But the stadium will bring so much economic benefit to the city! Well get at least 4 new fast food restaurants hiring only minimum wage workers, and a small boost in hotel revenue!
Transit won’t bring any return on investment. Only poor people use transit and they don’t have any money. And if someone who has a car does use transit that’s hurting the economy! Think of the poor gas station owners and car dealers!
I live in Bristol. Our two nearest arenas which can host large (10,000+ capacity) concerts are in Cardiff and Birmingham.
We are the only major city in England that lacks an arena. And our council is far more concerned with letting property developers flood the market with luxury office blocks and student apartments.
And people think that we are going to run out of fossil fuel or something. I guess they don’t know that dinosaurs die every day and we can collect the fossil fuel from them?
I love comedy podcasts, The Jeselnek and Rosenthal Vanity Project, a favourite. His style is dark humour and it seems that a significant proportion of the audience actually believe some of the things he jokes about. I think it’s one of the reasons they rarely field audience questions and never phone calls.
Comedy can be a minefield for this type of stuff. I’m a big fan of the comedians that can dance around the edge, or seem to cross it and then bring the audience back, eg: Mark Normand, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr, a lot of the old Norm MacDonald stuff, etc.
But I’ll see some fan compilations with titles or comments that make it clear that they don’t get the style of humor… Like “[comedian] DESTROYS feminists!!1!”
When, to anyone with a reasonable level of social intelligence, it’s abundantly clear that that’s not what’s happening.
Whoever made the meme is playing it right too. It’s fun to laugh about Zelda stuck in a freaky womb nose-to-nose with Dark Beast Ganon for 100 years when you’re on your way to the Korok Forrest to claim Hestu’s Gift.
I get it but… The fact that a team changes town is such an insane concept to me. I don’t know the SeaWolves, but they are probably called Seattle SeaWolves, right? So they carry the name of the city.
Where I’m from (Germany) that team would be dead instantly in the eyes of the fans. If f. ex. Victoria Berlin renamed itself to FC Berlin, the fans would find it weird but probably go along. 7f the moved to Magdeburg and are now Victoria Berlin but not in Berlin they would lose their fans. And wouldn’t gain Magdeburger Fans.
If you’re interested I would recommend you to check out the recent rise of FC Union Berlin. They’ve risen to the first division about 5 years ago and still play in a pretty old and basic stadium. They display of the current goals is still done by changing boards with numbers on them through a window.
And they managed to play in the champions League despite having an old stadium. Sadly they played their European games in the bigger Olympia stadium. I wish they would have hosted Real Madrid in the old forestry (name of the stadium “die Alte Försterei”).
The Cincinnati streetcar cost almost exactly $150m and it serves like 0.5% of the metro population. It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment of the post. We need to invest in public transit. Where I live there are zero non-car options. But don’t pretend you’re building comprehensive public transit for $150m.
If you’re in Cincy there’s Metro bus, and TANK bus in northern Kentucky comes up into Cincy as well. You can also buy combo passes that let you ride both. It’s admittedly a very lacking public transit system, especially after cuts made in the Covid era, but it’s there and gets me to and from work.
Unfortunately the doomed underground rail system has such an infamous reputation that the thought of getting such a system put in place these days is a far fetched dream.
I have a Cincinnati address but I’m in Clermont county just outside of Anderson, in the 45255 zip. There aren’t buses near my house, or sidewalks, or bike lanes. Just a ditch on the side of the road and 40+mph traffic with lots of construction trucks.
City street cars seem to be a waste of money now but more trains would be nice. They never invest enough in it.
I live in Atlanta. We have a shitty street car and a shitty train system. They don’t go to enough places to be useful most of the time. But if they got the same kind of funding our stadiums got it would be crazy good. I could ride the train instead of driving to most places if they just expanded to some more parts of the city.
Hopefully but I’m doubtful. My city (st Louis) has burned millions in a trash can of trying to get a singular, less than 5 mile, trolley working for more than a month and failed miserably. It’s been a major embarrassment that they’ve been entirely capable of getting it to run reliably down one mostly flat, straight street.
150m can do a whole bunch when you use properly rolled out busses, with their own lanes (and you can initially paint these if the budget is low). People driving their car on the bus lanes will nicely generate additional tax income (fines) and if the busses are good, the people will come.
Even in the Netherlands, where we have really good trains on even a European scale, we still have long-distance busses (comfy ones, for 1-2hr trips) and regional busses (still comfy, but those are 20-30 min trips). Custom infra doesn’t always cut it, especially when repurposing existing infra will serve the job just fine.
I’ve lived in the NL, we just have a different reality. Just the other side of my city is an hour away in a car with no traffic. Regional cities are 1.5-3 hrs away. There are some bus lines in the middle of the city but most of our metro area has zero non-car options.
It runs a 3.6 mile loop, that’s just over a 1.5 mile walk from one end to the other. I can walk it in 20 minute
Well fine if you want to brag I guess but most Midwesterners would need defibrillators and a fast food chain or two along the way to make this trek, and it ain’t taking 20min.
Okay you’re not wrong about most people. I saw a post in a couch to 5k thread recently about getting to running 14 minute miles. I can walk 13 minute miles. But the I-275 loop that circles Cincinnati is almost 90 miles around. The streetcar covering less than two miles of the city is still not helping the common person.
Belarus wants to work with Russia and be allied with them because they believe it will improve their standard of living. Belarus’s president wouldn’t invite Russia into their country otherwise.
In my case it’s more like, “You’re so clumsy you’re probably gonna chop your finger off. Look at you, I bet you will. Try and get real close to it like you’re chopping veggies without chopping your finger off. Bet you can’t. You probably can’t clean the blade real fast on the sharp side because you’ll chop your finger off. Pussy.”
Team owners: “We’re just humble billionaires and we care so much about your state. The team is part of the community… Now subsidize our massively profitable business or we’ll move the team.”
I’ll never understand why fans are die hard loyal to franchises that screw them at every possible opportunity. Insane ticket prices, seat license fees (which are somehow different than tickets?), insane concession prices, ads on everything- it hurts my brain.
I’m not a huge football/soccer fan, but I love the concept of promotion/relegation. Around here if you have a losing team you get rewarded with a high draft pick. It’s a strategy to be terrible.
I also would love having lower level teams to watch, but that’s pretty rare. If you have a pro team in your city, you probably don’t have a semi pro team with the exception of baseball.
Maybe that’s why so many people enjoy watching college sports. Although I have my own issues with that scene, because of course I do.
In the UK we have the same mindless billions in Soccer, but there is still (just about) a good level of community sport, like semi pro and below, where you can watch for almost nothing then go the bar after the match and drink with the players.
You don’t get the same athleticism and artistry (from overtrained genetic freaks) But you still get brilliant entertainment, drama, fun moments with your tribe. Etc.
I mean I think most people are aware of how abusive the relationship is at some level (conscious or not) but ultimately the reason billionaires buy teams like this is if you truly love sports what are you by going to do?
I think the only correct perspective to view this from is that it is a tragedy that something so incredibly important to people that it might as well be a religion, is utterly controlled by the billionaire class. I couldn’t care less for professional sports in most ways and find it annoying that stadiums get so much subsidies from cities but at the end of the day I have no interest in bashing people’s rabid love of a sport. I think it is great, go wild and be totally obsessed with your sports team, it is an utterly benign love at the heart of it.
Nailed it. This is especially true with football in the UK. People are literally born and brought up with the expectation of supporting a certain team.
From a quick search I found that it apparently gives the purchaser the right to a specific seat for the duration of a season. Makes sense I suppose, but still kinda scummy.
Their original stadium (Foxboro) cost an incredibly-low $7 million to build circa 1970. Rather than building a bowl-like structure fully above ground like conventional stadiums, they instead dug a stadium-shaped hole in the ground and filled it with seats - a really practical way to do something like this, as long as you don’t mind the flooding.
As a non north-american I never understood this franchise system. How could you cheer for a team that will move anytime to a city more profitable? In Europe and latin america, if your city sucks, is becoming poor or so, the team will fall to the second division and will deal with that cause they are from that city, cause they are a club, not a franchise. For me this makes much more sense.
As much a love to bash the yanks, it’s not just them any more .
You could take any of the top 10 brands in European football, move the stadium anywhere in the world, and no one would notice but for a handful Of die hards.
If Man City moved to Dubai tomorrow, would that really surprise you ?
If Real Madrid moved to Florida , Liverpool to Beijing, ? Your left with 10,000 pissed off locals, but that’s nothing when you’re a global brand.
You have a great point, but for me it is still too much conjectures, but looking to theses conjectures I still disagree. Moving to another country would destroy those teams, cause they aren´t just the teams, Liverpool actually is a global brand but it is the Liverpool that plays in the premier league and have their rivalries, leaving UK would mean leaving all these parts of the brand behind. It is also a very different scenario, those teams in US move to other cities in the same country and still compete in the same tournament keeping a lot more of their previous brand.
For me your example would be much closer to MLB, NBA, NFL and MLS if you thought about Liverpool goint to Bristol, for example. In this scenario I can see better your point but I still think that the club would lose a lot of their capital and the brand would suffer with the ridicule of the situation for the average football fan. But it is just another opinion based in my previous opinions.
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