This is the finale of a 4-part story that explains the nature of stadium drama in the United States of America from a pro-sports but liberal perspective. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 can be found here.
Last time, I discussed two possible solutions to the problems of threats for professional sports teams to move. I will discuss two more today. The first is somewhat indirect, providing options for more affordable stadiums in general, especially for basketball and hockey, as well as increased usage of stadiums. The second is the most necessary and most complicated paradigm shift in how we think about professional sports in the United States.
Let me declare one more reminder that none of these solutions are in any way mutually exclusive. I assess each of these on its own merits and “all of the above” approaches remain acceptable and advisable.
Reducing the cost of stadiums. Let’s be clear about something: When I go to a game, I’m going for the game. I want to see the teams play. I don’t care about whether your arena has holographic projectors or fifty different restaurants or a billion different “experience enhancers”. Few people do. You can probably sell just as many tickets without putting all this extra garbage to jack up the cost of the stadium. Let’s understand this, and understand that a city putting up 100 million for a stadium is a lot more feasible and potentially profitable than that city putting up 800 million. There are a few different ways to lower the costs of stadiums and/or increase their usage. (Thanks to Kossack super390 for his excellent comment last part that assisted in the creation of this.)
One is to use a form of mass production. If the same model is applied in many places, it cuts down on architectural design costs, unexpected happenstance costs due to an unfamiliar model, etc. Monolithic provides one example of what can be done for basketball and hockey arenas, even at the professional levels. A Crenosphere can probably be built for around 100 million, and hold enough people to host NHL and NBA games. It’s not fancy, but that’s not the point – people want to see the game. I recommend this path for basketball and hockey. Probably not feasible for the other sports as the fields are too large and the stadiums might not be able to manage it – at least with Monolithic’s buildings. Plus, baseball stadiums *are* unique in ways the others are not.
Another option is modularization and multipurposing. As I mentioned before, an NFL stadium gets 10 matches a year automatically, nowhere near enough for justified usage. But what happens if we expand the notion of what the stadium does, and specifically align it to host everything it can? For each NFL stadium, let’s flip some things around a bit. Let’s design a stadium such that we can easily shut down entire levels and sections of it, thus limiting our operating costs severely, to where we can have any target amount. First, we place a soccer team there as well. Actually, let’s place two soccer teams – a men’s and a women’s (although the persistent lack of support for women’s sports, comparatively, is something I would also like to rant about, but in a separate post). Any NFL stadium should be able to handle soccer as well. And with the club model mentioned last time around, you can use them. We can also get the local NCAA team to play football and soccer here. Then, let’s place local high school football games of the week there, give schools exposure that perhaps might not otherwise – perhaps even track meets if there are open dates. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s assess our day count now:
NFL – 10 home matches (+1 or 2 for playoff advancement) – target audience: the full 70K MLS (or lower division) – call it 17 home matches on the schedule that MLS tends to use – target audience: 25K for an MLS team (unless it starts to fill up, then activate more sections), possibly 10K, 5K, or even 2K for a lower division side
NWSL (or lower division) – the women’s league has been running shorter, but we can still add all these teams with the club model – call it another 10 matches – for NWSL itself, target audience to start at 10K and see what happens – I bet some teams start drawing more than the paltry 2K we’re seeing in many stadiums
NCAAF – 6 home matches – target audience is the full 70K if a power school, 40K for a lesser FBS school, 20K or even 10K for FCS
NCAA Soccer (M/W) – if a school has both programs, possibly another 24 home dates – target audience likely only 2K, but again, the stadium should still be able to operate this way High school football and soccer – the HS football season is 11-16 weeks depending on the area – target audience probably 10K for big games, 5K for not-as-big games. Target audience 2K for other sports, and I’ll admit the viability on these is a bit questionable hence why I’m not assigning more game dates to it.
So that’s a total of 78-83 game dates, not even counting special or reward events like NFL/MLS playoff games, NCAA bowl games or soccer tournament hosting, CONCACAF Champions League/US Open Cup, concerts, etc. as well as the extra high school events I mentioned for consideration. By not assuming we have to fill the entire thing for viability, or even a significant amount, we’ve made the stadium get respectable use and become much more worth it to the community. So we’ve now got a stadium that gets as much use as a baseball stadium. Football and soccer could really benefit from doing this. (For non-NFL cities that are still nervous about doing this for pro soccer, even your 20-30K soccer stadium could still be modularized to do some of these other things.) And of course with using basketball as a club model (or club/franchise hybrid), basketball teams can always get added to hockey arenas to add more game dates, as well as college and high school basketball for these arenas as well. Similar pattern here.
I don’t really have any specific solutions for baseball (although I think some of the extra crap that gets thrown in is also ridiculous (see: Miami fish tank) and can easily be eliminated), but with 81 game dates the stadium is already sort of viable on this front.
Okay, so none of my arguments so far have impressed you. Even if we were to implement all of this, you still don’t like it. We’re still giving money to billionaires. Okay, I agree. Especially as I’ve not really mentioned any solutions applicable to baseball, and all I got for football is “use the stadium more”, which really just reduces the problem to being on baseball’s level. Since there’s no mutual exclusivity, what I’m going to say next can be applied to all the sports, but I’m going to gear this towards baseball and football.
We need to take back our sports teams and turn them into public assets. I’m going to do a bit on football, then a bit on how baseball would end up a little different. While I won’t cover the other sports, you can probably see the pattern at that point, and these are the most important.
Each NFL team earned $226.4 million in revenue from the sharing process in 2014 (as reported by the single team that is public right now, the Green Bay Packers, here.) The NFL shares TV revenue, largely, and there are plenty of unshared revenues to be had as well. From the same piece, the Packers reported $149.3 million in local revenue, which consists of sales of merchandise, tickets (split 60/40 with visiting teams), and other local ventures owned by the team. This is $375 million in revenue. The salary cap in 2014 was $133 million. Let’s say that there’s an equal amount placed into non-player assets (stadium workers (which are also jobs being created!), maintenance, coaches, other staff, administration, etc.) – this is a tremendous overestimate, but we’ll say the total cost is then $266 million. That means the Packers made their shareholders about $90 million! If we made these teams public assets of the cities, they would increase money for the cities, not decrease them, especially if we’ve placed them under reasonable stadium controls – again, we don’t need fancy stadiums, just ones we can actually watch the game in. We’ve turned a loss into an asset. We can turn one of the worst prospects for cities in the United States into one of the best ways to make money.
There are a few concerns with this. One is that as a public asset, it can be very hard to make necessary changes to teams as needed, which could impact them competitively and possibly hurt the competition level of the NFL. I’m not too worried about this if every team does it, because the league can place controls on requirements to make cities actually keep their teams competitive. Refusing to do so, to spend on the level of others, does indeed justify a more legitimate threat to move a team – in this case, the team would be bought from the city and sold to another city. The controls are a bit weaker in baseball, though, and I will discuss how more fundamental changes will have to be made to how baseball works.
We don’t have specific numbers for baseball teams, and parity in finances is… less robust. I don’t believe any teams actually lose money, not in the long run, but some definitely make more than others. So we’ll need to put controls similar to the NFL. Have national TV revenue shared (though local TV is much more important in baseball) and put salary cap limitations. Then, it’s up to every city to make its own decisions on how and where to spend, although again, we will need minimum requirements to make sure teams don’t fail to become competitive at all. The minor league cities, too, in the same organization, are likely to have some input. Competitive balance is a major concern in baseball in general, and with public teams it’s even more critical that it be handled properly, because cities that hesitate to spend money will likely have issues remaining competitive otherwise. There are quite a few things that will need to be handled carefully in baseball, including the possibility of expansion, but all of these are going to get into a bit of higher-order baseball/sports detail that lies outside the scope of a Daily Kos post.
You’ve seen the problem, I’ve posted some solutions, where and how they work, the last being the most powerful and useful. This concludes this series. I may make more sports-related posts in other contexts (hints to potential topics have been taken from throughout the comments). I may do some posts more in line with the traditional postings of Daily Kos as well, but in general I find most people tend to cover most things pretty well. It sort of depends on what I feel like, what I see happening in the world, and what problems need to be addressed. Enjoy and comment!
EDIT: Copied from Word, forgot to apply proper formatting. Fixed.