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
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!”
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.
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.
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.
it hurts my brain
those players brains will be hurting from concussions
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.
I just want some trails...
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.
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.
Okay but their friends don't profit off public transportation so checkmate liberal
No, it's just a different, less important group of friends
It's really everybody, their problem is it doesn't benefit their friends comparatively more
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Not by fares, but by reduced loads on roads and increased building density. They're infrastructure. Roads aren't profitable either.
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.
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.
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)
Green Bay has a stadium of 81k for a city of 107k. That's a special case, though.
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.
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".
$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.
The problem in my town is the homeless people ruining the trails and parks. I feel bad for them but they will fill a park with tents and shit on the pavement
Where would you have them go, exactly?
And now you've found the problem. There are many non profits helping them and making sure they aren't starving but many of these people come from other places and have serious mental health issues.
There is habitat for humanity which is building houses with the idea that having a shelter and a shower can get people off the street. Its a cool project.
On one hand, where's the affordable housing? On the other hand, where's the access to affordable mental health programs?
Everyone often bleats out "bread and circuses" at everything but I think this is one area where that actually applies. It wins you votes to keep the city-branded circus in town even if it means kowtowing to billionaire team owner whims.
Bread & Circus!
Is this meme reporting live from Las Vegas, Nevada?
Because putting a stupid underground concrete bendy-straw full of manual-driving Teslas instead of...a subway system, and building like 8 more stadiums that shut down traffic and give us nothing but $600 concert tickets on Ticketmaster ....is totally this city's jam right now.
Hobart represents!
OKC right now
The OKC deal is actually a pretty square deal. The team is putting up 50m and the city is putting up another 70m, but the city retains ownership and use over the property. The funding is also coming from extending a 1% sales tax weve already been paying for the last 5 years.
It's not what I would prioritize, but at least we're actually going to keep the infrastructure we're paying for.
I wish my city council would spend money on a stadium...
