Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit [Paperback]

Joanna Cagan (Author), Neil De Mause (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

"Are you a sports fan distraught over your home team's move to another city? Or someone whose city has just lured a team to your home turf with a brand new stadium? Or maybe you don't follow sports, but as a taxpayer are outraged over cutbacks in school funding and other services."--BOOK JACKET. "Forget about the false tales of "welfare queens" who supposedly rode around in Cadillacs. Field of Schemes introduces you to some real welfare kings."--BOOK JACKET. "A used-car salesman turned baseball owner promises to pay for a new stadium out of his own pocket, if the state government just agrees to move a highway to clear the land. Several backroom deals later, the state is raising a quarter-billion dollars towards the stadium costs - and the team owner is getting his stadium scot-free."--BOOK JACKET. "The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft wants to buy a football team, but only if the state will build him a new stadium first. So he pays the $4 million cost of a referendum - even as his camp spends millions more in advertising to make sure he wins. In exchange, he gets at least $300 million in public money to build his team's new home."--BOOK JACKET.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction: The View from the cheap seats

Back in the dim, distant past, when the earth was new and the Carolina Hurricanes were still the Hartford Whalers, we knew little about the world of sports franchise roulette. We probably were about as informed as any regular newspaper reader or ESPN junkie-namely, we knew that sports teams seemed to be moving to new cities, or at least threatening to do so, at an alarming pace. Those that stayed put were more often than not rewarded with new sports palaces with odd corporate names like the TWA Dome and the Pepsi Center. We might have wondered, too, whether these new sports facilities were really worth the hundreds of millions of public dollars being spent on them. And we might have questioned, in idle conversation, the wisdom of spending such exorbitant amounts of money on behalf of private interests while so much of what we knew and loved about U.S. cities was falling apart.

Mostly, all we knew back then, in the fall of 1995, was that the Cleveland Browns were no more.

Each of us had a long history as a sports fan. Joanna grew up in Cleveland, singing the Browns Christmas song in 6th grade choir and generally confident in the notion that football and Sunday afternoons would forever go together. The announcement in November 1995 that longtime owner Art Modell was yanking the team away to Baltimore stunned locals. If this could happen to one of the most devoted fan bases in the country, it could happen anywhere.

Suddenly, the topic of team relocation and stadium construction seemed to deserve greater scrutiny. Local taxpayers had handed over hundreds of millions of dollars for a new baseball stadium for the Indians-should they have done the same for the Browns? And at what point was it fair for a beleaguered populace, facing a neglected educational infrastructure and a continued urban exodus, to say enough is enough, we deserve to have sports teams and a successful school system?

For Neil, meanwhile, growing up a Yankee fan meant riding the subway to the newly renovated ballyard in the Bronx 30 times a year, to sit in $1.50 bleacher seats with a crowd more diverse than you'd find most anywhere in a rapidly polarizing city: Latino families from the surrounding neighborhoods, members of the rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, a Japanese newspaper reporter who happily gave up her press-box seat to sit with the real fans, and an elderly cowbell-wielding man named Ali, who commuted from his native Puerto Rico every baseball season to watch his team in action.

But being a Yankee fan also meant weathering New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's recurrent threats to move the team to the swamplands of neighboring New Jersey. Yankee games became poignant with the fear that this could be the last generation to share in this sudden camaraderie. Meanwhile the city, pleading poverty, doubled the subway fare, while Steinbrenner, pleading poverty, redoubled his threats while quadrupling bleacher ticket prices. But it wasn't until a new mayor slashed social services to the bone while endorsing Steinbrenner's demand for a new midtown sports palace that the full extent of the story became clear: What was it about sports teams that they could find public money where the public couldn't?

Like other sports fans of long standing, we had worried over the yearly ritual of watching our teams declare their intentions to move to another city unless bribed with a new stadium or a new lease. As journalists concerned with urban issues, we wondered about the wisdom of city governments spending millions of dollars on these stadiums at a time when public housing, libraries, and schools were being dismantled at an unprecedented pace. Perhaps, we thought, there was a story in that.

What we found was more than a mere story. For one thing, the scale of the public subsidy was not millions of dollars, as we had thought, but billions-an expected $11 billion over the course of the 1990s, with no signs of slowing down.

We also discovered that the popular notion of the villains and the heroes in the battle over sports franchise blackmail was upside-down. Although newspapers had portrayed the public as unthinking fans who demanded their elected officials keep teams in town at any cost, we instead found hundreds of citizen activists who had been fighting city by city for years to stop public money from going to private profit. Corporate welfare, they called it, and understandably so. Meanwhile, the local politicians who had pleaded that they had no choice but to give in to sports owners' demands turned out to be eagerly lining up to build sparkling new luxury boxes-where they then happily attended games as the owners' special guests. As one fed-up city resident told us, "They're not public servants. They're corporate servants."

This book began because we were frustrated with free-agent franchises demanding money as the price of their loyalty. But this is far more than a sports story: It's also a story of deceptive politicians, taxpayer swindles, media slants, the power of big money, and most of all, a political system that serves the rich and powerful at the expense of the average fan, the average taxpayer, the average citizen.

The more we learned in researching this book, the more apparent it became that the most important partner in the new stadium tango has been left out for far too long. Average citizens are the ones paying for the cost of new sports facilities-in public subsidies, in tax revenue lost, in public spaces taken over for private gain, in disillusionment with the democratic process, and in the loss of sheer enjoyment at being a spectator at a pro sporting event. We spoke with heartbroken sports fans who couldn't imagine life without their team, and neighborhood activists just struggling to make ends meet. One outraged citizen, questioning the whole concept of public money going to sports facilities, wondered aloud if his love of bowling meant he should get state money to build new bowling lanes. Another has vowed never to patronize the monolithic stadium his once-beloved home team is about to build. All were willing to open their memories, their homes, and their lives to our inquiries and curiosity.

We remain overwhelmed and moved by the stories these people had to share. Yes, this is the tale of the Art Modells and George Steinbrenners of the world, but more than anything it is the average citizen's story: the story of people across the country saying "enough is enough" with corporate welfare in all its many forms.

We ultimately tracked the roots of the sports stadium swindle back in time to the construction of the railroads in 19th-century America, and into the corridors of local power politics in a hundred towns across the United States and Canada. But the story of the swindle really begins on the night it first broke through to public consciousness: a cold spring night in a Maryland suburb, when a fleet of moving vans crept away in the dead of night-stealing a city's football team away, and forever changing the way we think about sports, urban politics, and the future of the American city. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Common Courage Press; 2 edition (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567511384
• ISBN-13: 978-1567511383
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,519,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Whose money is it anyway? November 15, 1999

By A Customer

If you thought you had to have a stadium and you had to pay for it, read this before you vote. Wonderfully documented and thouroughly researched. I knew we all were getting screwed but until I read this book I didn't know how bad it could hurt. A good primer on the language of stadium larceny.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Trenchant analysis of a troubling phenomenon August 3, 2002

By Malvin VINE™ VOICE

Amazon Verified Purchase

"Field of Schemes" is an accessible but no less incisive critique of an often overlooked aspect of the corporate welfare phenomenon: professional sports team owners and the seemingly insatiable lust for obtaining ever-more-lavish stadiums to be built at public expense. Sports fans Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause combine original and secondary research with interviews to successfully chronicle and analyse the public stadium building boom in an entertaining yet thought-provoking manner.

Cagan and deMause paint a picture of a playing field that is decidedly not even. Local communities are pitted in a struggle against powerful coalitions of wealthy sports moguls, politicos, real estate developers and other related businesspeople (which oftentimes includes the local media, since sports helps sells newspapers and TV advertising) over the allocation of increasingly scarce public tax revenues. The authors show that public education in particular seems to bear the brunt of the burden whenever the community loses the fight and sees its funds siphoned away to build these private sports palaces.

Cagan and deMause detail specific cases where owners have successfully blackmailed communities and strong-armed local politicians. These case studies reveal a formula that the authors term "the art of the steal", a step-by-step game plan for owners who plan to fleece their communities for free sports structures. Shamelessly exploiting the community's emotional attachments to the home team and ruthlessly working the good-ole-boy business networks to which local politicians are beholden are a few of the key ingredients that helps to make these schemes work, the authors claim....

Cagan and deMause interview individuals associated with a few of the grass-roots organizations that sprung up to oppose various stadium initiatives. While such groups often experience initial success, they are usually overwhelmed in the long run by the persistence of the powerful forces lined up against them. Citing numerous opinion polls and voter referendums where citizens strenuously opposed the use of tax dollars to fund privately-owned stadiums, the authors suggest that the reason owners win more often than not is due to the greater political power at their disposal, and not the democratic process.

Indeed, the cost to society as a whole is often great. In Chapter 8, "Bad Neigbors", Cagan and deMause brilliantly relate baseball's current preoccupation with the recreation of a mythic past (through the construction of "old time" ballparks such as Camden Yards in Baltimore) with the real decay of America's inner cities. The authors discover that many urban centers have actually been subjected to a corporate "structural adjustment" program akin to those experienced in many Third World nations. They contend that a core problem is a system of private enterprise that privileges the profit motive at the expense of ordinary people.

The authors wrap up the book by alluding to signs that the public stadium-building frenzy may be slowing down, but sadly this appears to be the case mainly because most cities large enough to support a sports franchise have already been tapped out. Fortunately, the authors propose common-sense ideas that, if legislated, could discourage some corporate welfare give-aways. For example, the authors wonder why recipients shouldn't be required to report the public subsidies they receive as taxable income? This would vastly diminish the value of such subsidies and encourage private financing for these deals, which is where the authors contend they rightly belong.

I strongly recommend this book for both sports fans and non-sports fans alike who may be pondering how our society's infatuation with sports fantasy may be harming the real world in which we live. Read more ›