Whoa, Kinja, just post it once, okay? Thanks.

Weirdly, though, the number of city mayors who’ve been voted out of office for losing a team stands steady at zero. (Seattle’s Greg Nickels is the one possible exception, though I think it’s pretty generally accepted he mostly was voted out of office for things like neglecting to shovel the streets after it snowed.)…

Short answer: Arenas bring in somewhat more economic activity to a city than stadiums, especially if they can host both NBA and NHL teams and concerts. But given that just means “dark 150 days a year” rather than “dark 300 days a year,” they still pretty much such as public investments unless the city’s getting actual…

Again, Szymanski and Noll don’t think (nor do I) that MLS is going to go out of business. But if you asked me whether I thought, say, a Nashville franchise was likely to still be in business and in the top tier in another 10-15 years, I’d bet the under.

Sure, as a loss leader for soccer overall, it’s a fine business plan. Hell, even just in terms of making soccer more popular in the U.S., MLS is doing fine, especially considering where the league started.

As something that will maintain a $150m/team investment within the lifetimes of most of these owners? I’m less…

For the incoming owners, though, they’re buying smaller and smaller pieces of the pie. And it’s a pie whose value isn’t really known — yeah, MLS paid $450m (if Bloomberg is correct) to regain 100% control, but we can’t tell if they overpaid without seeing the revenue figures, and SUM keeps those on some sub-level of…

Red Bulls, NYCFC, Orlando, DC are all at least partly foreign-owned, off the top of my head.

Yeah, I’m down with that clarification.

You’d think that would be an incentive for MLS to hold the line on expansion, though, since the more new owners they allow into their club, the more watered-down their shares of SUM get.

There is much that does not make sense here, but I guess the rich can make dumb decisions as well as the rest of us.

I personally have been to an awful lot of “sold-out” Red Bulls games where most of the fans came disguised as empty seats. And a big reason I went to so many is that my son’s AYSO league offered $20 tickets for like $7.

I’m not an economist, but Noll and Szymanski are. (It’s my journalism degree that I got from a vending machine.)

The exact words from that Forbes article, if you click through:

“It’s of course not as simple as comparing those current values to past expansion fees, since the league and its teams have spent two decades losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but that continuing investment by MLS owners has led to a league that…

You’re leaving out such things as stadium debt, which is a thing for most teams, even those that got significant subsidies.

But, sure, I don’t think any of these teams are going bankrupt anytime soon. Just that it’s pretty unlikely that $150m valuation will hold up, especially if the next TV deal isn’t dripping with…

Yeah, Szymanski mentioned the land acquisition angle as well, which is certainly a consideration. But many of the would-be MLS expansion franchises aren’t looking to get seas of acreage, just enough land to fit a stadium — though I suppose “Buy MLS franchise, build stadium, tear down stadium when MLS contracts your…

The state of Michigan reimburses the Detroit schools for lost property taxes under the Red Wings/Pistons deal, so the money is coming out of state coffers, not city. Which is actually even more crazy, since you have Michigan paying for teams to move from one part of the state to another, which is of absolutely zero…

Actually, the public cost is going to end up being nearly $600 million once all the operating subsidies kick in:

FYI, the Hartford Yard Goats are not named after lawnmowing goats, but after some kind of train thing. Their hats still have an actual goat on them, though, chewing on a bat, which makes me all the more excited for whatever batshittery the Binghamton logo design crew will come up with for, really, any of these new…

The lesson isn’t even “Don’t use taxpayer money on sports arenas.”
It’s “Don’t use taxpayer money on sports arenas and get nothing in return.” If the Pirates had agreed to a long-term lease in exchange (the five-year lease only had a maximum $100,000 penalty for breaking it) and agreed to share a decent amount of…

The rule you guys are looking for is actually 6.05(m), which covers thrown, not fielded, balls:

They left out the best part of the Marty Cordova sick-kid blackmail story, though: By the time the ad aired, the kid in the hospital had *already died*: