New York Islanders still have a shot at a new arena
Friday, 05 August 2011 14:53
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/new-york-islanders-still-have-a-shot-at-a-new-arena
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
For the New York Islanders owner Charles Wang, the disappointment of losing an arena referendum in Nassau County last Monday was not the end of the road in terms of getting his Uniondale, New York-based New York Islanders a new arena. It was just a hiccup although if you read hockey writers accounts in both the New York and from the self proclaimed world's best hockey writers market, Toronto, it is all over for Wang. He should pack up and get out even if he has four years left on his lease because it will not happen for the Long Island businessman in Nassau County.
Wang, who spent part of his childhood in Queens, won't ever get a new arena in Nassau County according to the ones with supreme hockey knowledge and in fact one titan of the Toronto hockey writers Parthenon, the noted public policy and economic expert Damien Cox, suggested that the Islanders problems stem from Wang himself. Cox should stick to something he might know about — talking to hockey insiders about proposed trades, coaching or general manager changes — and leave the public policy writing to experts who understand property tax hikes, funding mechanisms for arenas and stadiums and whether a sports venue is an economic engine.
Cox probably has been to a New Jersey Devils game in Newark, New Jersey and if Cox and the rest of the enlightened thinkers who turn out daily rabble about hockey had any understanding of what they try and write about in the business arena of sports, Newark is a perfect place to start an urban policy lesson.
Newark was the apple of the eye of the former owners of the New Jersey Nets back in the 1990s and into the early part of the last decade. The Nets ownership planned to build an arena there and when it didn't happen, the Commissioner of the National Basketball Association David Stern called New Jersey politicians some names and said the politicians "blew it."
Funny thing, the New Jersey Nets franchise of Stern's NBA is using the very land on which the arena that was built after the Nets-Newark arena talk meltdown that the Nets ownership and Newark were planning. The team is renting dates at the building until a Brooklyn arena opens up. The New Jersey Devils ownership jumped into the void and worked out a deal with Newark to build a facility in a public-private partnership.
For Cox and the rest of the hockey hacks, perhaps some facts should be explained to them so they write better columns. In the sports stadium/arena game, no never means no even if voters say no.
Here are some examples of where the voters were sadly mistaken in the voter’s booth after rejecting a sports venue. Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Charlotte and Ramapo, New York eight miles north of the New Jersey-New York border at Montvale.
In the early 1990s, Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent was terrorizing cities in hopes of getting a new ballpark in places like Cleveland. No new park and your team will be moved. In an awful lot of places the threatening tactics worked. Cleveland can up with a "sin tax" with tax hikes on cigarettes and alcohol to help pay for a new Cleveland baseball park. The explosion of stadium and arena building in the United States started after the 1986 tax reform and owners noticed that a large loophole existed if a municipality put up funding for a building. The municipality could take as little as eight cents out of every dollar earned inside a facility and use that money to pay down the stadium or arena debt.
All the possible relocation threats worked as almost everyone got a new stadium between 1986 and 2011. Only two franchises in baseball are looking for new facilities, the Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff and the Tampa Bay Rays owners. Just about every minor league ballpark has been replaced or renovated since the 1990 Major League-Minor League development pact.
King County, Washington, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and Milwaukee residents said no to funding ballparks in votes. But the elected officials knew better and put new stadiums in those cities. Washington state lawmakers imposed tax hikes in restaurant, hotel and motel and restaurant tabs to fund a new Mariners home. There was a six county sales tax hike around Milwaukee to fund that city's new ball yard and A deal was crafted for Pittsburgh to build a new baseball facility and a new football stadium.
In the summer of 2010, Ramapo, New York voters overwhelmingly said no to a publicly funded minor league style baseball park only to see the Town Supervisor and the town council nullify the vote. Ramapo residents have no idea what the final tab on the stadium will be but they will be paying for years for a park that was built for a team in a financially shaky independent baseball loop, the CanAm League.
In the 1990s, stadium building was viewed as an economic engine which has over the decades proven to be false. The jobs created are mostly
per diem and minimum wage positions.
Still the stadiums kept being built. Middle and small markets like Nashville, Jacksonville, Charlotte and others began competing with the big boys and one of the biggest, the Los Angeles-Anaheim market, lost two National Football League teams following the 1994 season when Georgia Frontiere took her Anaheim-based Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis and Al Davis moved his Los Angeles Raiders back to Oakland after a deal had been conceptually worked out that would have kept Davis in the Los Angeles area. Art Modell moved his Cleveland Browns to Baltimore after the 1995 season when he was unable to get a new stadium, Cleveland threatened to sue the NFL and viola a deal was worked out, Cleveland built a new stadium and the NFL put an expansion team in the city in 1999. Houston and St. Louis also regained teams.
The National Basketball Association was not beyond using relocation threats. Leslie Alexander wanted to move his Houston Rockets along with his WNBA and indoor football team and flirted with Louisville. Houston voters got the message after saying no to an arena referendum and said yes. Ken Lay, the disgraced Enron CEO is a major player in getting a Houston baseball park approved, there seemed to be annual Larry King "exclusives" back in those days in his USA Today column that insiders told Larry that John McMullen (who also owned the New Jersey Devils) was moving his Astros to Washington.
After George Shinn could not get a new basketball arena built for his Charlotte Hornets, Shinn took his team to New Orleans. Despite voters saying no to a new arena in Charlotte, the city officials worked out a deal to build a new venue in exchange for an expansion franchise.
Wang's biggest deficiency is that he has publicly not taken the threat road and in the stadium/arena game that is a big stick. Nassau County politicians have basically shown Islanders owners like Wang and before that Howard and Ed Millstein and Stephen Gluckstern the door like an overbearing landlord hold an iron clad lease. In the late 1990s, Millstein thought he had a deal to build a new arena and that fell apart.
If Wang wants some leverage, Queens political and business leaders are interested in bringing the team west to the Mets ballpark/tennis center area or work out a deal to share the Brooklyn arena that will house the Nets. Back to Cox, surely he knows that the Toronto Maple Leafs-Raptors home building was half done when Maple Leaf Enterprises took over the basketball-only building and turned it into a multi-use facility.
Nassau County lawmakers are suburbanites and not used to dancing with major league hitters but then again Wang has not been blustery about his problems like former Devils owners, the late John McMullen who never missed liking a city with an arena that was better than the Meadowlands like Hamilton, Ontario or Hoboken. McMullen never did get his Hoboken building constructed but the Devils franchise controls a building in Newark.
A lot of people look at sports as a well, sports. It is a business, Wang will have more shots at the net; all he needs is one to go in while playing the arena game. He was never going to win last week's referendum, his pitch for the building was very weak and National Hockey League Commissioner did not issue the requisite threats. Also Nassau residents have been bombarded with the "nattering nabobs of negativism" — radio talk show hosts and cable TV carnies who constantly rail against the government and government spending. But New York has built four baseball stadiums (Bronx/Yankees, Queens/Mets in a city-state, private partnership, Brooklyn/Cyclones minor league team, Staten island/Yankees minor league team), one very expensive basketball arena in Brooklyn in a heavily subsidized project and has given Madison Square Garden a property tax break for nearly 30 years. There seems to be political will in Queens, maybe some in Brooklyn.
In New Jersey, Newark built an arena, the Jets and Giants with state aid negotiated a deal in a private/public partnership to build a new stadium even as the debt on old Giants stadium approached nine figures. That is how it is, no is never no.
Wang has some leverage and in the stadium/arena game, all you need is leverage even if you have four years left on your lease.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Showing posts with label NHL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NHL. Show all posts
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Bad owners like Time Warner ruin sports
THURSDAY, 02 JUNE 2011 13:35
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/bad-owners-like-time-warner-ruin-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to a Canadian group of investors who will take the National Hockey League team to Winnipeg, Manitoba is yet another Time Warner failure. The media giant selected the wrong people in Atlanta to buy the company's National Basketball Association Atlanta Hawks, the NHL Thrashers and the lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for the use of the city built arena.
Time Warner officials, like an awful lot of other officials at media companies, in the late 20th century decided that getting bigger was better and buy out other companies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and attempted what was then called "vertical integration" and bring a sports franchise into the company. Murdoch's thinking or his advisors thinking was to put Dodgers telecasts into the homes of the Pacific Rim countries like Japan.
Murdoch failed and sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt's group in 2004.
Time Warner ended up with the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks, Thrashers and control of the leases at Atlanta's new baseball stadium and the city arena. Time Warner then merged operations with America Online or AOL.
AOL Time Warner was a financial disaster.
AOL Time Warner got rid of World Championship Wrestling in March 2001 because it just didn't fit in with the corporate culture of the company. AOL Time Warner ditched the CNN's Sports Tonight program soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The show would continue on the CNNSI network which started in 1996. But AOL Time Warner ended that channel in 2002. The Hawks, Thrashers and the arena lease was sold off in 2003. Turner South, a regional cable network that was founded in 1999 and carried Braves, Hawks and Thrashers games was sold off in 2006.
In 2007, the Braves franchise was sold. AOL Time Warner also got rid of its share Comedy Central along with a record label.
The company now known as Time Warner has a long history of getting rid of sports properties. After Murdoch attempted to take over Warner Communications (a Time Warner predecessor) in the early 1980s, the company decided that it no longer was interested in owning the New York Cosmos despite the team's success at the Meadowlands. It can be argued that Warner Communications ruined not only the Cosmos with handing out large contracts to big names but the North American Soccer League as well. Eventually the Cosmos and the NASL folded.
AOL was eventually spun off.
Time Warner has stomped all over Ted Turner's legacy in sports. The Hawks, the Thrashers, the Goodwill games, even a sports show on CNN. Time Warner has destroyed CNN as a legitimate source of news and turned Headline News into something that resembles bad daytime/tabloid television. CNN and Headline News are profitable because of the 1984 federal legislation that created a bundled tier that saved cable channels like CNN, Headline News and ESPN.
It is quite clear that Ted Turner was and remains the most important person in Atlanta sports. He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the medium market franchise into a national brand thanks to WTBS. Turner hired top notch people to run his sports enterprises, Dr. Harvey Schiller, Jack Kelly, Stan Kasten.
At one time, New Jersey-native Kasten ran the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers.
Turner understood the value of having Braves baseball on WTBS and was mocked by baseball purists for turning Braves baseball into TV programming. Braves baseball games started at 5:05 p.m. on Wednesdays in a television block which served as a prelude to a Wednesday night movie. The Braves, a team out of Atlanta, had a national following and showed others in baseball that baseball was TV programming not just a game. Turner also brought the first Soviet player to the NBA as a part of the back and forth of staging the Goodwill Games.
Turner named the hockey team the Thrashers.
Turner ran a successful enterprise which was run into the ground by a company that got far too big, Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner. The company never replaced the sports people who ran Turner Sports, Dr. Schiller, Kelly, Kasten and a host of others. The only smart thing that AOL Time Warner did was to leave John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in charge of the Braves but the big money that Ted Turner provided to the club was gone. Today, the Atlanta Braves baseball team is run as a mid market franchise and is no longer "America's Team."
To blame Time Warner for the demise of the Atlanta Thrashers may be a bit of a stretch as the company washed its hand of the team eight years ago. Back in 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that Ted Turner was going to get a National Hockey League expansion team in Atlanta and that Dr. Schiller and Kasten were the kind of people the NHL wanted. Turner had the checkbook to buy a franchise for $80 million, there would be a new arena opening in the city and he could put together a regional cable TV network. There was always a possibility that the NHL could get a cable TV network contract with Turner Sports. He could also get corporate support. But the Time Warner takeover of Turner's company and then the AOL-Time Warner merger ended that.
The AOL Time Warner debacle came under President Bill Clinton's watch. Clinton also signed the 1996 TeleCommunications Act into law, an act that virtually destroyed local radio and ended up created two radio giants—Infinity and Clear Channel—and changed the industry.
Vertical integration failed.
Time Warner's Turner Sports still has some major properties. The NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball on TBS, NASCAR on TNT, NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV along with ncaa.com, nascar.com,nba.com, pga.com, pgatour.com. Atlanta Braves games are on Peachtree TV but Turner does not produce the games.
Time Warner was an original partner of the Fred Wilpon/New York Mets' SNY regional sports network. But Time Warner got rid of Time Warner Cable in 2009. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are separate companies and Time Warner Cable has a piece of SNY.
Media companies got bigger and were too big to fail but failed. Time Warner and Clear Channel have been bad stewards of media properties. Time Warner is out of the sports ownership business. Bad owners ruin sports and the guys at Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner whether it was Gerald Levin or Steve Case is at the top of the list of bad sports owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
THURSDAY, 02 JUNE 2011 13:35
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/bad-owners-like-time-warner-ruin-sports
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The sale of the Atlanta Thrashers to a Canadian group of investors who will take the National Hockey League team to Winnipeg, Manitoba is yet another Time Warner failure. The media giant selected the wrong people in Atlanta to buy the company's National Basketball Association Atlanta Hawks, the NHL Thrashers and the lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for the use of the city built arena.
Time Warner officials, like an awful lot of other officials at media companies, in the late 20th century decided that getting bigger was better and buy out other companies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers and attempted what was then called "vertical integration" and bring a sports franchise into the company. Murdoch's thinking or his advisors thinking was to put Dodgers telecasts into the homes of the Pacific Rim countries like Japan.
Murdoch failed and sold the Dodgers to Frank McCourt's group in 2004.
Time Warner ended up with the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks, Thrashers and control of the leases at Atlanta's new baseball stadium and the city arena. Time Warner then merged operations with America Online or AOL.
AOL Time Warner was a financial disaster.
AOL Time Warner got rid of World Championship Wrestling in March 2001 because it just didn't fit in with the corporate culture of the company. AOL Time Warner ditched the CNN's Sports Tonight program soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The show would continue on the CNNSI network which started in 1996. But AOL Time Warner ended that channel in 2002. The Hawks, Thrashers and the arena lease was sold off in 2003. Turner South, a regional cable network that was founded in 1999 and carried Braves, Hawks and Thrashers games was sold off in 2006.
In 2007, the Braves franchise was sold. AOL Time Warner also got rid of its share Comedy Central along with a record label.
The company now known as Time Warner has a long history of getting rid of sports properties. After Murdoch attempted to take over Warner Communications (a Time Warner predecessor) in the early 1980s, the company decided that it no longer was interested in owning the New York Cosmos despite the team's success at the Meadowlands. It can be argued that Warner Communications ruined not only the Cosmos with handing out large contracts to big names but the North American Soccer League as well. Eventually the Cosmos and the NASL folded.
AOL was eventually spun off.
Time Warner has stomped all over Ted Turner's legacy in sports. The Hawks, the Thrashers, the Goodwill games, even a sports show on CNN. Time Warner has destroyed CNN as a legitimate source of news and turned Headline News into something that resembles bad daytime/tabloid television. CNN and Headline News are profitable because of the 1984 federal legislation that created a bundled tier that saved cable channels like CNN, Headline News and ESPN.
It is quite clear that Ted Turner was and remains the most important person in Atlanta sports. He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the medium market franchise into a national brand thanks to WTBS. Turner hired top notch people to run his sports enterprises, Dr. Harvey Schiller, Jack Kelly, Stan Kasten.
At one time, New Jersey-native Kasten ran the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers.
Turner understood the value of having Braves baseball on WTBS and was mocked by baseball purists for turning Braves baseball into TV programming. Braves baseball games started at 5:05 p.m. on Wednesdays in a television block which served as a prelude to a Wednesday night movie. The Braves, a team out of Atlanta, had a national following and showed others in baseball that baseball was TV programming not just a game. Turner also brought the first Soviet player to the NBA as a part of the back and forth of staging the Goodwill Games.
Turner named the hockey team the Thrashers.
Turner ran a successful enterprise which was run into the ground by a company that got far too big, Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner. The company never replaced the sports people who ran Turner Sports, Dr. Schiller, Kelly, Kasten and a host of others. The only smart thing that AOL Time Warner did was to leave John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox in charge of the Braves but the big money that Ted Turner provided to the club was gone. Today, the Atlanta Braves baseball team is run as a mid market franchise and is no longer "America's Team."
To blame Time Warner for the demise of the Atlanta Thrashers may be a bit of a stretch as the company washed its hand of the team eight years ago. Back in 1997, it was a foregone conclusion that Ted Turner was going to get a National Hockey League expansion team in Atlanta and that Dr. Schiller and Kasten were the kind of people the NHL wanted. Turner had the checkbook to buy a franchise for $80 million, there would be a new arena opening in the city and he could put together a regional cable TV network. There was always a possibility that the NHL could get a cable TV network contract with Turner Sports. He could also get corporate support. But the Time Warner takeover of Turner's company and then the AOL-Time Warner merger ended that.
The AOL Time Warner debacle came under President Bill Clinton's watch. Clinton also signed the 1996 TeleCommunications Act into law, an act that virtually destroyed local radio and ended up created two radio giants—Infinity and Clear Channel—and changed the industry.
Vertical integration failed.
Time Warner's Turner Sports still has some major properties. The NBA on TNT, Major League Baseball on TBS, NASCAR on TNT, NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV along with ncaa.com, nascar.com,nba.com, pga.com, pgatour.com. Atlanta Braves games are on Peachtree TV but Turner does not produce the games.
Time Warner was an original partner of the Fred Wilpon/New York Mets' SNY regional sports network. But Time Warner got rid of Time Warner Cable in 2009. Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are separate companies and Time Warner Cable has a piece of SNY.
Media companies got bigger and were too big to fail but failed. Time Warner and Clear Channel have been bad stewards of media properties. Time Warner is out of the sports ownership business. Bad owners ruin sports and the guys at Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner whether it was Gerald Levin or Steve Case is at the top of the list of bad sports owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition" is available at bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Islanders new arena may be the grand prize in Nassau County casino bid
Islanders new arena may be the grand prize in Nassau County casino bid
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m7d16-Islanders-new-arena-may-be-the-grand-prize-in-Nassau-County-casino-bid
(New York, N. Y.) -- On April 16 of this year, former Hempstead Town Supervisor and former United States Senator from New York Al D'Amato told this reporter that there would be a resolution to the stalemate between New York Islanders owner Charles Wang and present Hempstead Town Supervisor Kate Murray over the future of the Nassau Coliseum and the area around the nearly four decades old building.
On April 16, D'Amato didn't say exactly how the saga would end but it would end favorably. There would be something, whether it was a rebuilt arena or a new venue for Charles Wang and the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League.
A few days later came word from Nassau County Supervisor Edward Mangano that he thought that a casino could be built on the land that Wang wanted for a renovated Coliseum and what amounted to an arena-village plan on the 77 acres of property. The casino plan came seemingly out of nowhere but it really didn’t. Mangano announced the possibility of a casino arena and then D’Amato in his Long Island Herald newspaper a little while later took great pains to explain why a casino made more sense than Wang’s Lighthouse Project.
D’Amato has not been in the Senate since 1998, but Park Strategies, LLC has an office in Washington and the Park Strategies LLC business card lists Alfonse M. D’Amato as Managing Director. D’Amato also is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Poker Players Alliance, a pro gaming group.
Murray never liked the Lighthouse Project plan even though Nassau County owned the land. (This would be a brilliant segue way in radio to change the subject to a how come the Hempstead Town Supervisor has the jurisdiction over county owned land but that is another issue for another day.)
Murray shot down Wang's proposal earlier this week but Mangano has again advanced the notion that the casino-arena plan is on the table.
There are many layers of analysis that should take place in examining the whole Nassau Coliseum issue including why Murray has been somewhat vague in her explanations as to why the Wang plan is unworkable.
No one knows if Wang and his partner Scott Rechler really have the $3.7 billion needed to fund the project and no one seems to know how the taxes will be collected from the property if it ever gets built.
Murray has been shielded from real media scrutiny because there is no media watchdog questioning her motives in Nassau County because the owner of Madison Square Garden, Charles Dolan (who is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Wang for Islanders cable TV rights) owns the area's two largest news organizations, the cash strapped Newsday and the journalist deficient News12.
The Wang plan should be major news in an everyday way because local residents are impacted whatever the decision. People like Murray have a get out of jail card from local media in virtually every community in the United States as news coverage has degenerated from covering facts to shouting sound bites with little meaning.
Journalists have ceded the profession to people screaming on radio or cable TV like former sportscasters, drug addicts, gamblers, political operatives and other people who would not be welcomed in most living rooms who set political agendas. These people pontificate yet know almost nothing about issues but Don Imus has always issued this proviso, saying “we are only entertainers.”
Politicians’ exhibit sheer arrogance and lack humility these days because journalists do not relentlessly pressure them in asking questions and never force them on the spot. When a politician gets questioned, a political appointee whose job it is to protect the politician from saying anything stupid or truthful in a bad way generally gets in the way of a questioner. The appointee worked on a campaign either as a spokesperson or stuffed envelopes or drove political people around.
The appointee takes public funds to protect the politician from the public who elected him or her in the event the politician says something stupid. It sort of validates the longtime television journalist David Brinkley's thought that people should not gush all over politicians since they are lucky to have a job.
Murray's luck may have started running out though on April 16 when D'Amato who is ever the power broker let it be known that there would be a solution. The casino idea is now in play because D'Amato wants it to be in play. D'Amato's partner in the endeavor besides the Nassau County Supervisor seems to be the Shinnecock Nation which is a federally recognized tribe on Long Island. The Shinnecocks have talked about opening about building a casino somewhere in Suffolk County in the past with the Ilitch Family.
Would the Shinnecocks, if the tribe got the land and built the casino, pay taxes to Murray’s Town of Hempstead? Possibly not and that might be a political problem for Murray.
A strange coincidence here or maybe not so strange. The Ilitch family owns Major League Baseball's Detroit Tigers, the National Hockey League's Detroit Red Wings, the Motor City Casino in Detroit, Gateway Casino Resorts and other gaming interests. Mike Ilitch's wife Marian has divested herself of the sports teams so there is not a conflict of interest as sports organizations allegedly want to distance themselves from sports unless there is a need. (Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert has the licensee to run the new Cleveland casino which will open adjacent to the arena that houses his basketball team).
The new Pittsburgh arena, where the NHL's Penguins play, was funded by proceeds from a Pittsburgh-based casino.
Casinos and gambling have become the piggy bank for communities and municipalities that now depend on one armed bandits to bail them out of dire financial straits or as economic engines to drive jobs. The manufacturing base in the United States is a lot smaller as jobs went elsewhere and overseas but the gaming industry keeps growing and growing. Sports leagues claim they stay away from gaming but WNBA Commissioner David Stern has one WNBA owner, the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, and all sports have marketing relationships with casinos these days.
Wang owns a National Hockey League team and while there are no details emerging from a possible arena-casino plan, it is a proposal that could work in Wang's favor.
Former Islanders Public Relations Director Chris Botta broke the latest twist of the Wang-Murray stare down in his Islanders Point Blank blog. He boiled it down to three key areas that makes the plan attractive to Wang and keeps Murray's hands off of the redevelopment of county property that is in her jurisdiction.
1) By partnering with the Islanders on the arena and the Shinnecock tribe on the entertainment complex, Mangano would not need any approvals from the Town of Hempstead.
2) After a decade of settling for a “transformed” arena and not the real thing at the insistence of politicians, the Islanders would have the genuine state-of-the-art facility they need to keep up in the NHL. If the team is competitive, free agents would have no more excuses not to sign on. (A new training facility, plus limited retail and office space, would be part of any new arena and also would not need Town of Hempstead approval).
3) If the entertainment complex can be fully realized in scope and profit margins on the level of the best in the East like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, the revenue needs of the Islanders could be addressed without the Lighthouse battle over residential units. The new casino would include a hotel and would not fall under Kate Murray’s zoning jurisdiction.
Wang had Murray's approval for a rebuilt arena but wanted more and he could not be blamed. Nassau County was willing to give a developer the land. Murray felt that Wang's mixed use proposal was too big and would take away from the suburban atmosphere of the area which includes Hofstra University, a parkway and some nearby shopping malls. Actually it is a snapshot of most of America come to think of it. Strip malls and a parkway near a commercial zone.
One former Islanders defenseman said in June he Wang should have settled for the rebuilt arena and that Wang was too greedy. Murray and her backers agreed to that phase of the plan. Murray cut back the project significantly and one of her political appointees (the envelope stuffers, the drivers who don't have to take public service exams and yet end up on the public dole for doing nothing except being part of a winning political campaign) didn't stop her from sounding stupid when she said "these were serious numbers that were scenically arrived at" in an interview with Dolan's paper.
Murray sounded more like a Lucky Strike commercial on the radio version of The Jack Benny Program of the 1940s than a smart politician (LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, was the tagline after some scientist or doctor spoke of the benefits of smoking even though cigarette companies knew that smoking was doing harm) in that interview.
D'Amato has not gone away and the Shinnecock Casino Plan should not be dismissed when looking at the possible players that might line up behind Wang including D'Amato and Ilitch. D'Amato still runs things in the Republican Party in Nassau County and his vision for the Nassau Coliseum might be Kate Murray (and her envelope stuffers) worst nightmare.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator, and a speaking on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m7d16-Islanders-new-arena-may-be-the-grand-prize-in-Nassau-County-casino-bid
(New York, N. Y.) -- On April 16 of this year, former Hempstead Town Supervisor and former United States Senator from New York Al D'Amato told this reporter that there would be a resolution to the stalemate between New York Islanders owner Charles Wang and present Hempstead Town Supervisor Kate Murray over the future of the Nassau Coliseum and the area around the nearly four decades old building.
On April 16, D'Amato didn't say exactly how the saga would end but it would end favorably. There would be something, whether it was a rebuilt arena or a new venue for Charles Wang and the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League.
A few days later came word from Nassau County Supervisor Edward Mangano that he thought that a casino could be built on the land that Wang wanted for a renovated Coliseum and what amounted to an arena-village plan on the 77 acres of property. The casino plan came seemingly out of nowhere but it really didn’t. Mangano announced the possibility of a casino arena and then D’Amato in his Long Island Herald newspaper a little while later took great pains to explain why a casino made more sense than Wang’s Lighthouse Project.
D’Amato has not been in the Senate since 1998, but Park Strategies, LLC has an office in Washington and the Park Strategies LLC business card lists Alfonse M. D’Amato as Managing Director. D’Amato also is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Poker Players Alliance, a pro gaming group.
Murray never liked the Lighthouse Project plan even though Nassau County owned the land. (This would be a brilliant segue way in radio to change the subject to a how come the Hempstead Town Supervisor has the jurisdiction over county owned land but that is another issue for another day.)
Murray shot down Wang's proposal earlier this week but Mangano has again advanced the notion that the casino-arena plan is on the table.
There are many layers of analysis that should take place in examining the whole Nassau Coliseum issue including why Murray has been somewhat vague in her explanations as to why the Wang plan is unworkable.
No one knows if Wang and his partner Scott Rechler really have the $3.7 billion needed to fund the project and no one seems to know how the taxes will be collected from the property if it ever gets built.
Murray has been shielded from real media scrutiny because there is no media watchdog questioning her motives in Nassau County because the owner of Madison Square Garden, Charles Dolan (who is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Wang for Islanders cable TV rights) owns the area's two largest news organizations, the cash strapped Newsday and the journalist deficient News12.
The Wang plan should be major news in an everyday way because local residents are impacted whatever the decision. People like Murray have a get out of jail card from local media in virtually every community in the United States as news coverage has degenerated from covering facts to shouting sound bites with little meaning.
Journalists have ceded the profession to people screaming on radio or cable TV like former sportscasters, drug addicts, gamblers, political operatives and other people who would not be welcomed in most living rooms who set political agendas. These people pontificate yet know almost nothing about issues but Don Imus has always issued this proviso, saying “we are only entertainers.”
Politicians’ exhibit sheer arrogance and lack humility these days because journalists do not relentlessly pressure them in asking questions and never force them on the spot. When a politician gets questioned, a political appointee whose job it is to protect the politician from saying anything stupid or truthful in a bad way generally gets in the way of a questioner. The appointee worked on a campaign either as a spokesperson or stuffed envelopes or drove political people around.
The appointee takes public funds to protect the politician from the public who elected him or her in the event the politician says something stupid. It sort of validates the longtime television journalist David Brinkley's thought that people should not gush all over politicians since they are lucky to have a job.
Murray's luck may have started running out though on April 16 when D'Amato who is ever the power broker let it be known that there would be a solution. The casino idea is now in play because D'Amato wants it to be in play. D'Amato's partner in the endeavor besides the Nassau County Supervisor seems to be the Shinnecock Nation which is a federally recognized tribe on Long Island. The Shinnecocks have talked about opening about building a casino somewhere in Suffolk County in the past with the Ilitch Family.
Would the Shinnecocks, if the tribe got the land and built the casino, pay taxes to Murray’s Town of Hempstead? Possibly not and that might be a political problem for Murray.
A strange coincidence here or maybe not so strange. The Ilitch family owns Major League Baseball's Detroit Tigers, the National Hockey League's Detroit Red Wings, the Motor City Casino in Detroit, Gateway Casino Resorts and other gaming interests. Mike Ilitch's wife Marian has divested herself of the sports teams so there is not a conflict of interest as sports organizations allegedly want to distance themselves from sports unless there is a need. (Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert has the licensee to run the new Cleveland casino which will open adjacent to the arena that houses his basketball team).
The new Pittsburgh arena, where the NHL's Penguins play, was funded by proceeds from a Pittsburgh-based casino.
Casinos and gambling have become the piggy bank for communities and municipalities that now depend on one armed bandits to bail them out of dire financial straits or as economic engines to drive jobs. The manufacturing base in the United States is a lot smaller as jobs went elsewhere and overseas but the gaming industry keeps growing and growing. Sports leagues claim they stay away from gaming but WNBA Commissioner David Stern has one WNBA owner, the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, and all sports have marketing relationships with casinos these days.
Wang owns a National Hockey League team and while there are no details emerging from a possible arena-casino plan, it is a proposal that could work in Wang's favor.
Former Islanders Public Relations Director Chris Botta broke the latest twist of the Wang-Murray stare down in his Islanders Point Blank blog. He boiled it down to three key areas that makes the plan attractive to Wang and keeps Murray's hands off of the redevelopment of county property that is in her jurisdiction.
1) By partnering with the Islanders on the arena and the Shinnecock tribe on the entertainment complex, Mangano would not need any approvals from the Town of Hempstead.
2) After a decade of settling for a “transformed” arena and not the real thing at the insistence of politicians, the Islanders would have the genuine state-of-the-art facility they need to keep up in the NHL. If the team is competitive, free agents would have no more excuses not to sign on. (A new training facility, plus limited retail and office space, would be part of any new arena and also would not need Town of Hempstead approval).
3) If the entertainment complex can be fully realized in scope and profit margins on the level of the best in the East like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, the revenue needs of the Islanders could be addressed without the Lighthouse battle over residential units. The new casino would include a hotel and would not fall under Kate Murray’s zoning jurisdiction.
Wang had Murray's approval for a rebuilt arena but wanted more and he could not be blamed. Nassau County was willing to give a developer the land. Murray felt that Wang's mixed use proposal was too big and would take away from the suburban atmosphere of the area which includes Hofstra University, a parkway and some nearby shopping malls. Actually it is a snapshot of most of America come to think of it. Strip malls and a parkway near a commercial zone.
One former Islanders defenseman said in June he Wang should have settled for the rebuilt arena and that Wang was too greedy. Murray and her backers agreed to that phase of the plan. Murray cut back the project significantly and one of her political appointees (the envelope stuffers, the drivers who don't have to take public service exams and yet end up on the public dole for doing nothing except being part of a winning political campaign) didn't stop her from sounding stupid when she said "these were serious numbers that were scenically arrived at" in an interview with Dolan's paper.
Murray sounded more like a Lucky Strike commercial on the radio version of The Jack Benny Program of the 1940s than a smart politician (LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, was the tagline after some scientist or doctor spoke of the benefits of smoking even though cigarette companies knew that smoking was doing harm) in that interview.
D'Amato has not gone away and the Shinnecock Casino Plan should not be dismissed when looking at the possible players that might line up behind Wang including D'Amato and Ilitch. D'Amato still runs things in the Republican Party in Nassau County and his vision for the Nassau Coliseum might be Kate Murray (and her envelope stuffers) worst nightmare.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator, and a speaking on the "Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Is the Left Wing to Blame for Nassau County's Lighthouse Failure?
Is the Left Wing to Blame for Nassau County’s Lighthouse Failure?
By Evan Weiner
April 18, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d18-Is-the-left-wing-to-blame-for-Nassau-Countys-Lighthouse-Project-failure#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Are there too many left wingers involved in Charles Wang's bid to build the Lighthouse project which includes a renovation of the Nassau Coliseum for Hempstead Town Supervisor, the Republican, Kate Murray's liking? As implausible as that might seem and as ironic as that might seem as Wang's National Hockey League's New York islanders have a major problem at left wing, one very prominent Republican insider who has intimate knowledge of the Islanders-Nassau Coliseum lease for decades said there are too many left wingers involved in Wang's bid to gain approval from Murray and Hempstead to build the Lighthouse Project.
The “Political Wise Guy” does think that eventually Murray and Wang will come to some sort of resolution but the left wing problem is real. The political wise guy information came after a Quebec-based business knocked down a rumor that they were about ready to buy the Islanders and move the team to Quebec City on Friday.
As far as anyone can tell, Wang has not brought in the Republican's top left wing target, George Soros or MoveOn.org. There has never been affirmation that Wang and his developer Scott Rechler have the funds needed to complete the project or who are the financiers helping them. It is totally unclear how or why Murray and the Nassau County Republicans came up with the left wing excuse.
But the left wing issue should be part of the equation.
Perhaps Murray and the Nassau County GOP have looked at the supporters of the project which includes an awful lot of unions, academia, clergy and Democrats led by people like the Long Island Federation of Labor. Labor and education seem to be the mortal enemies of the both the local and national Republican Party these days. Wang looked like he has making headway with Nassau County, the entity that owns the land he is seeking when Thomas Suozzi was the County Executive. Suozzi, a Democrat, lost in an effort to win re-election to Republican Ed Mangano. Mangano has been almost Harpo Marx-like in his comments on rebuilding the Coliseum and the Lighthouse Project.
In the end, it is Hempstead that has to approve the plan, not Nassau County.
Neither Murray nor Mangano nor the GOP have ever used the "left wing" card until now but the Republicans in Nassau were not very happy when Suozzi changed the terms of the Islanders lease before he left office and gave Wang additional revenues out of the old white building that was located on old Army/Air Force base.
The highly influential Republican insider's should clearly put Murray on the spot. The local media should be all over Murray and ask a simple question. Is it true that Hempstead will not approve the Wang-Rechler plan because there are too many left wing elements surround the developers? The Lighthouse Project has dragged on for years now yet it remains at best a lukewarm news item for Long Island's major media outlets, the Charles Dolan-owned newspaper, Newsday, and the Charles Dolan-owned cable television outlet, News12.
(Disclaimer, I was a an Op Ed contributor for Newsday, along with the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel between 2001 and 2005 when the three papers were owned by the Tribune Company. Dolan's SportsChannel entity through his program director Michael Lardner turned down a television project I created in the late 1980s.)
Neither Newsday nor News12 are first rate news operations. Dolan purchased a newspaper that was laying off workers and cutting back coverage. The paper is a mere shell of what it was before the Tribune Company decided that it was not making enough profit and laid off reporters and other workers. News12 Westchester and News12 Connecticut specialize in police runs and don't do any in depth coverage of ongoing issues. Dolan's News12's subscribe to the murder, mayhem, sports, entertainment and weather theory of news and giving the people want they want. TV documentaries are not a part of the Dolan news game plan.
It is not likely that either of Dolan's news arms will go after Murray to find out if the Lighthouse Project is being held up by partisanship based on some evidence that two reporters the reassigned after complaints by Suffolk County Executive, the Democrat turned Republican Steve Levy who is running for Governor in New York as a Republican. If Newsday folded like a cheap suit when Levy balked at coverage, will the paper stand up to Murray?
Doubtful.
But it is a job of a reporter to get to the bottom of a story and if the Political Wise Guy who was working on making the Nassau Coliseum profitable when the place was less than 10 years old without hesitation brings up the left wing issue, then there is a story worth pursuing.
By the way, Murray is a public worker and was hired by the people. She should be subjected to tough questioning if her boss decides he or she has questions of the Supervisor.
Politicians happen to work for people, people don't work for politicians. If it is true Murray is holding up the building process on political gamesmanship and not the merits of the case, she ought to be held accountable and that is where Dolan's media entities come in. Of course, there are many conflicts in the whole Dolan matter. Murray's Town of Hempstead has to renew Charles Dolan's Cablevision license to operate a cable company every number of years. Dolan has amassed a lot of power because he has relationships with virtually every municipality in Nassau and Suffolk County.
The Islanders franchise has never been about hockey. Hempstead or Uniondale where the Coliseum is actually located had some land and decided to develop an arena. The National Hockey League in 1971 was confronted with the news that a rival league, the World Hockey Association, was forming and the NHL decided to deny the new WHA a foothold in the New York City marketplace and "expanded" into Uniondale.
The Nassau Coliseum has always been a home for political patronage for Nassau GOP.
Nassau County Republicans awarded a no-bid concessions contract at the new arena to a prominent GOP contributor in 1972. The arena was a money-losing venture from the very start. The prominent GOP contributor was found in 1973 to have underpaid the county in concession revenues.
The GOP put their operatives in the Coliseum, gave them jobs and found themselves defending huge deficits at the new building.
The Coliseum was a dumping ground for political patrons.
Meanwhile the Nets and Islanders owner Roy Boe was underfunded and the basketball team was losing money. Ultimately Boe would agree to join the NBA with three other ABA teams in 1976 at a price of $3.2 million for the right to be an NBA team and then there was a $4.8 million charge for “invading” the New York Knicks territory. Boe could not afford the bills and sold his main draw Julius Erving to Philadelphia. Boe’s Nets would never recover from the merger and sale and Boe sold the team to New Jersey interests who moved the team to Piscataway, New Jersey in 1977. The Islanders nearly suffered the same fate in the late 1970s and were saved when a minority owner John O. Pickett stepped in.
Pickett’s team was aided by a huge cash infusion from the relatively new cable TV company, Charles Dolan’s Cablevision, and the team’s finances stabilized.
The Islanders franchise was a combination, GOP business and cable entity and Dolan was able to use the big money contract as a loss leader for his SportsChannel enterprise by pointing out to the various towns, villages and municipalities that enfranchised Cablevision in Nassau and Suffolk County that we had local programming nobody else did---the Islanders.
Dolan also hired political operatives---mostly Republicans—to help expand Cablevision on Long Island.
At the same time, the Coliseum was losing money. The Hempstead Town Supervisor, Alfonse D’Amato brokered a deal that gave Hyatt Management a five-year contract to run the Coliseum. The deal started in 1979 and D’Amato promised that the county would show a profit on the venue with Hyatt. D’Amato was wrong and the building lost money in 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982. D’Amato was gone by 1981 as he was elected to the Senate. His successor Thomas Gulotta wanted Hyatt gone but Nassau County Executive Francis Purcell extended the Hyatt deal, the company was now called Spectator Management Group, through 2015.
By the mid-1990s, the Islanders franchise became part of a real estate package that piqued the interest of a New York City developer, Howard Millstein. Pickett sold the Islanders to Millstein and Steven Gluckstern in 1997 and the New York City developer planned to build a new arena on the property along with other structures. Millstein and County Executive Gulotta worked out a deal which fell apart at the last minute. Unofficially the word was the two sides could not agree on who was going to build the venue, Millstein wanted his people, Gulotta wanted his people.
Millstein tried to get out of the lease that gave the hockey team no share of parking and concession revenue. Millstein and Gluckstern sold the Islanders and the Dolan cable TV deal to Wang in 2000.
In 2007 Wang proposed the “Lighthouse Project” which would have rebuilt the Coliseum and developed the land surrounding the building. The project has been in political limbo since then and no one is talking right now.
But someone has talked, albeit off the record, a political wise guy in the know. Someone now has to talk to Murray and get her to deny that there are too many left wingers involved with the Wang-Rechler plan or if there is another motive in delaying, delay and delaying a decision on the Lighthouse Project.
There is something wrong when any political decision, whether it is made in Hempstead or Washington is caused by political partisanship rather than the merits of the issue. It is time someone asked Murray the question as to why the Lighthouse has been held up and whether it is because there are too many left wingers in the bid?
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, columnist and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
April 18, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d18-Is-the-left-wing-to-blame-for-Nassau-Countys-Lighthouse-Project-failure#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Are there too many left wingers involved in Charles Wang's bid to build the Lighthouse project which includes a renovation of the Nassau Coliseum for Hempstead Town Supervisor, the Republican, Kate Murray's liking? As implausible as that might seem and as ironic as that might seem as Wang's National Hockey League's New York islanders have a major problem at left wing, one very prominent Republican insider who has intimate knowledge of the Islanders-Nassau Coliseum lease for decades said there are too many left wingers involved in Wang's bid to gain approval from Murray and Hempstead to build the Lighthouse Project.
The “Political Wise Guy” does think that eventually Murray and Wang will come to some sort of resolution but the left wing problem is real. The political wise guy information came after a Quebec-based business knocked down a rumor that they were about ready to buy the Islanders and move the team to Quebec City on Friday.
As far as anyone can tell, Wang has not brought in the Republican's top left wing target, George Soros or MoveOn.org. There has never been affirmation that Wang and his developer Scott Rechler have the funds needed to complete the project or who are the financiers helping them. It is totally unclear how or why Murray and the Nassau County Republicans came up with the left wing excuse.
But the left wing issue should be part of the equation.
Perhaps Murray and the Nassau County GOP have looked at the supporters of the project which includes an awful lot of unions, academia, clergy and Democrats led by people like the Long Island Federation of Labor. Labor and education seem to be the mortal enemies of the both the local and national Republican Party these days. Wang looked like he has making headway with Nassau County, the entity that owns the land he is seeking when Thomas Suozzi was the County Executive. Suozzi, a Democrat, lost in an effort to win re-election to Republican Ed Mangano. Mangano has been almost Harpo Marx-like in his comments on rebuilding the Coliseum and the Lighthouse Project.
In the end, it is Hempstead that has to approve the plan, not Nassau County.
Neither Murray nor Mangano nor the GOP have ever used the "left wing" card until now but the Republicans in Nassau were not very happy when Suozzi changed the terms of the Islanders lease before he left office and gave Wang additional revenues out of the old white building that was located on old Army/Air Force base.
The highly influential Republican insider's should clearly put Murray on the spot. The local media should be all over Murray and ask a simple question. Is it true that Hempstead will not approve the Wang-Rechler plan because there are too many left wing elements surround the developers? The Lighthouse Project has dragged on for years now yet it remains at best a lukewarm news item for Long Island's major media outlets, the Charles Dolan-owned newspaper, Newsday, and the Charles Dolan-owned cable television outlet, News12.
(Disclaimer, I was a an Op Ed contributor for Newsday, along with the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel between 2001 and 2005 when the three papers were owned by the Tribune Company. Dolan's SportsChannel entity through his program director Michael Lardner turned down a television project I created in the late 1980s.)
Neither Newsday nor News12 are first rate news operations. Dolan purchased a newspaper that was laying off workers and cutting back coverage. The paper is a mere shell of what it was before the Tribune Company decided that it was not making enough profit and laid off reporters and other workers. News12 Westchester and News12 Connecticut specialize in police runs and don't do any in depth coverage of ongoing issues. Dolan's News12's subscribe to the murder, mayhem, sports, entertainment and weather theory of news and giving the people want they want. TV documentaries are not a part of the Dolan news game plan.
It is not likely that either of Dolan's news arms will go after Murray to find out if the Lighthouse Project is being held up by partisanship based on some evidence that two reporters the reassigned after complaints by Suffolk County Executive, the Democrat turned Republican Steve Levy who is running for Governor in New York as a Republican. If Newsday folded like a cheap suit when Levy balked at coverage, will the paper stand up to Murray?
Doubtful.
But it is a job of a reporter to get to the bottom of a story and if the Political Wise Guy who was working on making the Nassau Coliseum profitable when the place was less than 10 years old without hesitation brings up the left wing issue, then there is a story worth pursuing.
By the way, Murray is a public worker and was hired by the people. She should be subjected to tough questioning if her boss decides he or she has questions of the Supervisor.
Politicians happen to work for people, people don't work for politicians. If it is true Murray is holding up the building process on political gamesmanship and not the merits of the case, she ought to be held accountable and that is where Dolan's media entities come in. Of course, there are many conflicts in the whole Dolan matter. Murray's Town of Hempstead has to renew Charles Dolan's Cablevision license to operate a cable company every number of years. Dolan has amassed a lot of power because he has relationships with virtually every municipality in Nassau and Suffolk County.
The Islanders franchise has never been about hockey. Hempstead or Uniondale where the Coliseum is actually located had some land and decided to develop an arena. The National Hockey League in 1971 was confronted with the news that a rival league, the World Hockey Association, was forming and the NHL decided to deny the new WHA a foothold in the New York City marketplace and "expanded" into Uniondale.
The Nassau Coliseum has always been a home for political patronage for Nassau GOP.
Nassau County Republicans awarded a no-bid concessions contract at the new arena to a prominent GOP contributor in 1972. The arena was a money-losing venture from the very start. The prominent GOP contributor was found in 1973 to have underpaid the county in concession revenues.
The GOP put their operatives in the Coliseum, gave them jobs and found themselves defending huge deficits at the new building.
The Coliseum was a dumping ground for political patrons.
Meanwhile the Nets and Islanders owner Roy Boe was underfunded and the basketball team was losing money. Ultimately Boe would agree to join the NBA with three other ABA teams in 1976 at a price of $3.2 million for the right to be an NBA team and then there was a $4.8 million charge for “invading” the New York Knicks territory. Boe could not afford the bills and sold his main draw Julius Erving to Philadelphia. Boe’s Nets would never recover from the merger and sale and Boe sold the team to New Jersey interests who moved the team to Piscataway, New Jersey in 1977. The Islanders nearly suffered the same fate in the late 1970s and were saved when a minority owner John O. Pickett stepped in.
Pickett’s team was aided by a huge cash infusion from the relatively new cable TV company, Charles Dolan’s Cablevision, and the team’s finances stabilized.
The Islanders franchise was a combination, GOP business and cable entity and Dolan was able to use the big money contract as a loss leader for his SportsChannel enterprise by pointing out to the various towns, villages and municipalities that enfranchised Cablevision in Nassau and Suffolk County that we had local programming nobody else did---the Islanders.
Dolan also hired political operatives---mostly Republicans—to help expand Cablevision on Long Island.
At the same time, the Coliseum was losing money. The Hempstead Town Supervisor, Alfonse D’Amato brokered a deal that gave Hyatt Management a five-year contract to run the Coliseum. The deal started in 1979 and D’Amato promised that the county would show a profit on the venue with Hyatt. D’Amato was wrong and the building lost money in 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1982. D’Amato was gone by 1981 as he was elected to the Senate. His successor Thomas Gulotta wanted Hyatt gone but Nassau County Executive Francis Purcell extended the Hyatt deal, the company was now called Spectator Management Group, through 2015.
By the mid-1990s, the Islanders franchise became part of a real estate package that piqued the interest of a New York City developer, Howard Millstein. Pickett sold the Islanders to Millstein and Steven Gluckstern in 1997 and the New York City developer planned to build a new arena on the property along with other structures. Millstein and County Executive Gulotta worked out a deal which fell apart at the last minute. Unofficially the word was the two sides could not agree on who was going to build the venue, Millstein wanted his people, Gulotta wanted his people.
Millstein tried to get out of the lease that gave the hockey team no share of parking and concession revenue. Millstein and Gluckstern sold the Islanders and the Dolan cable TV deal to Wang in 2000.
In 2007 Wang proposed the “Lighthouse Project” which would have rebuilt the Coliseum and developed the land surrounding the building. The project has been in political limbo since then and no one is talking right now.
But someone has talked, albeit off the record, a political wise guy in the know. Someone now has to talk to Murray and get her to deny that there are too many left wingers involved with the Wang-Rechler plan or if there is another motive in delaying, delay and delaying a decision on the Lighthouse Project.
There is something wrong when any political decision, whether it is made in Hempstead or Washington is caused by political partisanship rather than the merits of the issue. It is time someone asked Murray the question as to why the Lighthouse has been held up and whether it is because there are too many left wingers in the bid?
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator, columnist and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Minnesota and Glendale Lawmakers Inch Closer to New Sports Deals
Minnesota and Glendale Lawmakers Inch Closer to New Sports Deals
By Evan Weiner
April 8, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d8-Minnesota-and-Glendale-lawmakers-inch-closer-to-new-sports-deals#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Local governments and sports teams have a partnership; there is no getting around that. In cash-strapped states like Arizona and Minnesota, elected officials are trying to figure out the best way to go in keeping local franchises put. Glendale, Arizona has a relatively new, publicly financed, arena that houses a bankrupt National Hockey League franchise, the Phoenix Coyotes.
Now Glendale is weighing two proposals from Coyotes suitors who would purchase the team and keep the franchise in Glendale.
In the St. Paul, Minnesota statehouses, it appears that lawmakers are warming up to some sort of deal to build the National Football League's Minnesota Vikings a new facility so that Vikings owner Zygi Wilf can utilize revenue streams that an unavailable from the Minneapolis-based Metrodome, to help fund the team.
Government support for athletic facilities stretches out over six decades with Oakland officials back in 1944 thinking of using public money to build a stadium. The real breakthrough in government support of professional sports franchises came in 1950 when Milwaukee elected officials decided to build a new stadium with public funding that they hoped would attract a Major League Baseball team and keep the Green Bay Packers playing a portion of the team's NFL schedule in town. The gambit paid off as Milwaukee officials enticed Boston Braves owner Lou Perini to move his Braves in March 1953 just a few weeks prior to the season. The stadium was enough of a lure to keep the Green Bay Packers.
Perini made a ton of money in Milwaukee and it got Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley to worry that Brooklyn would not be able to compete with Milwaukee financially. O’Malley would eventually take an offer from Los Angeles and move his team from Brooklyn even though O’Malley’s Dodgers led the National League in revenue in 1957, the final year O’Malley had a team in Brooklyn.
Perini's move started sports free agency long before an arbitrator gave Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith free agency in baseball in 1975. Owners decided to play city against city in an effort to get the best stadium or arena deal available, and the 1986 Tax Act poured gasoline on smoldering flames as the new law restricted the amount of revenue generated inside an athletic facility that went off to pay the public debt on a municipally funded stadium to just eight cents on every dollar.
Major League Baseball expanded to Denver, Miami, Phoenix and St. Petersburg and moved the Montreal Expos to Washington. Virtually every team in Major League Baseball got a new or renovated facility with the exception of Oakland.
Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff is looking to move his team with San Jose the object of his affection after flirting with Fremont, California near San Jose.
The National Football League got a publicly financed stadium in Jacksonville and expanded into that city while Jerry Richardson built a privately funded facility in Charlotte using personal seat licenses to fund the stadium.
Richardson's stadium created another monster. People had to buy a seat license and then buy a ticket to use the seat.
Wilf is one of the last of the NFL owners who has not taken advantage of government money to build a "factory" for his business. Wilf may have state legislators and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty over a barrel in his quest for a new facility. The state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years for a new baseball stadium for the Twins and a new facility for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers using various taxes to fund the venues. Wilf's Metrodome deal with the state is up after the 2011 season and there is a possibility that Wilf could use the possible construction of a new stadium east of Los Angeles as leverage in his battle to get a new Vikings stadium somewhere in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
Wilf is not the only NFL owner looking for public funding. The York family, the owners of the San Francisco 49ers, is hoping that Santa Clara, California voters will look favorably at them and give them a new stadium in a June vote. Should that fail, look for both Oakland and San Francisco to start wooing the Yorks again and might ask Al Davis to join the Yorks and put his Oakland Raiders in a new stadium. The Buffalo Bills/New York State lease in Orchard Park is up after the 2012 season.
Wilf, the Yorks, Al Davis and possibly Wayne Weaver in Jacksonville have limited options though. Weaver’s Jaguars franchise is struggling to sell seats at Jacksonville’s stadium and there is no stadium available in LA equipped to handle the NFL's needs at this point. Ralph Wilson has sold a number of Bills home games to Toronto through the 2012 season. Toronto does not have a "suitable" NFL facility but there is a lot of money on Bay Street and the NFL knows that.
Meanwhile there seems to be action in Glendale regarding the sale of the Coyotes. Glendale has memoranda of understanding with two groups vying to but the bankrupt franchise, Ice Edge Holdings and the group led by Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Although the National Hockey League has the final say on the future owner of the Coyotes, Glendale apparently feels uncomfortable that the city can go ahead with an agreement. Whatever the final deal is, Glendale will have to make major concessions to keep the team skating in the arena. Glendale plans to hold a public hearing on the matter on April 13.
Many cities, counties and state governments have used a variety of mechanisms to attract and keep sports teams including payment in lieu of taxes instead of full property tax payment or tax incremental funding or creating special tax districts around a facility whereby an owner keeps all of the taxes that would normally flow into municipal coffers. Cities, counties and states have assumed the responsibility of paying off the entire cost of a stadium and in one case, New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson was given a cash payment in exchanging for keeping his Saints in the New Orleans Superdome. In July, Benson will get a $23 million check from Louisiana as a thank you for sticking around as part of a $186 million bailout between 2002 and 2010. Benson and the state crafted a new deal that substantially reduces Louisiana's annual payment but Benson gets to own an office building near the Superdome that will house state government offices and create an entertainment zone around the Superdome in exchange. Benson will get Louisiana money but not a straight handout starting in 2011.
New arenas do not mean success however. Memphis and Charlotte are prime examples of financial failures in the NBA despite new surroundings and the Phoenix Coyotes have a poor financial legacy.
But sports leagues are monopolies and city, county and state officials like being branded “Big League.” It takes a long time for a city to replace a team in most circumstances with Cleveland being a lone exception. The NFL got a municipally funded stadium agreement with Cleveland Mayor Michael White not long after Browns owner announced that he was taking his team to Baltimore for the 1996 season in the fall of 1995. Cleveland threatened to sue the NFL and by February 1996 a plan was worked out and the NFL "expanded" into Cleveland in 1999. Cities that lose teams seemingly are punished and eventually work their way back in but that is a long and expensive process which is why Glendale officials and lawmakers in Minnesota are looking to resolve their situations and keep the teams. It is cheaper to keep them now than going after replacement teams in the future.
Evan Weiner is an author, lecturer and radio-TV journalist on the "Politics of Sports Business."
By Evan Weiner
April 8, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m4d8-Minnesota-and-Glendale-lawmakers-inch-closer-to-new-sports-deals#
(New York, N. Y.) -- Local governments and sports teams have a partnership; there is no getting around that. In cash-strapped states like Arizona and Minnesota, elected officials are trying to figure out the best way to go in keeping local franchises put. Glendale, Arizona has a relatively new, publicly financed, arena that houses a bankrupt National Hockey League franchise, the Phoenix Coyotes.
Now Glendale is weighing two proposals from Coyotes suitors who would purchase the team and keep the franchise in Glendale.
In the St. Paul, Minnesota statehouses, it appears that lawmakers are warming up to some sort of deal to build the National Football League's Minnesota Vikings a new facility so that Vikings owner Zygi Wilf can utilize revenue streams that an unavailable from the Minneapolis-based Metrodome, to help fund the team.
Government support for athletic facilities stretches out over six decades with Oakland officials back in 1944 thinking of using public money to build a stadium. The real breakthrough in government support of professional sports franchises came in 1950 when Milwaukee elected officials decided to build a new stadium with public funding that they hoped would attract a Major League Baseball team and keep the Green Bay Packers playing a portion of the team's NFL schedule in town. The gambit paid off as Milwaukee officials enticed Boston Braves owner Lou Perini to move his Braves in March 1953 just a few weeks prior to the season. The stadium was enough of a lure to keep the Green Bay Packers.
Perini made a ton of money in Milwaukee and it got Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley to worry that Brooklyn would not be able to compete with Milwaukee financially. O’Malley would eventually take an offer from Los Angeles and move his team from Brooklyn even though O’Malley’s Dodgers led the National League in revenue in 1957, the final year O’Malley had a team in Brooklyn.
Perini's move started sports free agency long before an arbitrator gave Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith free agency in baseball in 1975. Owners decided to play city against city in an effort to get the best stadium or arena deal available, and the 1986 Tax Act poured gasoline on smoldering flames as the new law restricted the amount of revenue generated inside an athletic facility that went off to pay the public debt on a municipally funded stadium to just eight cents on every dollar.
Major League Baseball expanded to Denver, Miami, Phoenix and St. Petersburg and moved the Montreal Expos to Washington. Virtually every team in Major League Baseball got a new or renovated facility with the exception of Oakland.
Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff is looking to move his team with San Jose the object of his affection after flirting with Fremont, California near San Jose.
The National Football League got a publicly financed stadium in Jacksonville and expanded into that city while Jerry Richardson built a privately funded facility in Charlotte using personal seat licenses to fund the stadium.
Richardson's stadium created another monster. People had to buy a seat license and then buy a ticket to use the seat.
Wilf is one of the last of the NFL owners who has not taken advantage of government money to build a "factory" for his business. Wilf may have state legislators and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty over a barrel in his quest for a new facility. The state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years for a new baseball stadium for the Twins and a new facility for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers using various taxes to fund the venues. Wilf's Metrodome deal with the state is up after the 2011 season and there is a possibility that Wilf could use the possible construction of a new stadium east of Los Angeles as leverage in his battle to get a new Vikings stadium somewhere in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
Wilf is not the only NFL owner looking for public funding. The York family, the owners of the San Francisco 49ers, is hoping that Santa Clara, California voters will look favorably at them and give them a new stadium in a June vote. Should that fail, look for both Oakland and San Francisco to start wooing the Yorks again and might ask Al Davis to join the Yorks and put his Oakland Raiders in a new stadium. The Buffalo Bills/New York State lease in Orchard Park is up after the 2012 season.
Wilf, the Yorks, Al Davis and possibly Wayne Weaver in Jacksonville have limited options though. Weaver’s Jaguars franchise is struggling to sell seats at Jacksonville’s stadium and there is no stadium available in LA equipped to handle the NFL's needs at this point. Ralph Wilson has sold a number of Bills home games to Toronto through the 2012 season. Toronto does not have a "suitable" NFL facility but there is a lot of money on Bay Street and the NFL knows that.
Meanwhile there seems to be action in Glendale regarding the sale of the Coyotes. Glendale has memoranda of understanding with two groups vying to but the bankrupt franchise, Ice Edge Holdings and the group led by Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Although the National Hockey League has the final say on the future owner of the Coyotes, Glendale apparently feels uncomfortable that the city can go ahead with an agreement. Whatever the final deal is, Glendale will have to make major concessions to keep the team skating in the arena. Glendale plans to hold a public hearing on the matter on April 13.
Many cities, counties and state governments have used a variety of mechanisms to attract and keep sports teams including payment in lieu of taxes instead of full property tax payment or tax incremental funding or creating special tax districts around a facility whereby an owner keeps all of the taxes that would normally flow into municipal coffers. Cities, counties and states have assumed the responsibility of paying off the entire cost of a stadium and in one case, New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson was given a cash payment in exchanging for keeping his Saints in the New Orleans Superdome. In July, Benson will get a $23 million check from Louisiana as a thank you for sticking around as part of a $186 million bailout between 2002 and 2010. Benson and the state crafted a new deal that substantially reduces Louisiana's annual payment but Benson gets to own an office building near the Superdome that will house state government offices and create an entertainment zone around the Superdome in exchange. Benson will get Louisiana money but not a straight handout starting in 2011.
New arenas do not mean success however. Memphis and Charlotte are prime examples of financial failures in the NBA despite new surroundings and the Phoenix Coyotes have a poor financial legacy.
But sports leagues are monopolies and city, county and state officials like being branded “Big League.” It takes a long time for a city to replace a team in most circumstances with Cleveland being a lone exception. The NFL got a municipally funded stadium agreement with Cleveland Mayor Michael White not long after Browns owner announced that he was taking his team to Baltimore for the 1996 season in the fall of 1995. Cleveland threatened to sue the NFL and by February 1996 a plan was worked out and the NFL "expanded" into Cleveland in 1999. Cities that lose teams seemingly are punished and eventually work their way back in but that is a long and expensive process which is why Glendale officials and lawmakers in Minnesota are looking to resolve their situations and keep the teams. It is cheaper to keep them now than going after replacement teams in the future.
Evan Weiner is an author, lecturer and radio-TV journalist on the "Politics of Sports Business."
Saturday, January 9, 2010
American Needle, the NFL and the Supreme Court of the United States
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m1d9-American-Needle-the-NFL-and-the-Supreme-Court-of-the-United-States
American Needle, the NFL and the Supreme Court of the United States
By Evan Weiner
January 9, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- The Supreme Court of the United States goes back to work this week and the nine justices have an interesting case on the docket.
American Needle Inc. v the NFL (Docket 08-661).
The Court is supposed to listen to arguments from American Needle attorneys and National Football League lawyers as to whether National Football League Properties, the National Football League and the 32 individual teams acted as one when the league awarded Reebok International an exclusive 10-year deal to produce hats and other headgear in 2001 in violation of Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
Reebok is now owned by Addidas AG.
National Football League Properties decided in 2000 that it would put the caps, hats and headgear license up for bid and would give the contract to one company. Prior to 2001, the league had an assortment of licensees for the manufacture of caps, hats and headgear with American Needle holding one of those licenses.
After Reebok won the bid, American Needle decided to file an antitrust lawsuit in Chicago against the NFL in December 2004. The NFL picked up victories on in lower level trial and appeals court but the small Buffalo Grove, Illinois-based American Needle Inc. decided to press on and take the case to the Supreme Court.
National Football League lawyers apparently have no problems arguing the case before the nine justices and basically told American Needle’s attorneys to bring it on.
The NFL has received support from the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. Major League Baseball, which received antitrust protection from the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1922 ruling against the Baltimore Terrapins because baseball was a game, not a business, is not involved with this particularly case.
This might be the case that the National Football League has been seeking for decades. A favorable decision by the SCOTUS would presumably give the league an antitrust blanket and allow the league to really act with monopoly powers although Congress in 1961 gave the league antitrust protection with the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy. Congress gave football owners another gift by allowing the June 8, 1966 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League in the fall of that year which ended a bidding war for players.
President Lyndon B. Johnson gave his approval to the merger when the AFL-NFL legislation was tacked onto another bill. New Orleans ended up with a football team because of the political maneuvering by Louisiana Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs who traded a no vote on the merger in exchange for a guarantee that New Orleans would receive a team as part of political horse trading.
The fact that American Needle wants to do business with the NFL is pretty obvious. A NFL product license can bring in a sizeable check for any company. American Needle is arguing that it should be allowed to talk to each of the 32 teams not just the league and that companies like American Needle should have the opportunity to talk to say Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones about a deal where presumably they can offer him more money than he could get from his 1/32 share of the revenue.
The American Needle Inc. v NFL Supreme Court battle has apparently made an awful lot of people nervous and it does not appear from those who have SCOTUS anxiety are from the NFL owners camp. The National Football League Coaches Association filed a brief with the court saying that an NFL victory could mean a salary cap for head coaches and a salary scale for assistants because the NFL would gain monopoly power.
Additionally, some are arguing that the NFL would push a TV agenda that would include the scheduling of games against High School and College contests during the High School and College football season which is presently not allowed under the terms of the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which would have a direct impact on attendance at High School contests across America and cut down on the TV audience of Saturday college games.
The National Football League Players Association, which is preparing strategy in collective bargaining talks with the league owners with the Collective Bargaining Agreement schedule to expire after the 2010 season, is worried that an NFL SCOTUS victory would harm the players bargaining abilities since the association has used the courts to settle labor disputes.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, the National Basketball Players Association and the National Hockey League Players Association are supporting the National Football League Players Association by filing a brief which is supporting American Needle.
The National Federation of State High School Associations wants to keep Friday Night Lights going with no NFL interference.
The Federal Trade Commission has asked the nine justices to “vacate the judgment of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District” because the FTC is of the opinion that the league is 32 separate entities and that the league violates section 1 and section 2 of the Sherman Act.
Legal experts from various law schools, other lawyers with opinions and media pumped up experts like the Chicago-based Marc Ganis are predicting doom for fans should the National Football League win the case. (Sportswriters should do some research instead of relying on "experts" like Ganis and law professors, lazy journalism on their part) The dire consequences include even higher costs for merchandise (the cost is extremely high now for those who have not shopped) to league wide higher league mandated ticket pricing (ticket prices are extraordinarily high and in some cases come with a personal seat licensing tab for those who have not noticed) to hiring cheaper players and putting an inferior brand of football on the field (guess the experts failed to watch any Detroit Lions games over the past five years or this year’s St. Louis Rams).
The NFL and other leagues are in a powerful position not necessarily because of consumer power. Congressional acts in 1961 and 1966 backed by the signatures of President Kennedy and Johnson made the NFL a juggernaut. The Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 cemented the National and American League of baseball position as the dominant baseball force. Congress would not take up a proposed American Basketball Association-National Basketball Association merger in the early 1970s which forced the NBA to find a Washington political insider to become the league’s commissioner. Former Kennedy and Johnson staffer Lawrence O’Brien became the NBA’s head man in 1975 and by 1976, the NBA absorbed four ABA teams, Denver, Indiana, New York and San Antonio with each team paying $3.2 million to join the new league. Additionally the Uniondale, N. Y.-based New York Nets had to pay the New York Knicks $4.8 million for invading Knicks territory.
The NBA dictated terms despite not having the type of monopoly powers that Major League Baseball was granted by the 1922 SCOTUS decision.
Sports leagues are powerful but are always mindful of Congress even though Pete Rozelle during the 1986 United States Football League v National Football League antitrust suit said leagues are natural monopolies in Judge Peter K. Leisure’s court room in lower Manhattan. Rozelle was regarded as a genius but that genius label came because of powers given to his league by Congress and two Presidents. Major League Baseball, despite a 1922 antitrust exemption, had to fend off the Continental Baseball League in 1960 and the American League was forced to expand to Los Angeles and Washington in 1960 after Calvin Griffith moved his Washington Senators to Bloomington, Minnesota for fear of what Congress would do. The Continental League failed but the National League put teams in New York and Houston in 1962 because of the league and Congressional pressure.
The 1969 American League expansion came about only after Charles Finley moved his Kansas City A’s to Oakland for the 1968 season. Missouri Senator Stuart Symington applied pressure on the American League to restore a Kansas City franchise as soon as possible or baseball’s antitrust exemption would be gone. Kansas City and Seattle were granted American League franchises. Not to be outdone, National League owners added San Diego and Montreal.
In 1976, faced with an antitrust lawsuit filed by King County, Seattle and Washington over the move of the Seattle Pilots to Milwaukee in March 1970 for breach of contract, the American League expanded to Seattle and then added Toronto.
The 1991 National League expansion to Miami and Denver came as a result of political pressure on baseball from Colorado Senator Tim Wirth and Florida’s Connie Mack III. The 1995 baseball expansion to St. Petersburg, Florida and Phoenix was the result of an expiring stadium funding plan in Phoenix. Had baseball not acted by April 1, 1995, public monies for a downtown Phoenix stadium would have disappeared.
Even monopolies can not run roughshod as Major League Baseball owners learned. An arbitrator, Peter Seitz, granted players free agency on December 23, 1975 even though baseball had an antitrust exemption.
There is a lot of noise surrounding the January 13 Supreme Court session. Some “experts” suggest that the American sports landscape could be changed should the majority agree with the NFL, others think it is a simple case where a small hat company is suing the NFL because it lost business and wants a crack at talking to individual teams. The court will rule sometime this spring but will the decision change the big business of American sports?
The NFL is betting that the court will reaffirm that it is a single entity which does business for 32 affiliates. American Needle apparently just wants to have a crack at getting a slice of the NFL’s business.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
American Needle, the NFL and the Supreme Court of the United States
By Evan Weiner
January 9, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- The Supreme Court of the United States goes back to work this week and the nine justices have an interesting case on the docket.
American Needle Inc. v the NFL (Docket 08-661).
The Court is supposed to listen to arguments from American Needle attorneys and National Football League lawyers as to whether National Football League Properties, the National Football League and the 32 individual teams acted as one when the league awarded Reebok International an exclusive 10-year deal to produce hats and other headgear in 2001 in violation of Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
Reebok is now owned by Addidas AG.
National Football League Properties decided in 2000 that it would put the caps, hats and headgear license up for bid and would give the contract to one company. Prior to 2001, the league had an assortment of licensees for the manufacture of caps, hats and headgear with American Needle holding one of those licenses.
After Reebok won the bid, American Needle decided to file an antitrust lawsuit in Chicago against the NFL in December 2004. The NFL picked up victories on in lower level trial and appeals court but the small Buffalo Grove, Illinois-based American Needle Inc. decided to press on and take the case to the Supreme Court.
National Football League lawyers apparently have no problems arguing the case before the nine justices and basically told American Needle’s attorneys to bring it on.
The NFL has received support from the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. Major League Baseball, which received antitrust protection from the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1922 ruling against the Baltimore Terrapins because baseball was a game, not a business, is not involved with this particularly case.
This might be the case that the National Football League has been seeking for decades. A favorable decision by the SCOTUS would presumably give the league an antitrust blanket and allow the league to really act with monopoly powers although Congress in 1961 gave the league antitrust protection with the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy. Congress gave football owners another gift by allowing the June 8, 1966 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League in the fall of that year which ended a bidding war for players.
President Lyndon B. Johnson gave his approval to the merger when the AFL-NFL legislation was tacked onto another bill. New Orleans ended up with a football team because of the political maneuvering by Louisiana Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs who traded a no vote on the merger in exchange for a guarantee that New Orleans would receive a team as part of political horse trading.
The fact that American Needle wants to do business with the NFL is pretty obvious. A NFL product license can bring in a sizeable check for any company. American Needle is arguing that it should be allowed to talk to each of the 32 teams not just the league and that companies like American Needle should have the opportunity to talk to say Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones about a deal where presumably they can offer him more money than he could get from his 1/32 share of the revenue.
The American Needle Inc. v NFL Supreme Court battle has apparently made an awful lot of people nervous and it does not appear from those who have SCOTUS anxiety are from the NFL owners camp. The National Football League Coaches Association filed a brief with the court saying that an NFL victory could mean a salary cap for head coaches and a salary scale for assistants because the NFL would gain monopoly power.
Additionally, some are arguing that the NFL would push a TV agenda that would include the scheduling of games against High School and College contests during the High School and College football season which is presently not allowed under the terms of the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which would have a direct impact on attendance at High School contests across America and cut down on the TV audience of Saturday college games.
The National Football League Players Association, which is preparing strategy in collective bargaining talks with the league owners with the Collective Bargaining Agreement schedule to expire after the 2010 season, is worried that an NFL SCOTUS victory would harm the players bargaining abilities since the association has used the courts to settle labor disputes.
The Major League Baseball Players Association, the National Basketball Players Association and the National Hockey League Players Association are supporting the National Football League Players Association by filing a brief which is supporting American Needle.
The National Federation of State High School Associations wants to keep Friday Night Lights going with no NFL interference.
The Federal Trade Commission has asked the nine justices to “vacate the judgment of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District” because the FTC is of the opinion that the league is 32 separate entities and that the league violates section 1 and section 2 of the Sherman Act.
Legal experts from various law schools, other lawyers with opinions and media pumped up experts like the Chicago-based Marc Ganis are predicting doom for fans should the National Football League win the case. (Sportswriters should do some research instead of relying on "experts" like Ganis and law professors, lazy journalism on their part) The dire consequences include even higher costs for merchandise (the cost is extremely high now for those who have not shopped) to league wide higher league mandated ticket pricing (ticket prices are extraordinarily high and in some cases come with a personal seat licensing tab for those who have not noticed) to hiring cheaper players and putting an inferior brand of football on the field (guess the experts failed to watch any Detroit Lions games over the past five years or this year’s St. Louis Rams).
The NFL and other leagues are in a powerful position not necessarily because of consumer power. Congressional acts in 1961 and 1966 backed by the signatures of President Kennedy and Johnson made the NFL a juggernaut. The Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 cemented the National and American League of baseball position as the dominant baseball force. Congress would not take up a proposed American Basketball Association-National Basketball Association merger in the early 1970s which forced the NBA to find a Washington political insider to become the league’s commissioner. Former Kennedy and Johnson staffer Lawrence O’Brien became the NBA’s head man in 1975 and by 1976, the NBA absorbed four ABA teams, Denver, Indiana, New York and San Antonio with each team paying $3.2 million to join the new league. Additionally the Uniondale, N. Y.-based New York Nets had to pay the New York Knicks $4.8 million for invading Knicks territory.
The NBA dictated terms despite not having the type of monopoly powers that Major League Baseball was granted by the 1922 SCOTUS decision.
Sports leagues are powerful but are always mindful of Congress even though Pete Rozelle during the 1986 United States Football League v National Football League antitrust suit said leagues are natural monopolies in Judge Peter K. Leisure’s court room in lower Manhattan. Rozelle was regarded as a genius but that genius label came because of powers given to his league by Congress and two Presidents. Major League Baseball, despite a 1922 antitrust exemption, had to fend off the Continental Baseball League in 1960 and the American League was forced to expand to Los Angeles and Washington in 1960 after Calvin Griffith moved his Washington Senators to Bloomington, Minnesota for fear of what Congress would do. The Continental League failed but the National League put teams in New York and Houston in 1962 because of the league and Congressional pressure.
The 1969 American League expansion came about only after Charles Finley moved his Kansas City A’s to Oakland for the 1968 season. Missouri Senator Stuart Symington applied pressure on the American League to restore a Kansas City franchise as soon as possible or baseball’s antitrust exemption would be gone. Kansas City and Seattle were granted American League franchises. Not to be outdone, National League owners added San Diego and Montreal.
In 1976, faced with an antitrust lawsuit filed by King County, Seattle and Washington over the move of the Seattle Pilots to Milwaukee in March 1970 for breach of contract, the American League expanded to Seattle and then added Toronto.
The 1991 National League expansion to Miami and Denver came as a result of political pressure on baseball from Colorado Senator Tim Wirth and Florida’s Connie Mack III. The 1995 baseball expansion to St. Petersburg, Florida and Phoenix was the result of an expiring stadium funding plan in Phoenix. Had baseball not acted by April 1, 1995, public monies for a downtown Phoenix stadium would have disappeared.
Even monopolies can not run roughshod as Major League Baseball owners learned. An arbitrator, Peter Seitz, granted players free agency on December 23, 1975 even though baseball had an antitrust exemption.
There is a lot of noise surrounding the January 13 Supreme Court session. Some “experts” suggest that the American sports landscape could be changed should the majority agree with the NFL, others think it is a simple case where a small hat company is suing the NFL because it lost business and wants a crack at talking to individual teams. The court will rule sometime this spring but will the decision change the big business of American sports?
The NFL is betting that the court will reaffirm that it is a single entity which does business for 32 affiliates. American Needle apparently just wants to have a crack at getting a slice of the NFL’s business.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Bad week for Toronto hockey writers
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2009m12d12-Bad-week-for-Toronto-hockey-writers#
Bad week for Toronto hockey writers
By Evan Weiner
December 12, 2009
(New York, N. Y.) -- It has not been a good couple days for the Toronto sports media, rather the Toronto hockey fan sportswriters. National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman met with Quebec Premier Jean Charest and the Quebec premier is under the impression that Bettman would like to see a franchise in Quebec City.
Then came the story that Bettman would prefer expanding the league rather than relocating teams and on top of that there seems to be a group ready to buy the financially troubled Phoenix Coyotes willing to keep the team in Glendale, Arizona.
The stars are not aligning for the Toronto hockey scribes who were waving their red and white pom poms last summer and basically begging a United States bankruptcy judge to let Jim Balsillie pick up the Coyotes franchise and move the team to Hamilton, Ontario.
That didn’t happen as Judge Redfield Baum decided to let the NHL handle the sale of the Coyotes franchise. Balsillie, one of the BlackBerry founders, appealed to Canadian nationalism in his bid to buy the Coyotes and the Toronto hockey writers acted as if they were a Balsillie flack instead of journalists who researched sports league’s constitutions or previous denials of sports teams ownership transfers or relocation such as Major League baseball saying twice no to Edwin Gaylord in the 1980s in his attempt to but the Texas Rangers because he owned a “superstation” in Dallas and Gaylord’s Dallas TV station would air Rangers games nationally and devalue other baseball TV contracts.
That opened the door for George W. Bush to eventually join a group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. A little research would have helped Toronto hockey writers understand how leagues operate.
Now the Toronto writers are facing a dilemma. What if Quebec City really has the wherewithal to finance a new arena? In 1995, Quebec Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut and Bettman tried to persuade Quebec politicians to come up with public financing for a new arena to replace Le Colisee and failed. Aubut sold the team to Charlie Lyons and Ascent and the franchise ended up in Denver, Colorado.
The Toronto writers have been tearing apart Bettman for years about a perceived perception that Bettman has anti-Canadian stance and never include in their critiques of the “New York lawyer” or the “diminutive” commissioner helped prevent the Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington from selling his team to Houston sports owner Les Alexander who planned to take the team to Texas in 1998. Bettman also helped broker a deal to keep the Ottawa Senators in the Canadian capital, although technically the Senators home arena is in Kanata, which is west of Ottawa.
Bettman also fought to keep franchises in Pittsburgh, Nashville and Glendale, Arizona (Phoenix). He pushed for Edmonton and Calgary to get a share of the Alberta hockey lottery.
Under Bettman’s watch, Quebec City, Winnipeg and Hartford (three former World Hockey Association teams) have relocated. Quebec City to Denver in 1995, Winnipeg to Phoenix (now Glendale) in 1996 and Hartford to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997. All three cities simply did not have state of the art 1990s hockey arenas. Connecticut Governor John Rowland, who ended up in prison, seemed smitten with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft snooping around Hartford looking for a stadium for his National Football League team and didn’t really play ball with Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos.
Rowland not only lost a hockey team but probably Compuware jobs as Karmanos wanted to establish a Connecticut outpost for his computer company.
Rowland lost the Whalers and Kraft never really had any intention of moving his Patriots from the Boston metropolitan area and simply used Rowland as leverage to get a new stadium in Foxboro next to his old stadium. Kraft is further developing that property in Foxboro. He may be using United States government stimulus funding for his project.
The Toronto media, at least one of the hockey fans, er writers, Randy Sportak is urging the NHL to go into Toronto or Hamilton and while Quebec City or Winnipeg would be great additions to the league, Toronto deserves a second team. Sportak is also suggesting that the league move the New York Islanders or the Nashville Predators to southern Ontario.
Lazy journalism on Sportak’s part if he thinks the Islanders will move. Sportak probably has no idea how lucrative the Islanders cable TV deal with Cablevision’s Charles Dolan really is. The deal runs until 2031 and it behooves Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, the National Basketball Association’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers and the MSG Network, to keep paying. You see Dolan needs the Islanders to stay in Uniondale or move to the proposed Brooklyn arena or the proposed building that could end up on Shea Stadium’s former site or in the junkyards at Willets Point adjacent to the US National Tennis Center to keep his cable TV franchises on Long island.
Here is how it works. Dolan can go before any town, village or city board on the island in both Nassau and Suffolk County when his cable TV systems franchise licensing agreement is up and say I have two things other cable operators don’t have. The Islanders and News 12. Dolan uses the same strategy in New Jersey with the Devils and News 12. Dolan is a major benefactor of New Jersey Devils hockey.
That is how sports operators. Islanders owner Charles Wang is hoping that he can develop the area around the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale. If he cannot, you can be sure that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who found funds for new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and Mets, will be chatting up Brooklyn and Queens with Wang.
No matter how lucrative the Toronto market might be, and this is no slight about Toronto, T. O. is not the Big Apple even if hockey is king in Toronto.
There is no suggestion at present that Nashville is ready to give up on the Predators.
If there is expansion, Quebec City and Winnipeg are on top of the charts for the NHL. In fact, the founder of the Russian-based Kontinental Hockey League Alexander Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Russian Gazprom energy company, thinks that Quebec City is long overdue for an NHL team. An expansion of the league would mean a good deal of money for NHL owners. Even if the league sells the franchises for $150 million each, which is probably a low figure, two franchises would mean the NHL owners would split the $300 million 30 ways and give each owner $10 million.
It has not been a good week for the Toronto sports media. Quebec City wants an NHL team and Gary Bettman is listening, the NHL favors expansion over relocation, New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner wants a hockey team in his proposed Brooklyn building, presumably the Islanders, and Ice Edge wants the Coyotes and has a plan to use Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a second home for five games which should cause the Toronto writers to break out the pom poms again. But Saskatoon is not Southern Ontario nor is Quebec City and that is a problem for the Toronto scribes.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Bad week for Toronto hockey writers
By Evan Weiner
December 12, 2009
(New York, N. Y.) -- It has not been a good couple days for the Toronto sports media, rather the Toronto hockey fan sportswriters. National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman met with Quebec Premier Jean Charest and the Quebec premier is under the impression that Bettman would like to see a franchise in Quebec City.
Then came the story that Bettman would prefer expanding the league rather than relocating teams and on top of that there seems to be a group ready to buy the financially troubled Phoenix Coyotes willing to keep the team in Glendale, Arizona.
The stars are not aligning for the Toronto hockey scribes who were waving their red and white pom poms last summer and basically begging a United States bankruptcy judge to let Jim Balsillie pick up the Coyotes franchise and move the team to Hamilton, Ontario.
That didn’t happen as Judge Redfield Baum decided to let the NHL handle the sale of the Coyotes franchise. Balsillie, one of the BlackBerry founders, appealed to Canadian nationalism in his bid to buy the Coyotes and the Toronto hockey writers acted as if they were a Balsillie flack instead of journalists who researched sports league’s constitutions or previous denials of sports teams ownership transfers or relocation such as Major League baseball saying twice no to Edwin Gaylord in the 1980s in his attempt to but the Texas Rangers because he owned a “superstation” in Dallas and Gaylord’s Dallas TV station would air Rangers games nationally and devalue other baseball TV contracts.
That opened the door for George W. Bush to eventually join a group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. A little research would have helped Toronto hockey writers understand how leagues operate.
Now the Toronto writers are facing a dilemma. What if Quebec City really has the wherewithal to finance a new arena? In 1995, Quebec Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut and Bettman tried to persuade Quebec politicians to come up with public financing for a new arena to replace Le Colisee and failed. Aubut sold the team to Charlie Lyons and Ascent and the franchise ended up in Denver, Colorado.
The Toronto writers have been tearing apart Bettman for years about a perceived perception that Bettman has anti-Canadian stance and never include in their critiques of the “New York lawyer” or the “diminutive” commissioner helped prevent the Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington from selling his team to Houston sports owner Les Alexander who planned to take the team to Texas in 1998. Bettman also helped broker a deal to keep the Ottawa Senators in the Canadian capital, although technically the Senators home arena is in Kanata, which is west of Ottawa.
Bettman also fought to keep franchises in Pittsburgh, Nashville and Glendale, Arizona (Phoenix). He pushed for Edmonton and Calgary to get a share of the Alberta hockey lottery.
Under Bettman’s watch, Quebec City, Winnipeg and Hartford (three former World Hockey Association teams) have relocated. Quebec City to Denver in 1995, Winnipeg to Phoenix (now Glendale) in 1996 and Hartford to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997. All three cities simply did not have state of the art 1990s hockey arenas. Connecticut Governor John Rowland, who ended up in prison, seemed smitten with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft snooping around Hartford looking for a stadium for his National Football League team and didn’t really play ball with Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos.
Rowland not only lost a hockey team but probably Compuware jobs as Karmanos wanted to establish a Connecticut outpost for his computer company.
Rowland lost the Whalers and Kraft never really had any intention of moving his Patriots from the Boston metropolitan area and simply used Rowland as leverage to get a new stadium in Foxboro next to his old stadium. Kraft is further developing that property in Foxboro. He may be using United States government stimulus funding for his project.
The Toronto media, at least one of the hockey fans, er writers, Randy Sportak is urging the NHL to go into Toronto or Hamilton and while Quebec City or Winnipeg would be great additions to the league, Toronto deserves a second team. Sportak is also suggesting that the league move the New York Islanders or the Nashville Predators to southern Ontario.
Lazy journalism on Sportak’s part if he thinks the Islanders will move. Sportak probably has no idea how lucrative the Islanders cable TV deal with Cablevision’s Charles Dolan really is. The deal runs until 2031 and it behooves Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, the National Basketball Association’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers and the MSG Network, to keep paying. You see Dolan needs the Islanders to stay in Uniondale or move to the proposed Brooklyn arena or the proposed building that could end up on Shea Stadium’s former site or in the junkyards at Willets Point adjacent to the US National Tennis Center to keep his cable TV franchises on Long island.
Here is how it works. Dolan can go before any town, village or city board on the island in both Nassau and Suffolk County when his cable TV systems franchise licensing agreement is up and say I have two things other cable operators don’t have. The Islanders and News 12. Dolan uses the same strategy in New Jersey with the Devils and News 12. Dolan is a major benefactor of New Jersey Devils hockey.
That is how sports operators. Islanders owner Charles Wang is hoping that he can develop the area around the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale. If he cannot, you can be sure that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who found funds for new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and Mets, will be chatting up Brooklyn and Queens with Wang.
No matter how lucrative the Toronto market might be, and this is no slight about Toronto, T. O. is not the Big Apple even if hockey is king in Toronto.
There is no suggestion at present that Nashville is ready to give up on the Predators.
If there is expansion, Quebec City and Winnipeg are on top of the charts for the NHL. In fact, the founder of the Russian-based Kontinental Hockey League Alexander Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Russian Gazprom energy company, thinks that Quebec City is long overdue for an NHL team. An expansion of the league would mean a good deal of money for NHL owners. Even if the league sells the franchises for $150 million each, which is probably a low figure, two franchises would mean the NHL owners would split the $300 million 30 ways and give each owner $10 million.
It has not been a good week for the Toronto sports media. Quebec City wants an NHL team and Gary Bettman is listening, the NHL favors expansion over relocation, New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner wants a hockey team in his proposed Brooklyn building, presumably the Islanders, and Ice Edge wants the Coyotes and has a plan to use Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a second home for five games which should cause the Toronto writers to break out the pom poms again. But Saskatoon is not Southern Ontario nor is Quebec City and that is a problem for the Toronto scribes.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, November 20, 2009
Is Detroit Still a Major League Sports Town?
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7577
Is Detroit Still a Major League Sports Town?
By Evan Weiner
November 20, 2009
10:00 PM EST
Has Detroit ceased being a middle market franchise? There are three not so subtle clues that Detroit has slid into a small market city that has cropped up in just the last week. Mike Ilitch’s Detroit Tigers baseball franchise has a lot of money tied up in players and the rumors are that Ilitch is about ready to shave millions from his payroll and is looking to trade Curtis Granderson, a 28-year-old All-Star outfield, who has three years remaining on a five-year agreement with Ilitch that pays him more than six million dollars annually.
Granderson remains a member of the Detroit Tigers, but the 2009-10 hot stove league is far from over.
Granderson plays in a market that is going through more than just a bad recession. Detroit and the surrounding area lost been devastated by the retrenchment of the auto industry with both General Motors and Chrysler hanging on because of government bailouts from the United States and Canada. The only good news Ilitch has seen is that the American dollar has weakened while the Canadian dollar has flirted with par with the US greenback, which is a good development in the Detroit market as a good chunk of the metropolitan area is shared with Windsor and nearby Ontario cities. The bad part is that the automobile industry was a major part of the Windsor/Ontario economy as well.
Whether Granderson or Edwin Jackson is entirely up to Tigers management. But there is a question of just how much money that corporate Detroit can sink into two of Ilitch’s teams, the Tigers and the NHL Red Wings, William Ford’s Detroit Lions and the Auburn Hills-based Detroit Pistons.
The answer seems to be, not as much as the old days. In some aspects, it seems as if the Detroit Lions franchise has gone back 75 years. This Sunday’s home game against the Cleveland Browns will be blacked out in the Detroit metro region, an area that includes Toledo, Ohio, Lansing, Michigan and the Saginaw-Flint, Michigan market. Granted both the Lions and Browns are terrible football teams, both have won just one game and lost eight, but there would seem to be enough Cleveland Browns backers to make the relatively short trip up to Detroit.
This is the fourth time in six games that a Lions home contest has been blacked out in 2009. Detroit did sell out earlier this year against Pittsburgh and a lot of Steelers fans made the trip to Detroit but Ford’s team has had a lot of trouble selling 40,000 or more tickets per game. In 2008, as Detroit’s football team continued to lose and the auto companies were on the verge of failing, five of the Lions last six home games were not shown in the Detroit and secondary Detroit markets.
Of course, it cannot be said that a winning team in Detroit would do that much better considering the deteriorating economic conditions in Detroit and the surrounding area.
Detroit will be facing an old Thanksgiving Day rival this year on turkey day, the Green Bay Packers. More than likely, Detroit will fill up the stadium with help from Packers backers.
The Detroit Lions franchise was born in the Great Depression that started with the stock market crash in 1929 after the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans franchise was on the financial ropes in 1933. The owner of Detroit’s WJR radio, Gene Richards bought the Spartans and move the team to Detroit where the newly minted Lions franchise was looking to get people into Briggs Stadium.
Richards scheduled a Thanksgiving Day game in 1934 with the hopes that Thanksgiving Day parade goers in Detroit would wander over to the stadium and watch. There was significance to that game that is mostly lost today. The Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions contest was the first NFL game ever to be heard coast-to-coast and border-to-border in the United States. Detroit has hosted 69 Thanksgiving Day contests from 1934-38 and 1945-today. In 1939, United States President Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving and moved the holiday up a week to November 23 in an effort to spark Christmas sales and help the still struggling economy.
Political parties never change stripes and a silly battle ensued between Democrats and Republicans (this in the days prior to ersatz arguments on talk radio and cable TV news) and by 1940 there were states that “celebrated” the Democrats’ Thanksgiving a week earlier than the Republicans Thanksgiving. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia played each other in 1939 and 1940.
They were in the same state.
The municipally funded Pontiac Silverdome opened in 1975 with the Lions football team as the main tenant. The new facility cost $55.7 million. William Clay Ford’s Lions played football there from 1975-2001. The dome also played host to Detroit Pistons games from 1978-88. After Ford moved his Lions back to downtown Detroit, the then 27-year old football facility has virtually useless. The Jehovah’s Witnesses left the facility in 2004 after using it for years for an annual convention.
Between 2003 and 2006, the Pontiac Silverdome parking lot was the home for a Drive-In movie theater.
Two leagues that never got off the ground took a look at the facility. The World Hockey Association and the United States Football League. The reincarnation of the WHA was an ill-fated idea but there were plans to put a rink in the building in 2003 and the reincarnated USFL was looking to purchase the building and playing games there in 2010 along with hosting concerts,
The new USFL never got financial backing. On November 16, a Toronto-based company bought the old stadium for $583,000 at auction with the hope of placing a Major League Soccer team in the building.
The “new” USFL appears to be in the hands of another promoter with the hope of starting up in 2011 but that league will not be buying the old dome.
At least the building is still standing which is more than can be said for old stadiums in Seattle and Pittsburgh which were blown up after new facilities for major league sports teams were build with taxpayers money. Seattle (King County) and Pittsburgh (Allegheny County) taxpayers are still paying off the debt on the long departed Seattle Kingdome and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium.
Some may suggest the cheap purchase price for the Silverdome is the result of a crashing Detroit real estate market and the weak economy. While that is a major factor, the real reason the price went so cheap is that once a stadium gets to a certain age, it becomes useless and has virtually no value because it lacks what sports owners want today, luxury boxes, club seats, wide alleyways for concessions, in-facility restaurants and shops.
What was state-of-the-art in 1975 is a dump in today’s sports marketplace.
Detroit was once a major market thanks to the auto companies a half century ago. Today, the city and the surrounding area are hurting economically and the population is shrinking. That has taken a toll on Detroit sports properties and raises the question, can Detroit remain a major sports town that can support big time pro and college sports or will Detroit become a city like Louisville, Kentucky, which was once major league town in a different century?
eweiner@mcn.tv
Is Detroit Still a Major League Sports Town?
By Evan Weiner
November 20, 2009
10:00 PM EST
Has Detroit ceased being a middle market franchise? There are three not so subtle clues that Detroit has slid into a small market city that has cropped up in just the last week. Mike Ilitch’s Detroit Tigers baseball franchise has a lot of money tied up in players and the rumors are that Ilitch is about ready to shave millions from his payroll and is looking to trade Curtis Granderson, a 28-year-old All-Star outfield, who has three years remaining on a five-year agreement with Ilitch that pays him more than six million dollars annually.
Granderson remains a member of the Detroit Tigers, but the 2009-10 hot stove league is far from over.
Granderson plays in a market that is going through more than just a bad recession. Detroit and the surrounding area lost been devastated by the retrenchment of the auto industry with both General Motors and Chrysler hanging on because of government bailouts from the United States and Canada. The only good news Ilitch has seen is that the American dollar has weakened while the Canadian dollar has flirted with par with the US greenback, which is a good development in the Detroit market as a good chunk of the metropolitan area is shared with Windsor and nearby Ontario cities. The bad part is that the automobile industry was a major part of the Windsor/Ontario economy as well.
Whether Granderson or Edwin Jackson is entirely up to Tigers management. But there is a question of just how much money that corporate Detroit can sink into two of Ilitch’s teams, the Tigers and the NHL Red Wings, William Ford’s Detroit Lions and the Auburn Hills-based Detroit Pistons.
The answer seems to be, not as much as the old days. In some aspects, it seems as if the Detroit Lions franchise has gone back 75 years. This Sunday’s home game against the Cleveland Browns will be blacked out in the Detroit metro region, an area that includes Toledo, Ohio, Lansing, Michigan and the Saginaw-Flint, Michigan market. Granted both the Lions and Browns are terrible football teams, both have won just one game and lost eight, but there would seem to be enough Cleveland Browns backers to make the relatively short trip up to Detroit.
This is the fourth time in six games that a Lions home contest has been blacked out in 2009. Detroit did sell out earlier this year against Pittsburgh and a lot of Steelers fans made the trip to Detroit but Ford’s team has had a lot of trouble selling 40,000 or more tickets per game. In 2008, as Detroit’s football team continued to lose and the auto companies were on the verge of failing, five of the Lions last six home games were not shown in the Detroit and secondary Detroit markets.
Of course, it cannot be said that a winning team in Detroit would do that much better considering the deteriorating economic conditions in Detroit and the surrounding area.
Detroit will be facing an old Thanksgiving Day rival this year on turkey day, the Green Bay Packers. More than likely, Detroit will fill up the stadium with help from Packers backers.
The Detroit Lions franchise was born in the Great Depression that started with the stock market crash in 1929 after the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans franchise was on the financial ropes in 1933. The owner of Detroit’s WJR radio, Gene Richards bought the Spartans and move the team to Detroit where the newly minted Lions franchise was looking to get people into Briggs Stadium.
Richards scheduled a Thanksgiving Day game in 1934 with the hopes that Thanksgiving Day parade goers in Detroit would wander over to the stadium and watch. There was significance to that game that is mostly lost today. The Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions contest was the first NFL game ever to be heard coast-to-coast and border-to-border in the United States. Detroit has hosted 69 Thanksgiving Day contests from 1934-38 and 1945-today. In 1939, United States President Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving and moved the holiday up a week to November 23 in an effort to spark Christmas sales and help the still struggling economy.
Political parties never change stripes and a silly battle ensued between Democrats and Republicans (this in the days prior to ersatz arguments on talk radio and cable TV news) and by 1940 there were states that “celebrated” the Democrats’ Thanksgiving a week earlier than the Republicans Thanksgiving. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia played each other in 1939 and 1940.
They were in the same state.
The municipally funded Pontiac Silverdome opened in 1975 with the Lions football team as the main tenant. The new facility cost $55.7 million. William Clay Ford’s Lions played football there from 1975-2001. The dome also played host to Detroit Pistons games from 1978-88. After Ford moved his Lions back to downtown Detroit, the then 27-year old football facility has virtually useless. The Jehovah’s Witnesses left the facility in 2004 after using it for years for an annual convention.
Between 2003 and 2006, the Pontiac Silverdome parking lot was the home for a Drive-In movie theater.
Two leagues that never got off the ground took a look at the facility. The World Hockey Association and the United States Football League. The reincarnation of the WHA was an ill-fated idea but there were plans to put a rink in the building in 2003 and the reincarnated USFL was looking to purchase the building and playing games there in 2010 along with hosting concerts,
The new USFL never got financial backing. On November 16, a Toronto-based company bought the old stadium for $583,000 at auction with the hope of placing a Major League Soccer team in the building.
The “new” USFL appears to be in the hands of another promoter with the hope of starting up in 2011 but that league will not be buying the old dome.
At least the building is still standing which is more than can be said for old stadiums in Seattle and Pittsburgh which were blown up after new facilities for major league sports teams were build with taxpayers money. Seattle (King County) and Pittsburgh (Allegheny County) taxpayers are still paying off the debt on the long departed Seattle Kingdome and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium.
Some may suggest the cheap purchase price for the Silverdome is the result of a crashing Detroit real estate market and the weak economy. While that is a major factor, the real reason the price went so cheap is that once a stadium gets to a certain age, it becomes useless and has virtually no value because it lacks what sports owners want today, luxury boxes, club seats, wide alleyways for concessions, in-facility restaurants and shops.
What was state-of-the-art in 1975 is a dump in today’s sports marketplace.
Detroit was once a major market thanks to the auto companies a half century ago. Today, the city and the surrounding area are hurting economically and the population is shrinking. That has taken a toll on Detroit sports properties and raises the question, can Detroit remain a major sports town that can support big time pro and college sports or will Detroit become a city like Louisville, Kentucky, which was once major league town in a different century?
eweiner@mcn.tv
Saturday, October 24, 2009
NHL Loonie for Hockey in Quebec City or Winnipeg?
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7560
NHL Loonie for Hockey in Quebec City or Winnipeg?
By Evan Weiner
October 19, 2009
5:00 PM (ADT)
(Saint John, New Brunswick) – Saint John, New Brunswick is not anyone’s idea of the first stop of any major league sports tour, but walking through the downtown area of Saint John gives you a quick idea why it is possible that Canada is once again high on the list of possible destinations for financially failing NHL teams. A Saint John’s visitor does see an alarmingly high number of empty storefronts while walking through the downtown but a visitor armed with American dollars and ready to buy items gives you a quick answer as to why the National Hockey League is at least entertaining thoughts of putting franchises in either Winnipeg or Quebec City again.
The Canadian dollar is nearly on par with the American dollar for the first time in two years. That is not necessarily good news for Canadian companies hoping for American investors because the US dollar is worth on the other side of the 49th parallel has evaporated nor is it good news for businesses along with US-Canadian border as Canadians shop in American stores as American prices for items are cheaper. Eventually that can hurt Canadians as fewer US dollars flow into the country. Canadians have a major balancing act always. But the fact is that the loonie is getting stronger while the greenback has weakened.
All of this is good news for the six existing NHL franchises along with the National Basketball Association’s Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Blue Jays of Major League Baseball. Every time the Canadian dollar goes up against the American dollar, the franchises have more disposable income. The inverse holds true while the loonie backs off. The strengthening loonie is also helpful to Major League Soccer’s Toronto team and probably is good for the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills as those border three teams draw from the British Columbia and Ontario parts of their markets. It also helps Mike Ilitch’s Detroit Tigers baseball team and his NHL Red Wings.
The road back to Winnipeg or Quebec City in the NHL, Vancouver in the NBA and Montreal in Major League Baseball will be long and there is no guarantee that the loonie will maintain it’s present value. The NHL left Winnipeg and Quebec City when the loonie was heading to a low of 62 cents back in the late 1990s.
The situation in Quebec City has not changed much since Marcel Aubut sold his Quebec Nordiques to Charlie Lyons and Ascent back in 1995. Aubut was looking for a publicly backed new Quebec City arena and was told no by both Quebec City and the province of Quebec. Lyons moved the team to Denver. Recently Quebec City’ Mayor Regis Labeaume talked with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman about his plans to build a new, taxpayers funded arena. Labeaume figures it will cost $400 million (Cn) to construct the building with $175 million coming from Canada, $175 million from the province and $50 million from Quebec City coffers.
There is no doubt that Quebec City has passionate fans but the financially the NHL of 2009-10 differs from the final days of the Nordiques franchise. Ticket prices have skyrocketed along with player’s salaries. There also might be some English-speaking Canadian players who might refuse to play in the French-speaking city as well although only player, Eric Lindros back in 1991, flat out turned his back in the city. Quebec City had a long history of having fine non-French players who wanted to play there including the Statsny Brothers and Joe Sakic.
The founder of the Kontinental Hockey League and the CEO of Russia’s Gazprom, Alexander Medvedev, suggested last spring that he thought Quebec City would be a great hockey market.
But the market still lacks an arena and there is no suggestion that either the city or the province is ready to spend hundreds of millions of loonies on a building and then give 85 or 90 percent of the revenues generated in the building to the owner of a hockey team. Arena costs have risen from the $70 million dollar (US) range in the late 1980s to the more than a billion dollars (US) for places like the new Yankee Stadium in New York, the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas and the new New Jersey football stadium in the Meadowlands. It was far cheaper to build in 1995.
If the province or city doesn’t come up with loonies, then a prospective owner will have to put up cash in the building process and will have to pass along building costs to the fans or customers and it would have to be customers because ticket prices for regular seats and for the higher end items like luxury boxes and club seats will be astronomical.
Quebec City hockey proponents need to only look south of the border to New York where Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees and New York Mets had trouble filling up the high end tickets and where the National Football League’s New York Giants and New York Jets are having problems getting people to reach into their pockets to pony up thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses for the right to own a seat and then buying a ticket for that seat.
No matter how rabid an area’s fan base might be, the harsh realty is that fans don’t have the wherewithal to spend a small fortune to attend a game. National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern claims that the NBA might sell more tickets in 2009-10 but that owners’ revenues will be down because they are discounting tickets.
Stern though is also positioning the owners in the upcoming collective bargaining talks with the players. The present owners-players agreement ends in 2011.
Quebec City remains a small market with limited corporate and TV money although that could change depending on the definition of the marketplace. If Quebec becomes a provincial team, perhaps a local cable TV entity will offer New York or Toronto like prices for rights fees. A $250 million contract over 10 years would certainly make a Quebec City franchise more viable. The roughly six million people in the Province of Quebec (along with nearby New Brunswick) is certainly large enough to handle an NHL team if the franchise can position itself as the province’s team but there is another factor here that will present a significant obstacle, Quebec already has a provincial team -- the Montreal Canadiens.
Will the Molsons, the Canadiens owners, want to see another team in Quebec City? Thirty years ago, the NHL rejected overtures from World Hockey Association members Quebec City, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Hartford to join the league. Hockey fans in the three Canadian cities threatened a boycott and would not purchase Molson beer if Quebec City, Edmonton and Winnipeg were denied NHL entry.
Eventually the four WHA teams entered the league for the 1979-80 season after some NHL owners relented and took WHA owners money to enter the league. But throughout the years there have been suggestions that the NHL never shed any tears when Quebec City, Winnipeg and Hartford departed although Bettman did work feverishly with Edmonton officials and businesses to prevent the franchise from moving to Houston in 1998.
Bettman, who gets bad reviews from what appears to be very provincially minded Canadian sportswriters for various reasons that don’t always seem to stem from his policies, has been in the forefront of preserving Canadian franchises in Edmonton and Ottawa. Bettman’s lobbying efforts did get Alberta officials to throw some money into Edmonton and Calgary’s coffers from the province’s hockey lottery and Bettman worked the Ottawa business community along with Ontario leaders to make sure the Senators remained in the Canadian capital after the team’s financial problems in the 1990s surfaced and through the team’s bankruptcy in 2003.
The NHL does have a Canadian commitment despite the writings of Canadian scribes although those writers seemed to suffer from memory loss during this year’s Phoenix Coyotes saga when Jim Balsillie attempted to buy the team and move the franchise to Hamilton, Ontario. Bettman showed the same tenacity in the Phoenix situation as he did in Edmonton and Pittsburgh and in Buffalo after the both the Sabres ownership declared bankruptcy in 2003 and in New Jersey in 1995 to keep the franchises in their home cities.
The Winnipeg situation has changed somewhat since Barry Shenkerow sold his Winnipeg Jets to Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern in 1996. The team moved to Phoenix that fall. Shenkerow was looking for a municipally funded arena with all the gadgets that were state of the art in 1995 including luxury boxes and club seats. He never got the building but there is a new structure in Winnipeg today that probably would be considered state of the art. The problem with Winnipeg in 1995 remains the same today; there is a limited population, which means a limited cable TV market and limited corporate support. In other words despite a high interest from a local fan base, there are too few people to make it worthwhile. A potential owner would have to get virtually every penny spent in the new arena and have a cable TV operator willing to spent New York or Toronto money for TV that would include the entire province of Manitoba along with western Ontario and Saskatchewan and possibly make the games available in northern Minnesota and North Dakota to make it worthwhile.
In both cases, Quebec City and Winnipeg, the local market may be hockey fertile but is it financially fertile? That is why the teams left in the first place. Aubut decried the 1995 Collective Bargaining Agreement and predicted his Quebec Nordiques would not survive because he could not compete financially with the terms of that agreement. Despite the 2004-05 NHL lockout and the implementation of a salary cap, the business of the NHL remains very expensive.
Two years ago when the Canadian dollar overtook the US dollar in value, NBA Commissioner David Stern lamented that there was no interest parties in British Columbia who wanted any information on the finances of an NBA team. Vancouver was an NBA failure between 1995-2001 because the owner of the Vancouver Canucks Arthur Griffiths got into financial trouble by spending his own money to build an arena and then bought an NBA franchise for about $140 million Canadian. Eventually Griffiths sold the NBA Grizzlies to Michael Heisley who was so desperate to own an NBA team that he accepted Griffiths lease in the building which gave him virtually no luxury suite, club seat or concessions money. Heisley move his team to Memphis where it has struggled financially since day one in the new city.
There seems to be no interest in returning a team to Vancouver but if the loonie remains hot, there might be someone who might want to kick the tires in Vancouver.
There is no information suggesting that Major League Baseball wants to return to Montreal or that Montreal city officials want MLB back. Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria was unable to build a stadium in the city in the early 1990s and ended up owning the Florida Marlins in a swap of franchises that saw MLB take over the Expos and Marlins owner John Henry end up with the Boston Red Sox. The deal was 10-strike for Henry’s portfolio, some much so that wife is now buying up property near the Garden in Boston as the family continues to gobble up properties near Fenway Park and now the Garden and Loria is getting a ballpark at the old Orange Bowl site in Miami. Montreal had changed throughout the years since MLB expanded there in 1968 but the end of the Loria years, no English-speaking Montreal radio station even bothered to bid for the team’s play-by-play rights.
The best area in good or bad economic times for an NHL team is probably the Kitchener-Waterloo area, which is just outside Toronto’s territorial rights. Hamilton lacks a suitable arena. If any Major League sport returns to Canada, it will be the NHL with the NFL keeping a close on Toronto.
The NFL-Toronto situation is difficult because of the presence of the Canadian Football League in the city. The Toronto Argonauts used to be a big deal in the city which had just one big league sport franchise---the Maple Leafs—but that was before 1977 when the American League put a baseball team in the city. Toronto is big league in every sense of the way and the CFL isn’t but the CFL is uniquely Canadian and in 1974, Parliament wanted to protect the league by imposing laws making it very difficult for any American football entity to operate in the country.
Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson is selling one home game a year to Toronto sports operators through 2012. Wilson, who is 90 years old, has a deal with New York to keep his Bills playing in Orchard Park through the 2012 season. Wilson has been regionalizing the team in the past few years in order to broaden his fan/customer/corporate base and part of his market is the Niagara Frontier of Ontario. Toronto would probably be a strong NFL franchise even though 12-man football is played in Ontario high schools and there are no football factories in Canadian colleges. Still, Toronto offers a football owner something that no other non-NFL city can – Bay Street – the financial capital of Canada. Toronto has corporate dollars that Buffalo (and Jacksonville) does not have. Toronto and Los Angeles are the best football markets available in North America and neither has a team.
Because of politics, the best solution for the NFL might be a split of the Buffalo-Toronto franchise like the Green Bay-Milwaukee situation that existed until 1994 when the Packers played home games in both Wisconsin cities.
The hot loonie has attracted Bettman’s interest but whether it is a passing fancy or the real McCoy will be answered by financial markets and politics because at the end of the day, it is not about the game that is played, rather the factors that fans never think about like currency rates, availability of credit and political sensibilities.
eweiner@mcn.tv
NHL Loonie for Hockey in Quebec City or Winnipeg?
By Evan Weiner
October 19, 2009
5:00 PM (ADT)
(Saint John, New Brunswick) – Saint John, New Brunswick is not anyone’s idea of the first stop of any major league sports tour, but walking through the downtown area of Saint John gives you a quick idea why it is possible that Canada is once again high on the list of possible destinations for financially failing NHL teams. A Saint John’s visitor does see an alarmingly high number of empty storefronts while walking through the downtown but a visitor armed with American dollars and ready to buy items gives you a quick answer as to why the National Hockey League is at least entertaining thoughts of putting franchises in either Winnipeg or Quebec City again.
The Canadian dollar is nearly on par with the American dollar for the first time in two years. That is not necessarily good news for Canadian companies hoping for American investors because the US dollar is worth on the other side of the 49th parallel has evaporated nor is it good news for businesses along with US-Canadian border as Canadians shop in American stores as American prices for items are cheaper. Eventually that can hurt Canadians as fewer US dollars flow into the country. Canadians have a major balancing act always. But the fact is that the loonie is getting stronger while the greenback has weakened.
All of this is good news for the six existing NHL franchises along with the National Basketball Association’s Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Blue Jays of Major League Baseball. Every time the Canadian dollar goes up against the American dollar, the franchises have more disposable income. The inverse holds true while the loonie backs off. The strengthening loonie is also helpful to Major League Soccer’s Toronto team and probably is good for the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks, Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills as those border three teams draw from the British Columbia and Ontario parts of their markets. It also helps Mike Ilitch’s Detroit Tigers baseball team and his NHL Red Wings.
The road back to Winnipeg or Quebec City in the NHL, Vancouver in the NBA and Montreal in Major League Baseball will be long and there is no guarantee that the loonie will maintain it’s present value. The NHL left Winnipeg and Quebec City when the loonie was heading to a low of 62 cents back in the late 1990s.
The situation in Quebec City has not changed much since Marcel Aubut sold his Quebec Nordiques to Charlie Lyons and Ascent back in 1995. Aubut was looking for a publicly backed new Quebec City arena and was told no by both Quebec City and the province of Quebec. Lyons moved the team to Denver. Recently Quebec City’ Mayor Regis Labeaume talked with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman about his plans to build a new, taxpayers funded arena. Labeaume figures it will cost $400 million (Cn) to construct the building with $175 million coming from Canada, $175 million from the province and $50 million from Quebec City coffers.
There is no doubt that Quebec City has passionate fans but the financially the NHL of 2009-10 differs from the final days of the Nordiques franchise. Ticket prices have skyrocketed along with player’s salaries. There also might be some English-speaking Canadian players who might refuse to play in the French-speaking city as well although only player, Eric Lindros back in 1991, flat out turned his back in the city. Quebec City had a long history of having fine non-French players who wanted to play there including the Statsny Brothers and Joe Sakic.
The founder of the Kontinental Hockey League and the CEO of Russia’s Gazprom, Alexander Medvedev, suggested last spring that he thought Quebec City would be a great hockey market.
But the market still lacks an arena and there is no suggestion that either the city or the province is ready to spend hundreds of millions of loonies on a building and then give 85 or 90 percent of the revenues generated in the building to the owner of a hockey team. Arena costs have risen from the $70 million dollar (US) range in the late 1980s to the more than a billion dollars (US) for places like the new Yankee Stadium in New York, the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas and the new New Jersey football stadium in the Meadowlands. It was far cheaper to build in 1995.
If the province or city doesn’t come up with loonies, then a prospective owner will have to put up cash in the building process and will have to pass along building costs to the fans or customers and it would have to be customers because ticket prices for regular seats and for the higher end items like luxury boxes and club seats will be astronomical.
Quebec City hockey proponents need to only look south of the border to New York where Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees and New York Mets had trouble filling up the high end tickets and where the National Football League’s New York Giants and New York Jets are having problems getting people to reach into their pockets to pony up thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses for the right to own a seat and then buying a ticket for that seat.
No matter how rabid an area’s fan base might be, the harsh realty is that fans don’t have the wherewithal to spend a small fortune to attend a game. National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern claims that the NBA might sell more tickets in 2009-10 but that owners’ revenues will be down because they are discounting tickets.
Stern though is also positioning the owners in the upcoming collective bargaining talks with the players. The present owners-players agreement ends in 2011.
Quebec City remains a small market with limited corporate and TV money although that could change depending on the definition of the marketplace. If Quebec becomes a provincial team, perhaps a local cable TV entity will offer New York or Toronto like prices for rights fees. A $250 million contract over 10 years would certainly make a Quebec City franchise more viable. The roughly six million people in the Province of Quebec (along with nearby New Brunswick) is certainly large enough to handle an NHL team if the franchise can position itself as the province’s team but there is another factor here that will present a significant obstacle, Quebec already has a provincial team -- the Montreal Canadiens.
Will the Molsons, the Canadiens owners, want to see another team in Quebec City? Thirty years ago, the NHL rejected overtures from World Hockey Association members Quebec City, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Hartford to join the league. Hockey fans in the three Canadian cities threatened a boycott and would not purchase Molson beer if Quebec City, Edmonton and Winnipeg were denied NHL entry.
Eventually the four WHA teams entered the league for the 1979-80 season after some NHL owners relented and took WHA owners money to enter the league. But throughout the years there have been suggestions that the NHL never shed any tears when Quebec City, Winnipeg and Hartford departed although Bettman did work feverishly with Edmonton officials and businesses to prevent the franchise from moving to Houston in 1998.
Bettman, who gets bad reviews from what appears to be very provincially minded Canadian sportswriters for various reasons that don’t always seem to stem from his policies, has been in the forefront of preserving Canadian franchises in Edmonton and Ottawa. Bettman’s lobbying efforts did get Alberta officials to throw some money into Edmonton and Calgary’s coffers from the province’s hockey lottery and Bettman worked the Ottawa business community along with Ontario leaders to make sure the Senators remained in the Canadian capital after the team’s financial problems in the 1990s surfaced and through the team’s bankruptcy in 2003.
The NHL does have a Canadian commitment despite the writings of Canadian scribes although those writers seemed to suffer from memory loss during this year’s Phoenix Coyotes saga when Jim Balsillie attempted to buy the team and move the franchise to Hamilton, Ontario. Bettman showed the same tenacity in the Phoenix situation as he did in Edmonton and Pittsburgh and in Buffalo after the both the Sabres ownership declared bankruptcy in 2003 and in New Jersey in 1995 to keep the franchises in their home cities.
The Winnipeg situation has changed somewhat since Barry Shenkerow sold his Winnipeg Jets to Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern in 1996. The team moved to Phoenix that fall. Shenkerow was looking for a municipally funded arena with all the gadgets that were state of the art in 1995 including luxury boxes and club seats. He never got the building but there is a new structure in Winnipeg today that probably would be considered state of the art. The problem with Winnipeg in 1995 remains the same today; there is a limited population, which means a limited cable TV market and limited corporate support. In other words despite a high interest from a local fan base, there are too few people to make it worthwhile. A potential owner would have to get virtually every penny spent in the new arena and have a cable TV operator willing to spent New York or Toronto money for TV that would include the entire province of Manitoba along with western Ontario and Saskatchewan and possibly make the games available in northern Minnesota and North Dakota to make it worthwhile.
In both cases, Quebec City and Winnipeg, the local market may be hockey fertile but is it financially fertile? That is why the teams left in the first place. Aubut decried the 1995 Collective Bargaining Agreement and predicted his Quebec Nordiques would not survive because he could not compete financially with the terms of that agreement. Despite the 2004-05 NHL lockout and the implementation of a salary cap, the business of the NHL remains very expensive.
Two years ago when the Canadian dollar overtook the US dollar in value, NBA Commissioner David Stern lamented that there was no interest parties in British Columbia who wanted any information on the finances of an NBA team. Vancouver was an NBA failure between 1995-2001 because the owner of the Vancouver Canucks Arthur Griffiths got into financial trouble by spending his own money to build an arena and then bought an NBA franchise for about $140 million Canadian. Eventually Griffiths sold the NBA Grizzlies to Michael Heisley who was so desperate to own an NBA team that he accepted Griffiths lease in the building which gave him virtually no luxury suite, club seat or concessions money. Heisley move his team to Memphis where it has struggled financially since day one in the new city.
There seems to be no interest in returning a team to Vancouver but if the loonie remains hot, there might be someone who might want to kick the tires in Vancouver.
There is no information suggesting that Major League Baseball wants to return to Montreal or that Montreal city officials want MLB back. Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria was unable to build a stadium in the city in the early 1990s and ended up owning the Florida Marlins in a swap of franchises that saw MLB take over the Expos and Marlins owner John Henry end up with the Boston Red Sox. The deal was 10-strike for Henry’s portfolio, some much so that wife is now buying up property near the Garden in Boston as the family continues to gobble up properties near Fenway Park and now the Garden and Loria is getting a ballpark at the old Orange Bowl site in Miami. Montreal had changed throughout the years since MLB expanded there in 1968 but the end of the Loria years, no English-speaking Montreal radio station even bothered to bid for the team’s play-by-play rights.
The best area in good or bad economic times for an NHL team is probably the Kitchener-Waterloo area, which is just outside Toronto’s territorial rights. Hamilton lacks a suitable arena. If any Major League sport returns to Canada, it will be the NHL with the NFL keeping a close on Toronto.
The NFL-Toronto situation is difficult because of the presence of the Canadian Football League in the city. The Toronto Argonauts used to be a big deal in the city which had just one big league sport franchise---the Maple Leafs—but that was before 1977 when the American League put a baseball team in the city. Toronto is big league in every sense of the way and the CFL isn’t but the CFL is uniquely Canadian and in 1974, Parliament wanted to protect the league by imposing laws making it very difficult for any American football entity to operate in the country.
Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson is selling one home game a year to Toronto sports operators through 2012. Wilson, who is 90 years old, has a deal with New York to keep his Bills playing in Orchard Park through the 2012 season. Wilson has been regionalizing the team in the past few years in order to broaden his fan/customer/corporate base and part of his market is the Niagara Frontier of Ontario. Toronto would probably be a strong NFL franchise even though 12-man football is played in Ontario high schools and there are no football factories in Canadian colleges. Still, Toronto offers a football owner something that no other non-NFL city can – Bay Street – the financial capital of Canada. Toronto has corporate dollars that Buffalo (and Jacksonville) does not have. Toronto and Los Angeles are the best football markets available in North America and neither has a team.
Because of politics, the best solution for the NFL might be a split of the Buffalo-Toronto franchise like the Green Bay-Milwaukee situation that existed until 1994 when the Packers played home games in both Wisconsin cities.
The hot loonie has attracted Bettman’s interest but whether it is a passing fancy or the real McCoy will be answered by financial markets and politics because at the end of the day, it is not about the game that is played, rather the factors that fans never think about like currency rates, availability of credit and political sensibilities.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
NHL, MLB, NFL, NBA Win, Hamilton and Balsillie Lose
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7547
NHL, MLB, NFL, NBA Win, Hamilton and Balsillie Lose
By Evan Weiner
September 30, 2009
10:30 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- So Jim Balsillie has dropped out of the bidding for the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes National Hockey League franchise after a bankruptcy judge in Phoenix, Arizona decided that sports leagues are a private entity and that sports owners have a right to pick owners and territories. The judge, Redfield T. Baum, turned down Balsillie's bid and an offer by the NHL to buy the financially ailing franchise that sits in Glendale, Arizona not in downtown Phoenix because of a terrible decision by the sitting city council in the late 1980s when they buckled to Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Coangelo's want for the perfect basketball arena with perfect seating for HIS customers and not approve an all purpose use for the building.
The saga of the Phoenix Coyotes should be studied by urban planners and sports business management professors, experts and students as soon as possible because of the action of the elected officials of Phoenix who made a badly flawed decision which resulted in an arena that could only sell 75 percent of the available seating because of obstructed views. Coangelo wanted a hockey team in the building but not own it. He wanted money off of the team as he got the lion’s share of the revenues of any activity in the building because of the lease he demanded and got from the Phoenix officials. Coangelo knew an NHL franchise could not succeed in that building and various Coyotes owners reached the same conclusion very quickly.
The Coyotes franchise became a piece of real estate with a subsequent owner coming up with a plan to try and build an arena in Scottsdale less than five years after Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern purchased the Winnipeg Jets and moved the franchise to the Valley of the Sun in 1996. Gluckstern quickly cashed in and bought the New York Islanders in what was a real estate grab that did not work out for him in Nassau County, N. Y.
Burke sold the Coyotes to real estate developer Steve Ellman in 2001.
Eventually, after no arena materialized in Scottsdale, Ellman found a willing partner in Glendale and built the arena as part of a real estate development deal.
In 2006, Ellman sold the majority stake of the Coyotes to one of his real estate partners Jerry Moyes in a deal that gave Moyes the hockey team and allowed Ellman to take over the development of the real estate parcel in Glendale. Within two years, Moyes threw his hands up and walked away leaving the NHL apparently to pay off the bills. In May 2009, Moyes decided bankruptcy was a good option and found a willing individual to buy the franchise in Balsillie in a bankruptcy proceeding. The NHL apparently was trying to sell the team to Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf as Moyes walked into Judge Baum's court.
Reinsdorf's Major League White Sox franchise was already doing business in Glendale as Reinsdorf moved his spring training headquarters from Tucson, Arizona to Glendale in the winter/spring of 2009.
Balsillie had twice before gone after an NHL team. He had an agreement to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006 and dropped out after to agree to some NHL stipulations. In June 2007 he made his biggest mistake in his dealing with NHL owners and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Not too long after he signed an agreement to buy the Nashville Predators from Craig Leipold, he announced that he planned to relocate the team to Hamilton, Ontario in 2008-09. Soon after his plans became public, the deal was called off.
Balsillie is obvious a smart guy given his success with Research in Motion and BlackBerry but he actions in the Nashville matter and subsequent behavior in the Phoenix dealings were silly. Prospective sports owners have to understand that becoming a major league sports owner is not a right but a privilege. You have to prove that you a worthy to join their private club, Balsillie might be raking in the cash with BlackBerry but that does not mean that he will be allowed in the brotherhood of owners.
There must have been a huge sigh of relief from the law offices of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association when they found out that Judge Baum in his decision wrote.
"In the final analysis, the court cannot find or conclude that the interests of the NHL can be adequately protected if the Coyotes are moved to Hamilton without first having a final decision regarding the claimed rights of the NHL."
Judge Baum understood from day one that the NHL is a private entity that has its own rules not too much different than a golf course which can allow or reject prospective members. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis was able to move his team to Los Angeles after the National Football League blocked his planned relocation in 1981 by a 22-0 vote with five abstentions by joining with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission's lawsuit which charged that the NFL violated antitrust laws by not allowing the move. Davis and the Coliseum Commission won the case, Davis moved the team to LA and the NFL was forced to tighten up its relocation rules. The NFL has not stopped any moves since the Davis case as Robert Irsay took his Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, Bill Bidwill took an offer from Tempe, Arizona in 1988, Davis moved back to Oakland in 1995, Georgia Frontiere moved her Rams from Anaheim to St. Louis in 1995, Art Modell accepted an offer from Maryland and pulled his Cleveland Browns out of the Ohio city in 1995 with the team landing in Baltimore in 1996. Bud Adams finally made good on his threat to move the Houston Oilers in 1996 and took them to Nashville in 1998 with a stop over in Memphis in 1997.
The National Basketball Association blocked the sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum in 1994. Arum and his partners wanted to put the team in New Orleans. The NBA led by Commissioner David Stern wanted to keep the team in Minneapolis and found a local owner who bought the team. But Stern did not block Donald Sterling's relocation of the San Diego Clippers to LA in 1985 even though he was against the move. Under Stern's watch, the Kansas City Kings franchise moved to Sacramento, George Shinn left Charlotte for New Orleans; Michael Heisley moved his Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis and Clayton Bennett has a basketball team in Oklahoma City after leaving Seattle. All of those moves got the approval from NBA owners.
Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption. They could act without worry but the owners and the Commissioner's office got sloppy and were sued in 1992 by Frank Morsani and his Tampa Bay Baseball Group. Morsani and his investors accused Major League Baseball of reneging on its promise to grant the group an expansion team for the Tampa Bay area. In 2003, Morsani and Major League Baseball reached a settlement in the case.
There are many people who are pointing the finger at Gary Bettman for the Phoenix situation and for what people see as a flawed plan to expand hockey into the southern and southwestern part of the United States. Never let facts get in the way of a good story. Bettman was still in the NBA when the 21 NHL owners in 1990 decided that they needed to expand their league footprint.
Bettman was not the NHL Commissioner when the league split the Minnesota North Star franchise and moved a piece of the team to Daly City, California and the Cow Palace then to San Jose in 1991. Bettman was not there when the league added Tampa Bay and Ottawa in 1992-93 or when Wayne Huizenga's Miami-based Florida Panthers and the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim joined the league or when Norman Green decided to move his Minnesota North Stars to Dallas. All three moves were orchestrated for 1993-94 and even though Bettman joined the league on February 1, 1993, he inherited the business moves.
Bettman's so-called southern strategy wasn't so southern when the league expanded in 1997. Nashville joined in 1998, Atlanta in 1999 but two northern cities, Columbus and St. Paul, Minnesota started play in 2000. The Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos apparently was enticed by Raleigh, North Carolina's plan to build an arena for an NHL expansion team and decided to relocate his team to the Research Triangle area but Karmanos had some good reasons to move. Connecticut Governor John Rowland seemed uninterested in building a new Hartford arena and put turned his attention to building a Hartford football stadium for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Karmanos got a number of perks for his hockey team and his Compuware business with the move.
Bettman and the NHL owners did not stop the sale of the Quebec Nordiques by owner Marcel Aubut to Ascent Entertainment and Charlie Lyons in 1995 after Aubut could not get a new arena in Quebec City.
A sports commissioner can make suggestions to owners but at the end of the day, a commissioner works for the owners, a notion that certain sportswriters, fans and apparently some "experts" who teach sports business classes cannot grasp. Just ask former Major League Baseball Commissioner about autonomy. A Commissioner has some rope but not much. A Commissioner is a lobbyist, in Bettman's case, a negotiator when a collective bargaining agreement with the players is done, and gets TV and marketing deals done. Someone in the NHL decided that Phoenix was an important market and was worth keeping.
The NHL is the only buyer left standing with Balsillie gone. Judge Baum wants the NHL to be kinder to Moyes and Wayne Gretzky in making them whole. The Phoenix area has been hard hit by the recession and the real estate bust but demographers think there could be as many as eight million people in the Valley of the Sun metropolitan area by 2050. Phoenix and the surrounding area was one of the fastest growing United States markets in the 1990s and into the 21st century. But that is in the future. Phoenix has a lot of western Canadian snowbirds along with American Midwesterners who winter in the Valley. Those people are potential customers, the Phoenix business community needs to step up as well to keep the team there. The Coyotes franchise also needs an owner who understands that hockey has to be sold not only on the NHL level but on the youth level.
The Dallas Stars franchise resides in a major Sun Belt market with months of very hot weather yet the Metroplex has embraced youth hockey and Texas has more professional hockey teams than any other state in America.
Balsillie will probably be back but he needs to be rehabilitated if he wants an NHL franchise. He needs to understand that the NHL has rules and regulations and until he gets into the club, he needs to abide by the owners and the Commissioner's wishes.
As far as Hamilton, the city officials of the 1980s were not much smarter than those in Phoenix who knuckled under and gave into Coangelo's demands. The city's arena was built without a thought of the future and lacks sufficient luxury boxes and club seats. The Hamilton building is not up to NHL standards and it will cost taxpayers in an economically depressed city hundreds of millions of dollars to get the building up to snuff. Then there is the question of how much money that a potential Hamilton owner has to pay Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for invading the Toronto territory and how much money that owner has to give Buffalo Sabres owner Tom Galisano for encroaching the Sabres northern territory not to mention worrying about the United States Senate and New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand. The two New York lawmakers were not happy with the thought of a Hamilton team because it might take business away from Buffalo.
For those who think the game is the most important part of sports, think again. Or read Judge Baum's decision.
eweiner@mcn.tv
NHL, MLB, NFL, NBA Win, Hamilton and Balsillie Lose
By Evan Weiner
September 30, 2009
10:30 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- So Jim Balsillie has dropped out of the bidding for the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes National Hockey League franchise after a bankruptcy judge in Phoenix, Arizona decided that sports leagues are a private entity and that sports owners have a right to pick owners and territories. The judge, Redfield T. Baum, turned down Balsillie's bid and an offer by the NHL to buy the financially ailing franchise that sits in Glendale, Arizona not in downtown Phoenix because of a terrible decision by the sitting city council in the late 1980s when they buckled to Phoenix Suns CEO Jerry Coangelo's want for the perfect basketball arena with perfect seating for HIS customers and not approve an all purpose use for the building.
The saga of the Phoenix Coyotes should be studied by urban planners and sports business management professors, experts and students as soon as possible because of the action of the elected officials of Phoenix who made a badly flawed decision which resulted in an arena that could only sell 75 percent of the available seating because of obstructed views. Coangelo wanted a hockey team in the building but not own it. He wanted money off of the team as he got the lion’s share of the revenues of any activity in the building because of the lease he demanded and got from the Phoenix officials. Coangelo knew an NHL franchise could not succeed in that building and various Coyotes owners reached the same conclusion very quickly.
The Coyotes franchise became a piece of real estate with a subsequent owner coming up with a plan to try and build an arena in Scottsdale less than five years after Richard Burke and Steven Gluckstern purchased the Winnipeg Jets and moved the franchise to the Valley of the Sun in 1996. Gluckstern quickly cashed in and bought the New York Islanders in what was a real estate grab that did not work out for him in Nassau County, N. Y.
Burke sold the Coyotes to real estate developer Steve Ellman in 2001.
Eventually, after no arena materialized in Scottsdale, Ellman found a willing partner in Glendale and built the arena as part of a real estate development deal.
In 2006, Ellman sold the majority stake of the Coyotes to one of his real estate partners Jerry Moyes in a deal that gave Moyes the hockey team and allowed Ellman to take over the development of the real estate parcel in Glendale. Within two years, Moyes threw his hands up and walked away leaving the NHL apparently to pay off the bills. In May 2009, Moyes decided bankruptcy was a good option and found a willing individual to buy the franchise in Balsillie in a bankruptcy proceeding. The NHL apparently was trying to sell the team to Chicago White Sox and Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf as Moyes walked into Judge Baum's court.
Reinsdorf's Major League White Sox franchise was already doing business in Glendale as Reinsdorf moved his spring training headquarters from Tucson, Arizona to Glendale in the winter/spring of 2009.
Balsillie had twice before gone after an NHL team. He had an agreement to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006 and dropped out after to agree to some NHL stipulations. In June 2007 he made his biggest mistake in his dealing with NHL owners and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Not too long after he signed an agreement to buy the Nashville Predators from Craig Leipold, he announced that he planned to relocate the team to Hamilton, Ontario in 2008-09. Soon after his plans became public, the deal was called off.
Balsillie is obvious a smart guy given his success with Research in Motion and BlackBerry but he actions in the Nashville matter and subsequent behavior in the Phoenix dealings were silly. Prospective sports owners have to understand that becoming a major league sports owner is not a right but a privilege. You have to prove that you a worthy to join their private club, Balsillie might be raking in the cash with BlackBerry but that does not mean that he will be allowed in the brotherhood of owners.
There must have been a huge sigh of relief from the law offices of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association when they found out that Judge Baum in his decision wrote.
"In the final analysis, the court cannot find or conclude that the interests of the NHL can be adequately protected if the Coyotes are moved to Hamilton without first having a final decision regarding the claimed rights of the NHL."
Judge Baum understood from day one that the NHL is a private entity that has its own rules not too much different than a golf course which can allow or reject prospective members. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis was able to move his team to Los Angeles after the National Football League blocked his planned relocation in 1981 by a 22-0 vote with five abstentions by joining with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission's lawsuit which charged that the NFL violated antitrust laws by not allowing the move. Davis and the Coliseum Commission won the case, Davis moved the team to LA and the NFL was forced to tighten up its relocation rules. The NFL has not stopped any moves since the Davis case as Robert Irsay took his Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, Bill Bidwill took an offer from Tempe, Arizona in 1988, Davis moved back to Oakland in 1995, Georgia Frontiere moved her Rams from Anaheim to St. Louis in 1995, Art Modell accepted an offer from Maryland and pulled his Cleveland Browns out of the Ohio city in 1995 with the team landing in Baltimore in 1996. Bud Adams finally made good on his threat to move the Houston Oilers in 1996 and took them to Nashville in 1998 with a stop over in Memphis in 1997.
The National Basketball Association blocked the sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves to a group led by boxing promoter Bob Arum in 1994. Arum and his partners wanted to put the team in New Orleans. The NBA led by Commissioner David Stern wanted to keep the team in Minneapolis and found a local owner who bought the team. But Stern did not block Donald Sterling's relocation of the San Diego Clippers to LA in 1985 even though he was against the move. Under Stern's watch, the Kansas City Kings franchise moved to Sacramento, George Shinn left Charlotte for New Orleans; Michael Heisley moved his Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis and Clayton Bennett has a basketball team in Oklahoma City after leaving Seattle. All of those moves got the approval from NBA owners.
Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption. They could act without worry but the owners and the Commissioner's office got sloppy and were sued in 1992 by Frank Morsani and his Tampa Bay Baseball Group. Morsani and his investors accused Major League Baseball of reneging on its promise to grant the group an expansion team for the Tampa Bay area. In 2003, Morsani and Major League Baseball reached a settlement in the case.
There are many people who are pointing the finger at Gary Bettman for the Phoenix situation and for what people see as a flawed plan to expand hockey into the southern and southwestern part of the United States. Never let facts get in the way of a good story. Bettman was still in the NBA when the 21 NHL owners in 1990 decided that they needed to expand their league footprint.
Bettman was not the NHL Commissioner when the league split the Minnesota North Star franchise and moved a piece of the team to Daly City, California and the Cow Palace then to San Jose in 1991. Bettman was not there when the league added Tampa Bay and Ottawa in 1992-93 or when Wayne Huizenga's Miami-based Florida Panthers and the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim joined the league or when Norman Green decided to move his Minnesota North Stars to Dallas. All three moves were orchestrated for 1993-94 and even though Bettman joined the league on February 1, 1993, he inherited the business moves.
Bettman's so-called southern strategy wasn't so southern when the league expanded in 1997. Nashville joined in 1998, Atlanta in 1999 but two northern cities, Columbus and St. Paul, Minnesota started play in 2000. The Hartford Whalers owner Peter Karmanos apparently was enticed by Raleigh, North Carolina's plan to build an arena for an NHL expansion team and decided to relocate his team to the Research Triangle area but Karmanos had some good reasons to move. Connecticut Governor John Rowland seemed uninterested in building a new Hartford arena and put turned his attention to building a Hartford football stadium for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Karmanos got a number of perks for his hockey team and his Compuware business with the move.
Bettman and the NHL owners did not stop the sale of the Quebec Nordiques by owner Marcel Aubut to Ascent Entertainment and Charlie Lyons in 1995 after Aubut could not get a new arena in Quebec City.
A sports commissioner can make suggestions to owners but at the end of the day, a commissioner works for the owners, a notion that certain sportswriters, fans and apparently some "experts" who teach sports business classes cannot grasp. Just ask former Major League Baseball Commissioner about autonomy. A Commissioner has some rope but not much. A Commissioner is a lobbyist, in Bettman's case, a negotiator when a collective bargaining agreement with the players is done, and gets TV and marketing deals done. Someone in the NHL decided that Phoenix was an important market and was worth keeping.
The NHL is the only buyer left standing with Balsillie gone. Judge Baum wants the NHL to be kinder to Moyes and Wayne Gretzky in making them whole. The Phoenix area has been hard hit by the recession and the real estate bust but demographers think there could be as many as eight million people in the Valley of the Sun metropolitan area by 2050. Phoenix and the surrounding area was one of the fastest growing United States markets in the 1990s and into the 21st century. But that is in the future. Phoenix has a lot of western Canadian snowbirds along with American Midwesterners who winter in the Valley. Those people are potential customers, the Phoenix business community needs to step up as well to keep the team there. The Coyotes franchise also needs an owner who understands that hockey has to be sold not only on the NHL level but on the youth level.
The Dallas Stars franchise resides in a major Sun Belt market with months of very hot weather yet the Metroplex has embraced youth hockey and Texas has more professional hockey teams than any other state in America.
Balsillie will probably be back but he needs to be rehabilitated if he wants an NHL franchise. He needs to understand that the NHL has rules and regulations and until he gets into the club, he needs to abide by the owners and the Commissioner's wishes.
As far as Hamilton, the city officials of the 1980s were not much smarter than those in Phoenix who knuckled under and gave into Coangelo's demands. The city's arena was built without a thought of the future and lacks sufficient luxury boxes and club seats. The Hamilton building is not up to NHL standards and it will cost taxpayers in an economically depressed city hundreds of millions of dollars to get the building up to snuff. Then there is the question of how much money that a potential Hamilton owner has to pay Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for invading the Toronto territory and how much money that owner has to give Buffalo Sabres owner Tom Galisano for encroaching the Sabres northern territory not to mention worrying about the United States Senate and New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand. The two New York lawmakers were not happy with the thought of a Hamilton team because it might take business away from Buffalo.
For those who think the game is the most important part of sports, think again. Or read Judge Baum's decision.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The European and North American Sports Cultural Divide
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7531
The European and North American Sports Cultural Divide
By Evan Weiner
September 13, 2009
10:00 PM EDT
(Copenhagen, Denmark) -- On September 1st, the wife and I were walking down Strøget, the main shopping area in Copenhagen when she spotted a fellow in a red shirt with the letters AIG emblazoned on the front. She wondered why anyone would want to wear the insignia of a disgraced financial company that is being bailed out by America taxpayers on a shirt until she realized that the shirt was actually part of the Manchester United football kit.
In Europe, no one thinks twice about seeing a corporate logo on a sports uniform. It is part of the game unlike the practice in North America where advertising on Major League Baseball or National Football League or National Basketball Association or National Hockey League shirt is akin to drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
The European football kit is not much different than a rugby shirt. The team's major sponsor has a big logo which captures the eye while a much smaller team logo resides in the upper left hand side of the shirt. The shirt or kit manufacturer has a small logo on the upper right side of the shirt. The logo is clearly visible on TV screens, from the stands or in newspaper/magazine pictures.
That is the reason the sponsorship is so attractive.
AIG's logo has been plastered on Manchester United's shirts since 2006 as part of a four-year, $100 million (US) deal. AIG is not the only taxpayer bailout English Premier League team marketing partner. The U. K. has nationalized the Northern Rock bank. Northern Rock's logo appears on Newcastle United's shirt. Northern Rock also is a major sponsor of Newcastle's rugby team.
Financial institutes have been sports marketing partners for a long, long time and it seems that people in the United States have no problem with stadium naming rights except possibly Citibank's marketing deal with Fred Wilpon's New York Mets. In the United States, journalists and editors who should know better and avoid corporate names in articles, columns, radio updates and talk shows along with TV talking heads embrace the corporate names. The fourth estate has accepted corporate marketing partnership and so have sports fans.
Naming rights, presumably, for a stadium do not interfere with a game nor does the NBA's marketing deals with a car company to sponsor league trophies for the Most Valuable Player Award, Defensive Player of the Year, Sixth Man Award and Most Improved Player.
The English Premier League is sponsored by Barclay's bank.
But there is a great sports cultural divide between Europe and North America. In Europe, sports teams whether it is in football, cycling, rugby or cricket have advertising on their shirts, in North America there is still a thought that advertising on baseball uniforms, football, hockey and basketball shirts is something of a violation that might even supersede the separation of church and state although it is rather unclear just what is so sacred about a jersey in those sports even though there is subtle advertising on those shirts as the companies that make the shirts have clearly visible logos on the clothing.
In North America, it is accepted practice for race drivers to have their uniforms plastered with sponsor logos and Major League Soccer follows European tradition and places advertising logos on soccer shirts.
Does a sponsor’s logo ruin a game? The answer is no.
In Europe, the inclusion of a sponsor logo is no big deal. But to some like Ralph Nader, a sponsor's logo on a sports shirt is absolutely wrong and breaks the covenant between the fans sports owners. There are others who feel the same way.
On May 4, 2004, Nader sent a letter to Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig condemning Selig and Major League Baseball owners for putting advertising logos on New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms for the opening series of the 2004 MLB season in Tokyo, Japan.
Nader didn't hide his feelings in his salvo to Selig.
"The great lengths of selfishness with which you are willing to go to desecrate baseball and alienate fans of the game should no longer surprise us. Still, your placement of advertisements on the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms for Major League Baseball's opener on March 30 in Tokyo ambushed fans across the country and left them shaking their heads at this obscene embarrassment," Nader wrote in his opening paragraph.
"We urge that you immediately put this issue to rest once and for all and eliminate any current or future possibility that Major League Baseball will accept advertisements on uniforms.
"You are suffocating Baseball's fan base. It's not enough for fans who want to enjoy a game to be forced to watch this pitch sponsored by that company or that home run sponsored by this corporation. In addition, they go to a stadium paid for by the fans and taxpayers, yet almost every available space is filled with ads and named after some multinational corporation with no ties to the community.
"Over the last several years, fans have been made to watch 'virtual advertising' infiltrate television broadcasts, and T.V. commentators using the broadcast booth to hawk cell phones during the playoffs and World Series. This over-commercialization is sapping the fun out of being a fan of Major League Baseball.
"Now, you have sunk to a greedy new low. Bending Baseball to the demands of advertisers and accepting more than $10 million (according to Advertising Age) for a corporation to plaster ads on the uniforms for the two-game series in Tokyo. It's supposedly a one-time deal, but conventional wisdom says otherwise -- that permanent advertising on uniforms isn't a question of 'if,' but 'when.'
"MLB executive vice president for business Tim Brosnan, told reporters in Japan 'Are there any definitive plans to put logos on uniforms? No. I don't see that happening. But on the other side of the coin, never say never.'
"'We're mindful of the fans, but I don't think [advertising on uniforms] is unreasonable,' Brosnan later told the New York Post. 'We're always looking for new ways to advance our business.'
"That must sound reassuring to fans. The public tolerates a certain amount of commercialism, but why do you insist on trying the patience of loyal baseball fans across the country? We already have NASCAR, with drivers doubling as walking commercial billboards. Is that really what you want for the national pastime?
"Commissioner Selig, no one is trying to get in the way of your ability to make money, but you need to look beyond the immediate bottom line to make Major League Baseball sustainable. As primary caretaker, this means your job is to respect cities and fans, ensure the integrity of the game, and eliminate self-interested and destructive tendencies. Advertising on uniforms runs counter to each of these critical principles.
"If you allow such an explicit interference of baseball with another greedy vehicle for corporate marketing -- using player uniforms as product placement surfaces -- apathy is not what you should expect from fans and sportswriters. There will be considerable resentment, and fans will drift away. A matter of taste can sour more quickly than you think."
Major League Baseball has not added logos to the front of team shirts yet. Nor as the NFL, NBA or the NHL. But the way North American sports is structured today, there is no reason to keep logos off of shirts except for tradition. The National Hockey League a few years back wiped off the names of the companies that supply equipment to players unless the league received a stipend from the companies. Putting a logo on a Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Hockey League, and National Basketball Association uniform would not compromise any games. Logos on shirts in Europe or Asia are commonplace. There is nothing scared about sports uniforms.
eweiner@mcn.tv
The European and North American Sports Cultural Divide
By Evan Weiner
September 13, 2009
10:00 PM EDT
(Copenhagen, Denmark) -- On September 1st, the wife and I were walking down Strøget, the main shopping area in Copenhagen when she spotted a fellow in a red shirt with the letters AIG emblazoned on the front. She wondered why anyone would want to wear the insignia of a disgraced financial company that is being bailed out by America taxpayers on a shirt until she realized that the shirt was actually part of the Manchester United football kit.
In Europe, no one thinks twice about seeing a corporate logo on a sports uniform. It is part of the game unlike the practice in North America where advertising on Major League Baseball or National Football League or National Basketball Association or National Hockey League shirt is akin to drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
The European football kit is not much different than a rugby shirt. The team's major sponsor has a big logo which captures the eye while a much smaller team logo resides in the upper left hand side of the shirt. The shirt or kit manufacturer has a small logo on the upper right side of the shirt. The logo is clearly visible on TV screens, from the stands or in newspaper/magazine pictures.
That is the reason the sponsorship is so attractive.
AIG's logo has been plastered on Manchester United's shirts since 2006 as part of a four-year, $100 million (US) deal. AIG is not the only taxpayer bailout English Premier League team marketing partner. The U. K. has nationalized the Northern Rock bank. Northern Rock's logo appears on Newcastle United's shirt. Northern Rock also is a major sponsor of Newcastle's rugby team.
Financial institutes have been sports marketing partners for a long, long time and it seems that people in the United States have no problem with stadium naming rights except possibly Citibank's marketing deal with Fred Wilpon's New York Mets. In the United States, journalists and editors who should know better and avoid corporate names in articles, columns, radio updates and talk shows along with TV talking heads embrace the corporate names. The fourth estate has accepted corporate marketing partnership and so have sports fans.
Naming rights, presumably, for a stadium do not interfere with a game nor does the NBA's marketing deals with a car company to sponsor league trophies for the Most Valuable Player Award, Defensive Player of the Year, Sixth Man Award and Most Improved Player.
The English Premier League is sponsored by Barclay's bank.
But there is a great sports cultural divide between Europe and North America. In Europe, sports teams whether it is in football, cycling, rugby or cricket have advertising on their shirts, in North America there is still a thought that advertising on baseball uniforms, football, hockey and basketball shirts is something of a violation that might even supersede the separation of church and state although it is rather unclear just what is so sacred about a jersey in those sports even though there is subtle advertising on those shirts as the companies that make the shirts have clearly visible logos on the clothing.
In North America, it is accepted practice for race drivers to have their uniforms plastered with sponsor logos and Major League Soccer follows European tradition and places advertising logos on soccer shirts.
Does a sponsor’s logo ruin a game? The answer is no.
In Europe, the inclusion of a sponsor logo is no big deal. But to some like Ralph Nader, a sponsor's logo on a sports shirt is absolutely wrong and breaks the covenant between the fans sports owners. There are others who feel the same way.
On May 4, 2004, Nader sent a letter to Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig condemning Selig and Major League Baseball owners for putting advertising logos on New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms for the opening series of the 2004 MLB season in Tokyo, Japan.
Nader didn't hide his feelings in his salvo to Selig.
"The great lengths of selfishness with which you are willing to go to desecrate baseball and alienate fans of the game should no longer surprise us. Still, your placement of advertisements on the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms for Major League Baseball's opener on March 30 in Tokyo ambushed fans across the country and left them shaking their heads at this obscene embarrassment," Nader wrote in his opening paragraph.
"We urge that you immediately put this issue to rest once and for all and eliminate any current or future possibility that Major League Baseball will accept advertisements on uniforms.
"You are suffocating Baseball's fan base. It's not enough for fans who want to enjoy a game to be forced to watch this pitch sponsored by that company or that home run sponsored by this corporation. In addition, they go to a stadium paid for by the fans and taxpayers, yet almost every available space is filled with ads and named after some multinational corporation with no ties to the community.
"Over the last several years, fans have been made to watch 'virtual advertising' infiltrate television broadcasts, and T.V. commentators using the broadcast booth to hawk cell phones during the playoffs and World Series. This over-commercialization is sapping the fun out of being a fan of Major League Baseball.
"Now, you have sunk to a greedy new low. Bending Baseball to the demands of advertisers and accepting more than $10 million (according to Advertising Age) for a corporation to plaster ads on the uniforms for the two-game series in Tokyo. It's supposedly a one-time deal, but conventional wisdom says otherwise -- that permanent advertising on uniforms isn't a question of 'if,' but 'when.'
"MLB executive vice president for business Tim Brosnan, told reporters in Japan 'Are there any definitive plans to put logos on uniforms? No. I don't see that happening. But on the other side of the coin, never say never.'
"'We're mindful of the fans, but I don't think [advertising on uniforms] is unreasonable,' Brosnan later told the New York Post. 'We're always looking for new ways to advance our business.'
"That must sound reassuring to fans. The public tolerates a certain amount of commercialism, but why do you insist on trying the patience of loyal baseball fans across the country? We already have NASCAR, with drivers doubling as walking commercial billboards. Is that really what you want for the national pastime?
"Commissioner Selig, no one is trying to get in the way of your ability to make money, but you need to look beyond the immediate bottom line to make Major League Baseball sustainable. As primary caretaker, this means your job is to respect cities and fans, ensure the integrity of the game, and eliminate self-interested and destructive tendencies. Advertising on uniforms runs counter to each of these critical principles.
"If you allow such an explicit interference of baseball with another greedy vehicle for corporate marketing -- using player uniforms as product placement surfaces -- apathy is not what you should expect from fans and sportswriters. There will be considerable resentment, and fans will drift away. A matter of taste can sour more quickly than you think."
Major League Baseball has not added logos to the front of team shirts yet. Nor as the NFL, NBA or the NHL. But the way North American sports is structured today, there is no reason to keep logos off of shirts except for tradition. The National Hockey League a few years back wiped off the names of the companies that supply equipment to players unless the league received a stipend from the companies. Putting a logo on a Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Hockey League, and National Basketball Association uniform would not compromise any games. Logos on shirts in Europe or Asia are commonplace. There is nothing scared about sports uniforms.
eweiner@mcn.tv
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