But if [the youth we develop] sign other professional contracts and they haven't signed a contract with MLS, then yes. We do lose their rights. That's what I'm talking about. There needs to be a mechanism to sign those players to professional contracts and then maybe place them, whether it's a developmental league, whether we have relationships with PDL teams, or USL teams, or even foreign teams, so they can continue to get minutes and develop. That's the piece we're missing right now.
I agree whole heartedly with this. This is what I was getting at regarding players like Devin Barclay.
Also, it's kind of pathetic, but McCullers is already pushing for public financing for a new Crew Stadium project years in advance.
We've seen what's happened with the Blue Jackets and their situation with a privately financed, privately held facility. This community has struggled in getting public-private partnerships put in place in order to build professional sports infrastructure, and it's something that we've got to figure out. I'll be meeting, and I have been meeting with local politicians and community leaders. But we need to fix this problem for the professional sports industry, not just the Blue Jackets, so in five to 10 years, when we're either needing to address our situation here or if we're talking about a new stadium, we've got a mechanism in place that's a public-private partnership that's going to be able to get the job done and in five to 10 years we're not looking at the same situation with the Crew that we're looking at with the BlueJackets right now.
So that's not the situation now, you're just trying to avoid it becoming the situation?
Absolutely. We need to take a more holistic view of what it takes to be a major league city, and in particular the ability to develop professional sports infrastructure is something we've got to be able to figure out.
Let me say that in the context of Crew Stadium, I can absolutely see better public investment for things like 1) improving ingress and egress infrastructure and 2) paving the damn parking lots.
However, the Blue Jackets pay something like $5 million a year in lease payments to the owner of Nationwide Arena, albeit on much higher revenues. HSG owns Crew Stadium and makes lease payments of something like $50,000 a year to the Ohio Expo Commission for the land the stadium sits on, plus about $131,000 for event revenue. The stadium was built at a time of historically low interest rates, so while the debt service on the stadium is significant, I can't imagine it's overwhelming.
Now in the past, the Crew has been on the hook for paying property taxes of about $500k a year, and have done everything in their power to get out of paying it. They appealed to the tax board and courts to lower the value of the stadium, and when that didn't work, got some legislators to write up some bills, but at this point, I can't find whether or not the team has finally gotten out of paying that. So let's be generous and say all told the team has $1 million in lease and tax obligations if they haven't reduced it already.
Is it a significant amount of money? Sure. Is it something as a tax payer I'd be inclined to hand back over to the team? Eh, not so much, but I'm a partisan on the issue of no-tax-bailouts for professional sports teams.
The Crew have also been passing the hat around Columbus and the suburbs for public financing to help them build a new training facility, and so far it hasn't happened. The saga has gone on for a couple of years at least at this point, and it's clear that there isn't much interest in financing another revenue stream for the team (in the form of lots of extra fields for hosting events a la Frisco).
I think McCullers is being somewhat dishonest about all privately financed facilities being a bad thing. It all depends on the underlying agreement, and right now I can't say that the Crew have all that bad of one. The bottom line is that the team will push for all it can get because local government traditionally caves once a team threatens to move. I could imagine in five to ten years horror stories coming out about how bad the team is doing like they do for every other pro sports team that wants a public handout.
Romantic that I am, I'd love to see the State of Ohio and various local entities pony up for infrastructure improvements so that the team can renovate and stay in CCS for a long time to come. But the reality doesn't always follow notions of romance or sense, so we'll have to check back in 5 or 10 years and see what threats or figures come out.
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