Team owners: “We’re just humble billionaires and we care so much about your state. The team is part of the community… Now subsidize our massively profitable business or we’ll move the team.”
I’ll never understand why fans are die hard loyal to franchises that screw them at every possible opportunity. Insane ticket prices, seat license fees (which are somehow different than tickets?), insane concession prices, ads on everything- it hurts my brain.
I’ll never understand why fans are die hard loyal to franchises that screw them at every possible opportunity.
Because for many people it is a core part of their identity, without which they wouldn’t have much outside of work and sleep
Seems crazy. I think professional sports would be so much cooler if the community had stake in the team and got something out of winning/profits.
It’s just so weird to attach your identity to a team that you are in no way a part of, other than the location.
The Euro Leagues system
Your local team gets good enough that you have a team then there are stakes
NA leagues don’t do this because they are entertainment not competitive products
I’m not a huge football/soccer fan, but I love the concept of promotion/relegation. Around here if you have a losing team you get rewarded with a high draft pick. It’s a strategy to be terrible.
I also would love having lower level teams to watch, but that’s pretty rare. If you have a pro team in your city, you probably don’t have a semi pro team with the exception of baseball.
Maybe that’s why so many people enjoy watching college sports. Although I have my own issues with that scene, because of course I do.
What’s the state of community sport in the US ?
In the UK we have the same mindless billions in Soccer, but there is still (just about) a good level of community sport, like semi pro and below, where you can watch for almost nothing then go the bar after the match and drink with the players.
You don’t get the same athleticism and artistry (from overtrained genetic freaks) But you still get brilliant entertainment, drama, fun moments with your tribe. Etc.
Community sports is where it’s at.
everything would be so much cooler with that.
I mean I think most people are aware of how abusive the relationship is at some level (conscious or not) but ultimately the reason billionaires buy teams like this is if you truly love sports what are you by going to do?
I think the only correct perspective to view this from is that it is a tragedy that something so incredibly important to people that it might as well be a religion, is utterly controlled by the billionaire class. I couldn’t care less for professional sports in most ways and find it annoying that stadiums get so much subsidies from cities but at the end of the day I have no interest in bashing people’s rabid love of a sport. I think it is great, go wild and be totally obsessed with your sports team, it is an utterly benign love at the heart of it.
Nailed it. This is especially true with football in the UK. People are literally born and brought up with the expectation of supporting a certain team.
“You will not believe this 2000 year old strategy, that still works today!”
That’s why history is so interesting. People today are exactly the same as we’ve always been.
Just doing shit faster
As a non north-american I never understood this franchise system. How could you cheer for a team that will move anytime to a city more profitable? In Europe and latin america, if your city sucks, is becoming poor or so, the team will fall to the second division and will deal with that cause they are from that city, cause they are a club, not a franchise. For me this makes much more sense.
As much a love to bash the yanks, it’s not just them any more .
You could take any of the top 10 brands in European football, move the stadium anywhere in the world, and no one would notice but for a handful Of die hards.
If Man City moved to Dubai tomorrow, would that really surprise you ?
If Real Madrid moved to Florida , Liverpool to Beijing, ? Your left with 10,000 pissed off locals, but that’s nothing when you’re a global brand.
You have a great point, but for me it is still too much conjectures, but looking to theses conjectures I still disagree. Moving to another country would destroy those teams, cause they aren´t just the teams, Liverpool actually is a global brand but it is the Liverpool that plays in the premier league and have their rivalries, leaving UK would mean leaving all these parts of the brand behind. It is also a very different scenario, those teams in US move to other cities in the same country and still compete in the same tournament keeping a lot more of their previous brand.
For me your example would be much closer to MLB, NBA, NFL and MLS if you thought about Liverpool goint to Bristol, for example. In this scenario I can see better your point but I still think that the club would lose a lot of their capital and the brand would suffer with the ridicule of the situation for the average football fan. But it is just another opinion based in my previous opinions.
seat license fees (which are somehow different than tickets?)
What the actual fuck is THAT bullshit??
From a quick search I found that it apparently gives the purchaser the right to a specific seat for the duration of a season. Makes sense I suppose, but still kinda scummy.
it hurts my brain
those players brains will be hurting from concussions
For the record, N.E. Patriots paid for their stadium and continue to pay all upgrade costs. They just finished an expensive upgrade.
There also is a train stop on the property. Even though it is a commuter line, it’s not busy. The hours kinda suck. But, better than nothing.
Their original stadium (Foxboro) cost an incredibly-low $7 million to build circa 1970. Rather than building a bowl-like structure fully above ground like conventional stadiums, they instead dug a stadium-shaped hole in the ground and filled it with seats - a really practical way to do something like this, as long as you don’t mind the flooding.
I remember it well. Shoveled snow out of the stands with FHS groups for $$.
Then Kraft built Gillette for $325 million. Just spent millions more on upgrades.
Bread and games, it’s what the lizard brain craves.
But the stadium will bring so much economic benefit to the city! Well get at least 4 new fast food restaurants hiring only minimum wage workers, and a small boost in hotel revenue!
Transit won’t bring any return on investment. Only poor people use transit and they don’t have any money. And if someone who has a car does use transit that’s hurting the economy! Think of the poor gas station owners and car dealers!
/S /S /S /S /S
This is actually pretty accurate to how big oil, auto manufacturers and sports owners who are friends could operate.
Don’t forget the companies that clean up mess and repair damages that sports fans make. They need some love (and loads of money) too.
And people think that we are going to run out of fossil fuel or something. I guess they don’t know that dinosaurs die every day and we can collect the fossil fuel from them?
I live in Bristol. Our two nearest arenas which can host large (10,000+ capacity) concerts are in Cardiff and Birmingham.
We are the only major city in England that lacks an arena. And our council is far more concerned with letting property developers flood the market with luxury office blocks and student apartments.
The Cincinnati streetcar cost almost exactly $150m and it serves like 0.5% of the metro population. It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment of the post. We need to invest in public transit. Where I live there are zero non-car options. But don’t pretend you’re building comprehensive public transit for $150m.
It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minute
Well fine if you want to brag I guess but most Midwesterners would need defibrillators and a fast food chain or two along the way to make this trek, and it ain’t taking 20min.
Okay you’re not wrong about most people. I saw a post in a couch to 5k thread recently about getting to running 14 minute miles. I can walk 13 minute miles. But the I-275 loop that circles Cincinnati is almost 90 miles around. The streetcar covering less than two miles of the city is still not helping the common person.
City street cars seem to be a waste of money now but more trains would be nice. They never invest enough in it.
I live in Atlanta. We have a shitty street car and a shitty train system. They don’t go to enough places to be useful most of the time. But if they got the same kind of funding our stadiums got it would be crazy good. I could ride the train instead of driving to most places if they just expanded to some more parts of the city.
Are streetcars like trams? Because over here I love taking the tram in largerish cities like Ghent, they’re like busses but faster.
Yes, street cars or trolleys are essentially trams. Small, slow, go on rails in the pavement alongside cars.
Nowadays trams can go pretty fast. Plus, a better aligned railway and a better suspension means that they became.uch more quiet.
I just hope that someday we will see more of those used in large cities
Hopefully but I’m doubtful. My city (st Louis) has burned millions in a trash can of trying to get a singular, less than 5 mile, trolley working for more than a month and failed miserably. It’s been a major embarrassment that they’ve been entirely capable of getting it to run reliably down one mostly flat, straight street.
Yes, street cars or trolleys are essentially trams. Small, slow, go on rails in the pavement alongside cars.
CAD 180 millions for a 35km long express bus lane where I live…
Where’s that? I’ve seen in Calgary it’s 280 million per km for their new green line
New roads: expensive
Repurposing roads: not as expensive
150m can do a whole bunch when you use properly rolled out busses, with their own lanes (and you can initially paint these if the budget is low). People driving their car on the bus lanes will nicely generate additional tax income (fines) and if the busses are good, the people will come.
Even in the Netherlands, where we have really good trains on even a European scale, we still have long-distance busses (comfy ones, for 1-2hr trips) and regional busses (still comfy, but those are 20-30 min trips). Custom infra doesn’t always cut it, especially when repurposing existing infra will serve the job just fine.
I’ve lived in the NL, we just have a different reality. Just the other side of my city is an hour away in a car with no traffic. Regional cities are 1.5-3 hrs away. There are some bus lines in the middle of the city but most of our metro area has zero non-car options.
I just want some trails…
If you’re in Cincy there’s Metro bus, and TANK bus in northern Kentucky comes up into Cincy as well. You can also buy combo passes that let you ride both. It’s admittedly a very lacking public transit system, especially after cuts made in the Covid era, but it’s there and gets me to and from work.
Unfortunately the doomed underground rail system has such an infamous reputation that the thought of getting such a system put in place these days is a far fetched dream.
I have a Cincinnati address but I’m in Clermont county just outside of Anderson, in the 45255 zip. There aren’t buses near my house, or sidewalks, or bike lanes. Just a ditch on the side of the road and 40+mph traffic with lots of construction trucks.
I agree with the sentiment of this post, but these numbers are silly.
$150m would barely build a bus fleet transit system, nevermind the maintenance, operating, and personnel costs for the fleet (and completely forget about actual long term transit solutions like rail at that cost figure).
And $1b stadiums are outliers – our city got into controversy over our stadium which costed around $250m. Not many municipalities are loaded enough to be getting into billion dollar capital expenditure decisions.
you could absolutely build 1 or 2 decent rapid bus lines for that money, as well as pay for a few years of operations. but…. 1 or 2 rapid bus lines, while nice, certainly doesn’t make for a comprehensive system.
City: spends 100k out of $1B of transit budget on installing barriers for separated bike lanes.
My car-dependant city: tHeY sPeNt ToO mUcH oN bIkE lAnEs
My city painted lines in the road, and people still bitch about it 3 years later, the lines are almost gone from fading and chipping, and cycling is still dangerous due to some traffic specifically targeting them for harrasment.
Paint is not a substitute for infrastructure.
Yeah, there’s an especially shitty part of a city where used to live, that part is always mostly traffic jams and the bike lanes painted on the road side are just used as a parking lot for expensive cars 🤦♂️
People are freaking out about that in my city while the $500 million dollar highway interchange right next to it gets no attention.
"Oh BTW, we gave the stadium to some wealthy dude, and he’ll keep all of the money the stadium makes. Don’t worry though, your tax dollars will pay for the upkeep.
I would like to see those contracts, but we never seem to. It is my understanding that the team does pay the city to use the stadium, so there is direct income back to the government that owns it. Whether it offsets the cost to build and infrastructure improvements and all of that is a great question, but I never feel like we have all of the information.
Personally I think the sports franchises should build their own stadiums, but that train left the station long ago. So I’d at least like to better understand the actual deal the government is getting.
People have no idea what things cost. Stadiums are cheap.
150 million dollars in a major city might be enough to open a new Walmart. Forget about a comprehensive transit system.
Raiders and Rams stadiums each cost over a billion and have been built in the last 5ish years. Stadiums should and can be cheap but the NFL owners aren’t doing that. Vegas is also tearing down the Tropicana to build a massive and expensive baseball stadium in its please with a smaller Tropicana on the site as well
Yeah, plus 10/16 stadiums on the Wikipedia page for most expensive ones are in the US.
Funny you mention those stadiums. SoFi Stadium, where the Rams play, was 100% financed by the Rams owner.
Allegiant Stadium, where the Raiders play, did get public funding, but it was capped at $750 million while the Raiders paid $1.1B.
I don’t like public stadium funding, either, but outside of Olympic spending, cities are mot routinely paying over $1B in public dollars for a single stadium.
Kroenke should lay his own shit, he’s made billions ripping off fans and married a Walton, you know, the family that makes billions refusing to pay their workers fairly and makes the towns they go into finance the building of the Walmart because they “create jobs” shitty jobs that still require government aid to live on but jobs I guess
Did I say they shouldn’t?
It cost £200 million (£327m at current prices) just for 14km of tram lanes in my local city.
It could buy a decent amount of buses (~£200k each, more for green options), but without infrastructure changes and bus lanes, have fun watching them sit in traffic while everyone refuses to use them.
Shit’s expensive yo.
Not only they aren’t cheap, but they are pretty much never profitable. If we are to build things that are not profitable, we could as well build something that will offer a service to the population, like public transportation.
Not by fares, but by reduced loads on roads and increased building density. They’re infrastructure. Roads aren’t profitable either.
Not profitable, But for whom?
Contracts that big have a lot of grease and going on. Someone’s leasing that land from someone else.
The people In charge have a friend or two that own a few blocks of land just outside the site? Political capital, bribes, and contracts.
Hell, even the bus or rail line will face the same issues.
A lot of unprofitable ventures happen in government. It’s a sneaky way too steal tax money.
I don’t care or expect public services to be profitable, just lower cost and higher quality than a private Enterprise version.
Do we need quality, clean, reliable drinking water? Then don’t depend on shitrag nestle, who will figure out how to make it a stratified subscription.
Hell, without competition, even taxis can be held to a standard.
We’re going to pay a fortune for the government to provide safe infrastructure. But they’re going to hire all the right people vet them and make sure they do it right. Until they don’t.
Even NASA had to fall hard to get put back on track. I still think government services are the best option. Damn if the water isn’t fucking muddy. Pun not intended but I kind of like it.
A lot of your points, valid as they are, can be addressed if we have good transparency and oversight.
Let’s take advantage of how digital life has become, make reports accessible to the regular Jane/joe that detail where our tax dollars went.
A stadium is a service to the public. Stadiums are amenities, and increase happiness among the citizens that enjoy events. Even Sid Meyer’s Civ game has an amenities concept, because they’re really important for cities. If there’s no entertainment options in the city, then all of the talented people leave. That means all of the corporations with great jobs for talented people leave too. With them goes all the money, and you’re left with urban decay and poverty. Yes, transportation is important, but so are amenities.
Besides what Civ says, a lot of stadiums are built for a one time special event, like the olympics or some world cup.
I’m thinking about the olympic stadium of Montreal (which I think the post was about). It was built for the olympics of 76 and cost around a billion dollars at the time.
Since we don’t have a baseball team anymore, it is used only once in a while for music shows, but the acoustic is horrible because it wasn’t built for it. In my lifetime, I honestly never went inside for an event.
And now, the government is talking about a plan to repair it for an other billion. At this point, the only reason to keep it is because it’s so old and unique. Plus, it would just costs too much to demolish it.
It does bring a bunch of tourists annually, but for local people, it’s either seen as a weird relic of the past or a big scam.
Also, why can’t I just be a peaceful barbarian? Why would my population need amenities anyway? And who told them what is a stadium?Also, why can’t I just be a peaceful barbarian?
Because barbarians get crushed under the weight of civilization.
The A’s are a nuisance, not a service.
Baseball games aren’t the only thing that happen at baseball stadiums. I agree with you about the A’s though. That’s a tragedy of a team, especially considering their previous highs.
Owners pockets only have an in door, no out door.
Your money becomes their money.
For the record, N.E. Patriots paid for their stadium and continue to pay all upgrade costs. They just finished an expensive upgrade.
There also is a train stop on the property. Even though it is a commuter line, it’s not busy. The hours kinda suck. But, better than nothing.
That’s one out of like 50 teams though. Assholes like Stan Kroenke are far more common, demanding cities spend billions on his teams or he just moves them like he did with the rams
What city size can justify a $1 billion stadium and pull off comprehensive public transit for $150M?
What city size can justify a $1 billion stadium
Could have just stopped there. The answer is none regardless of the rest.
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Being able to built 150 million dollar comprehensive public transit was the difficult part
According to Wikipedia there are at least 16 cities that felt this price to be justified, 10 of which are in the US. >!Seems like the smallest population is in Inglewood, it’s almost same as stadium capacity when it’s expanded.!<
Do you live in orbanistan (hungary) here we have 2 big stadiums 200m away from each other, and having 10000 person stadiuma in a village where 1800 people lives…
At least Budapest has good public transport (from what I’ve seen in like 5 days)
No it isn’t. Prague have. We dont even have a railway (nor normal railway, nor underground) to the airport, only bus 🤣 Outside of the downtown youre mostly fked with the public transport, or at least takes hours to travel.
At least your busses don’t have the door to the electric panel open and dangling, like in Bucharest…
Green Bay has a stadium of 81k for a city of 107k. That’s a special case, though.
And, they act like stadiums are going to"drive economic" activity instead of creating dead zones in cities.
You know what would guarantee increased economic activity?
People being able to easily get to jobs and shops.Stadiums drive economic activity into city government officials pockets.
Even then, only in a shortsighted, politically deceptive manner. Taxation driven by sales in a thriving hub with free transit also pads the budget. But, taxes are unpopular and people like sports teams and arena shows and overpriced shitty beverages. They give the bigger dopamine hit.
Is that an economic activity in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Patriot Place @ Gillette Stadium is definitely not a “dead zone”.
Oh, someone lives in Québec city lmao!!
I was going to say Alberta, lol
Edit: I know the $1.22 billion is just for a new arena in Calgary, but it’s a big part of it for sure
I thought it was Nashville.
$150 mill for, say, light rail? LOL
150M isn’t even close to covering a functioning public transit system in any major US city. Expansions of the subway in New York routinely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and that’s just expansions. Even if you’re looking at buses only, if you start with the assumption that each bus runs about $100k, that’s a mere 1500 buses. The CTA in Chicago uses over 1800 buses–that only counts the ones currently in operation–so you’re still short on building bus stops, bus lanes, any kind of light rail system, and so on. Oh, and lots of the bus lines in Chicago stop running after a certain time; I couldn’t take the buses to go to any concerts, since nothing operated in my area between midnight and 5am.
Plus, you have ongoing operating expenses. Once a stadium is built, it’s usually operated by someone other than the city.
I’m not saying I’m in favor of stadiums, but whoever costed this needs to consult with a civil engineer to come up with a more realistic figure for comprehensive public transit for major cities.
Try more like $500,000 for a bus.
And light rail is $20m per mile or more (way more in an established downtown).
And I am, in fact, a civil engineer.
Thank you for your more informed numbers! I had no idea that a basic city bus was half a million dollars; that seems outrageous, but it also seems outrageous that an F-150 can easily cost $80k.
It’s a pity that it’s so damn expensive to run light rail in established cities; it seems to make a lot more sense in the long run, but those numbers are really hard to swallow in the short run.
In London, Ontario, the city gave the transit commission $350M to spend on a new transit overhaul called Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). It was the best plan possible for our city as our streets are too narrow to accommodate light rail and we sit on swampland at a low altitude above sea level which prevents a subway from being built. All the commission had to do was pour concrete for new bus pads and widen a couple of streets to add in a dedicated bus lane.
They blew half the money on consultations, construction fuck ups, and removal of fuck ups in 2022. They never finished BRT, bought themselves a brand new HQ at a cost of $120M, and now in 2023, they’re saying they’re $175M overbudget on BRT.
No one in our city is talking about this.
