The Golden State Warriors are leaving Oracle Arena after this season, for a fresh new arena in Mission Bay and home crowds even more dominated by Silicon Valley parasites and vampires than what they see now in Oakland. If there’s any sliver of silver lining for Golden State’s Oakland fans, it’s that the franchise…
Whenever professional economists are asked about stadium and arena deals, they invariably explain, for the hundredth time, that these “almost never” work out to the benefit of the public. (Look, here are a bunch saying so just a few weeks ago!) Between the price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the…
Ever since the new, taxpayer-funded home of the Pistons and Red Wings opened in Detroit, people have taken note of the often empty seats surrounding the action. This was especially true during Pistons games last season, when the team consistently found itself playing in front of a sea of vacant red seats. The arena…
Build a stadium!, they say. It’ll pay for itself! It’ll spur economic development in the surrounding neighborhood! It never does. For every single city/county/state/province that falls for it, eventually there comes the moment when they have to admit they got bamboozled. It’s Manitoba’s turn now.
The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Monday to approve a plan to let a group of private investors build a new stadium on the site of the current home of the Seattle Storm and the former home of the Seattle Supersonics, as part of a push to land an expansion NHL franchise later this year.
When the state of Rhode Island offered up $38 million in June to the owners of the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox toward a new stadium, it seemed likely to be the first step on the road to a replacement for the beloved-but-modern-kitchenless 76-year-old McCoy Stadium. Sure, the PawSox owners had balked at some elements of…
A hot new sports media startup may not be the place you’d expect to find a braindead take lifted straight from a dead-tree columnist’s 1996 notebook, but then you remember that The Athletic, in its quest to destroy all print sports sections, did hire plenty of middle-aged white guys. One of those guys is Joe McDonald,…
Milwaukee’s new NBA arena will open later this summer, and will host Bucks home games starting with opening night in October. Last week the Bucks and banking software company Fiserv announced a 25-year agreement to name the new arena Fiserv Forum, but this otherwise standard piece of stadium business has an especially…
The Seattle Mariners have issued an ultimatum: Give them $180 million in taxpayer money for their 19-year-old stadium, or they won’t sign a long-term lease.
After the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to end a 16-month legal fight with the Diamondbacks on Wednesday, the team will now be allowed to leave their current ballpark for a shiny new stadium as early as 2022, five years before their 30-year agreement to play in their current ballpark was set to…
The people of Cobb County, Ga., have a budget conundrum on their hands, thanks to craven former county chairman Tim Lee’s insistence on spending almost $400 million in public money for a stadium without giving the public a chance to vote on it. Despite a record-high tax digest, the county is $30 to 55 million in the…
There’s one MLS expansion slot left, and it’ll soon be awarded to Cincinnati, Sacramento, or Detroit. Sacramento once looked like a lock to get an expansion spot, but it’s now rather uncertain, likely because Sacramento’s ownership group isn’t as flamboyantly wealthy as their competitors.
Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who was recently accused of sexual harassment and getting racist with team employees, will soon sell his stake in the team. It’s not clear who will buy the team yet, though the end of the Panthers’ season on Sunday means that the process is now underway. Diddy offhandedly made…
The Columbus Crew’s season is over, but the fight over where they’ll play the 2019 season is becoming increasingly heated. Despite it being a horrendous breach of trust with the city of Columbus and an affront to MLS’ bizarre, artificially deflated business model, MLS czar Don Garber is apparently content with…
The Oakland A’s have been trying to leave their sewage-logged digs for a new ballpark for what feels like decades now. In September, they expressed their desire to build a new, privately financed stadium near Laney College, right in the middle of Oakland next to Lake Merritt. They’ll have to pick a new site now.
The Deadspin Awards are this month, and we need our readers to decide the winners of these prestigious honors. Today, we ask you to help us determine the answer to an important question: What is the worst stadium scam of them all?
There has been much fanfare in Metro Detroit about the $863 million new stadium downtown that serves as the new home for both the Red Wings and the Pistons, which was paid for in part by $324 million in public money from the city and the state. The stadium, which is named after cheap pizza, is by all accounts…
MLS is not and for the foreseeable future will not be one of this country’s so-called Big Four, but let no one say the scrappy upstart doesn’t extort American cities like a big-boy league. The league’s rapid expansion—someone without a stake in the matter would say too rapid—has cities from Cincinnati to St. Louis to …
If you read the press release announcing the construction of a new ballpark out in Summerlin, Nev. for the Las Vegas 51s, you might have thought that the construction would mercifully be completed without use of public money. The Raiders’ stadium deal is the worst heist in American history, and one may have thought…
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