So that’s five straight posts about the Buffalo Bills owners’ plans to get around a billion dollars in public subsidies for a new stadium; what else is going on in the sports world, you may ask? Why, here’s a little news item in Sports Business Journal talking to Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan, wonder what he has to say:
Chiefs President Mark Donovan said the team is evaluating pitches from developers to build a new stadium in Kansas, across the state line from its historic Missouri home of Arrowhead Stadium. “Pretty consistently, we get inquiries from the state of Kansas, [that] if you’re going to make a change, what if you brought the stadium here?” Donovan said at the NFL annual meeting. “So we’re looking at that as well.”
Well, then! Donovan didn’t mention anything about public funding, but then, he didn’t have to: Talking about moving the Chiefs from Missouri to Kansas, even if it’s only a matter of a few miles, can’t be anything but the prelude to an attempt to prompt a bidding war between the two states for the team’s presence. That’s working pretty well for Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder, so why not?
The idea that the Chiefs owners might demand stadium money is nothing new: It was already reported last year that the NFL team might piggyback on the Royals‘ owners’ own request for a new stadium with a “hey, us too!” plan. But after a couple of high-profile football stadium projects that were mostly paid for by the teams themselves — the New York Jets and Giants‘ new stadium, and the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers‘ new stadium — it looks like NFL owners are determined to get back to business as usual, which means a whole lot of taxpayer cash and a little something thrown in by the billionaires who would actually benefit from the project. In addition to the Bills and the Chiefs and the Commanders, we have the Tennessee Titans owners’ call for at least $300 million in public money for stadium renovations and possibly more if they instead choose to go with a whole new building, plus a plan for $600 million in taxpayer funding for improvements to the Baltimore Ravens‘ stadium. And hey, the Denver Broncos‘ 21-year-old stadium just caught fire, causing damage to part of the steel superstructure — wouldn’t it be simpler to just tear it down and build a new one?
The sad fact of the matter, as I told a series of TV reporters Zooming me from their cars yesterday, is that sports team owners are not going to stop demanding public money to underwrite their private profits until they start getting “no” for an answer. So every billion-dollar Bills subsidy that sails through will only increase the desire of their fellow billionaires to get a cut of that boodle — understandably so, as the best way to turn a big fortune into an even bigger fortune is to get somebody else to pay for your business expenses. I feel like a broken record on this sometimes — it’s literally the subtitle of our book, after all — but if sports owners are going to keep on working the same grift, I guess it’s my fate to keep pointing it out, in hopes that either someone in a position of power will take notice or somebody will get out the torches and pitchforks.