17 million a year in provincial subsidies, according to the Montreal Gazette, though it didn’t specify if these are just operating subsidies or include paying off the cost of past roofs and such — maybe it’s time to consider whether it wouldn’t be a better investment just to take the roof off entirely and leave the stadium open-air, as it was for the first decade of its existence. Sure, then it couldn’t be used for all of the 200 events a year it’s supposedly currently used for — actual number a whole lot less than that, unless guided tours of the stadium count as “events” — but are a handful of extra wintertime concerts or whatever, or even a shot at hosting some 2026 World Cup games (which, you know, take place in the summer when it’s quite pleasant outside in Montreal) really going to be worth $250 million in expense? I guess that’s not the sort of thing you ask when you’re the tourism minister and your job is promoting tourism at all cost and not figuring out how to pay for it, but one hopes that the rest of Québec’s legislators will give this proposal at least a bit more sideeye.

Share this post:

I went to see a sporting event at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, and it wasn’t bad at all

access_time personNeil deMause

So as part of my vacation last week, I got to attend the Women’s World Cup semifinal in Montreal between the U.S. and Germany, which was kind of a good game. Since the Women’s World Cup isn’t nearly as big of a deal as the Men’s World Cup (because, duh, girls), the tournament isn’t occasioned by the construction of massive new stadiums that nobody will ever use again, but rather is played in whatever stadiums the host nation already has available.

For the U.S.-Germany semifinal, this meant Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, the erstwhile Big Owe that helped drive the Expos out of town. I’d been there once before in 2001 for an Expos game, and found it to be a weird place to watch baseball, though mostly because baseball in a cavernous indoor space with only a couple thousand fans is always going to be weird. Since the Expos left, it hasn’t been used for much — Alouettes playoff games, Impact spring games when the weather is too awful to go outside, occasional concerts.

Packed with 50,000 screaming (mostly) USA fans, though, it proved to be a great place to watch soccer. (Albeit soccer on fake turf, but that’s an issue with all the venues for this World Cup.) Olympic Stadium is a “concrete donut” era big oval, which is okay for soccer, and the sightlines seemed fine, though given that we were right behind one goal our sightlines would have been fine regardless:

bigopano

freekickWhat was less fine was the scene outside the stadium when we (and a couple hundred other USA fans) showed up at 2 in the afternoon, two hours before gates opened, hoping to find some souvenirs or food to buy or other cup-related activities to take part in:

outsideoNow, I honestly don’t know whether the near-complete lack of activities (a feeble fanfest finally opened a couple of hours before the game) was because FIFA doesn’t care about women soccer players unless they’re wearing hotpants, because vendors were all busy with the Jazz Fest across town, or because of some traditional Quebecois aversion to providing timely service. But the point is that there was nothing wrong with Olympic Stadium that some better concessions options (and turning over more of the washrooms to women — predictably at a women’s sporting event with half men’s rooms, the women’s room lines were appallingly long) wouldn’t have fixed. Some renovations and a more attentive concessionaire (there were no USA player t-shirts on sale anywhere, which at most stadiums would be enough to get your marketing director fired, then rehired just so that you could fire him again), and Olympic Stadium would still be far from modern, but would be a perfectly okay place to watch a sporting event.

And that’s at a stadium that is perpetually ranked among the worst ever. Consider, then, to what degree bad management and disinterest in upgrading a facility that you want out of anyway contributes to the flaws that are being perpetually trotted out in support of arguments that pretty much any stadium over 15 years old is ready for the junkpile. The fact of the matter is that if the game is fun, it’s going to be fun pretty much anyplace; and if it’s not fun, a ride on a baseball-shaped Ferris wheel can only do so much to save it.

Anyway, soapbox off. Suffice to say that I went to a soccer match at what is rightfully considered one of the worst stadiums ever built, and had a great time. It seems like there should be some kind of lesson in that.

Share this post: