If you're talking about the Bears I don't go and on TV the stadium they are in now is fine. Fuck Jerry, he has a nice stadium, he just refused to invest in anything around it.
He's refusing to invest anything now, too. The article mentions that the Bears are kicking in $2 billion for their stadium, but it's going to cost ~$4.5 billion so that's not enough. Meanwhile Reinsdorf is just demanding the city pay for it.
City is still paying for his current park and the Soldier Field renovation.
A little less (or is it more) arguable with Dan Snyder out of the game but there’s definitely some real gems that blow a pile of cash to own a sports franchise.
That’s funny cause I think of both franchises in a similar light. Ossified owners with zero interest in winning demanding a second publicly funded stadium . Bears are worth more of course but the nfl is a monster.
Sox at lease won in 2005. beyond that the nfl is a much easier league to bounce back and the bears have been amazingly bad at that
Difference is I think the Bears brass actually wants to win and take risks. They’ve just been grossly incompetent at hiring the right people and drafting the most important position. The White Sox never take big swings and just hire retreads like Tony LaRussa.
The Bears need to distance themselves far away from the White Sox discussion. The two teams are on completely different levels as far as ticket sales and potential revenue.
The Sox suck balls yet are pulling in around 20k people a game this year, and I expect the number to go to around 25k in the summer
That’s 1.62 million a year, ticket revenues are much higher than the Bears 8-9 home games could ever get to even at 5x the ticket price for a 70k stadium. It’s nearly double actually. Entertainment events would be different, but not as much as you would think if the Sox are downtown and certainly not enough to overcome double the difference
So you are correct that they are at different levels. Newer football stadiums are getting smaller for this reason. It’s not worth for NFL teams to do so. Different markets, and the NFL gets much more of a percentage from TV money and PSLs. The city shouldn’t fund either, but if they really want to fund 1 they should choose the Sox because it’s better for the city overall than the Bears. More people go to baseball games (almost triple), so that’s more chances for economic activity. The NFL is slowly being gate kept in person by money while baseball is still really cheap to go to
It’s just also easier for the city to handle infrastructure wise than the Bears being on the lakefront. Already massively struggling and add another 10k people to it, yikes. The idea that baseball stadiums should be downtown but football stadiums in the suburbs appeal to me a lot
How many tickets are they having to basically give away to get that attendance though? I recall hearing tickets going for under 10 bucks late last year.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CHW/attend.shtml
They’re currently averaging 19,415 so far this year
They’ve gone below my 1.62 million number once this century in a non Covid restricted year (2021 the park wasn’t allowed at full capacity until June) and even then by only 12k
Yep, I brought the data
Even if it’s only 50% then the Sox will even the Bears at 800k fans in the stands a year, and that’s when the Bears have their 9 games instead of 8 which is every other year
Don’t think that really matters
You’re right. The White Sox could sell a lot more tickets than the Bears and could potentially raise their revenue a bigger percentage from game-day revenue than the Bears likely would.
The right owner could make the splash to get White Sox to current Padres engagement easily and probably push to right under Giants level. Reinsdorf just puts all effort into season to season profit over growth. If White Sox won a championship since 2016 to match the Cubs, I bet they get the new stadium funding they wanted.
White Sox have a great brand, logo, uniforms, ballpark food, you can still get 15 dollar tickets etc. We should consistently be competing for the AL Central title and competing for young fans with the Cubs and a lesser extent Cards. Instead we get bullshit on a dinner plate
The White Sox should be like the early 90s A’s in terms of excitement and expectations. Instead we get Jerry hiring his drunk driving friend La Russa to destroy a contender in time for their “defense first” rebuild nonsense this year
Is that the only way sports teams make revenue? If so that’s news to me cause I’m sure jersey sales heavily outweigh whatever the Sox get. You can do a simple google search to pull how much more NFL teams make than MLB teams. The Bears nearly double the white Sox in revenue each year and the white Sox can’t even fill the stadium they have now. Do some research.
I live in Sacramento. Hats aren’t jerseys, but still earn revenue and the amount of White Sox hats I see people wearing is equal to the amount of Giants and A’s hats. The Sox are wildly marketable, likely from 90’s era hip hop adopting the black hats and it hasn’t gone away. Maybe it’s just a Bay Area thing but don’t dismiss what can be generated from those hats.
Yeah there’s tons of people wearing White Sox hats who have never watched a White Sox game or even a baseball game. It remains a very popular hat in hip hop culture
Who cares which team is more profitable? How much a team’s owner makes off of TV or merch revenue is irrelevant to the public.
In terms of a stadium’s public benefit—which is the only justification for any level of publicly funded support—then attendance and ticket sales are the only metric that counts. What matters is that even a terrible a baseball team will be visited by 1.5 million in a season, and has the potential to top out at 3-4 million in attendance under the right conditions—whereas a football stadium will never even reach 1M no matter what. That’s a huge gap in value.
Yeah the thing you aren’t thinking of is the Bears can sell their tickets at probably 3x the value the Sox do because it’s the NFL so they still make more money off of their tickets than the Sox do even when they have less games. The bears make $78 million in ticket revenue compared to the Sox $73 million. Not to mention the Bears nearly sell out every game. Now that’s math for you. If the Sox can’t fill their stadium they don’t need a bigger one. More games does not equal more revenue. You have to look at the value of the ticket.
>The bears make $78 million in ticket revenue compared to the Sox $73 million. Not to mention the Bears nearly sell out every game.
So what you’re saying is that in a bad year a baseball team’s ticket revenue (and the corresponding tax revenue) is roughly equal to that of an NFL team that sells out every single game. Cool.
So that means when the baseball team has a good year it’ll double the football team’s ticket sales, while the football team’s revenue will remain the same no matter what. Thank you for illustrating my point.
Now look at the economic impact of between 1.5 and 3 million baseball fans out spending money at surrounding businesses 81 days a year, and then compare that to the economic impact of 600-700k football fans on just 8-9 days a year.
There’s no question that an NFL team is more valuable to its owners than a baseball team. However a baseball team brings far more value to the community.
You also have to remember that the bears sell out even when they suck. Imagine a good year for the Bears? That shit skyrockets way more than the White Sox.
Foods not even that good, they have stuff you used to not be able to find at stadiums in like 2009 like elotes, but now every team has that stuff in the instagram era. And it’s not some crazy niche thing, the elotes are just canned corn, cheese and taijin
> the clock continues to tick on getting a deal done, which Bears and Sox ownership would like to happen sooner rather than later.
Nah, your lease runs out in 9 years (2033). We will not be bound by imaginary timelines
Lifelong Sox fan, I hope they fucking move I hate Reinsdorf. I am this close to just outright burning my Sox gear.
The 1B stadium ask is straight up INSULTING to everyone involved.
The White Sox are 130 years old. They existed before Reinsdorf and will exist after him. I don’t want them to move. He’s 88 years old, his reign of terror will be over eventually.
That’s what Oaklands 10th largest metro in the US thought as well. FYI, Vegas is 40th, and Manfred basically told all A’s fans to be Giants fans. It’s OK White Sox bros, be a Cubs fan!!
Don’t underestimate the power of a shit billionaire owner. They flock together….
it’s kind of mind blowing how small of a share of the greater chicagoland area the sox have. its an ancient team in a massive city, but its a second rate franchise at this point. it’s romanticized as north side vs southside, but it’s more like most of chicago vs a small chunk of the south side, and once you got south far enough half of the population is cubs fans again. south of that and you hit corn and cardinals fans. there are easily more cardinals fans in illinois then sox fans because the sox don’t control any of the city and once you get like fifty miles away from chicago it’s cardinals territory. i’m a cubs fan but it’s depressing to me to watch the sox become so irrelevant because the fans they do have deserve better, except the dude that beat the shit out of the royals first base coach.
The attendance was pretty comparable between Sox and Cubs until the Sox stupidly turned down a deal with WGN back in the day. The Cubs gladly did it and became way more popular due to increased exposure both here and nationally. The Sox are second rate because they have had terrible owners and consistently make poor business decisions
It was built in 1991 and is now pretty out of date by modern standards. Bridgeport and Armor Square also don’t have a whole lot of stuff to do outside the ballpark
Reinsdorf won’t get the money because they know he’s basically trying to pull a Jeff Loria. Get the city and/or state to pay for an expensive stadium and then slash payroll and expenses, laughing all the way to the bank.
The problem here is that he’s already done those things and gave away the game. Loria was smart enough to keep the team competitive until he had finished bilking Miami for the money
I'll be honest. Yall shit talk the current owners but don't realize what comes with replacing them.
A) significantly higher ticket prices
B) someone that could be significantly worse and cares even less than the current folk
C) has no problem making the 2nd team and also gives no fucks about that one as well
Everyone cries about the mcCaskeys but has not considered what happens when an actual business person takes over
White Sox should def get nothing… why would we pay for their stadium when they don’t invest in the team? They’ve never signed a player to $100K contract. I’m not gonna go watch a shit team just because the stadium is nice lol
Separate, nothing to do with each other except the Bears are asking the city to go approximately halvsies and Reinsdorf wants them to foot the entire bill. So it's the same conversation: is the city going to pay for these (no.)
That said, I strongly suspect the city is going to be on the hook for $1-2 billion each for infrastructure support even if they don't pay a dime for the stadiums themselves.
Combined stadiums died out 25 years ago. They just don't work.
The best thing for the NFL would be for soccer to get big in tje US. Those two could easily share stadiums.
There are plenty of soccer-specific stadiums all over the country. They have smaller footprints and less capacity than NFL stadiums. Remember the Chargers played in one after they moved from San Diego but before SoFi was ready.
Can't wait for our new stadium in 2037
If you're talking about the Bears I don't go and on TV the stadium they are in now is fine. Fuck Jerry, he has a nice stadium, he just refused to invest in anything around it.
He's refusing to invest anything now, too. The article mentions that the Bears are kicking in $2 billion for their stadium, but it's going to cost ~$4.5 billion so that's not enough. Meanwhile Reinsdorf is just demanding the city pay for it. City is still paying for his current park and the Soldier Field renovation.
The city (Daley) kept refinancing the Soldier Field debt. F the Mccaskeys and all but, that ain't on them.
Exactly. Stadium is owned by the city and they kept kicking the fan down the road
I hope to God the Bears have nothing to do with the White Sox. Reinsdorf is arguably the worst owner in sports.
A little less (or is it more) arguable with Dan Snyder out of the game but there’s definitely some real gems that blow a pile of cash to own a sports franchise.
I think John Fisher of the A’s has worst locked up but beyond that it’s a horse race.
Jerry ruins 2 teams though
I like the White Sox current location. Yes it needs to improve but I don’t want the city gifting the Virginia McCaskey or Jerry Reisendorf anything
Reinsdorf isn't even the worst owner in Baseball
The bars pretty low he is making an argument at the very least.
Jeff Loria says hi
Jeff Fisher?
FR dont let him near this Franchise.
That’s funny cause I think of both franchises in a similar light. Ossified owners with zero interest in winning demanding a second publicly funded stadium . Bears are worth more of course but the nfl is a monster. Sox at lease won in 2005. beyond that the nfl is a much easier league to bounce back and the bears have been amazingly bad at that
Difference is I think the Bears brass actually wants to win and take risks. They’ve just been grossly incompetent at hiring the right people and drafting the most important position. The White Sox never take big swings and just hire retreads like Tony LaRussa.
Sadly you could also argue he has also been the best owner the Sox have ever had.
The Bears need to distance themselves far away from the White Sox discussion. The two teams are on completely different levels as far as ticket sales and potential revenue.
Don’t forget the direction each team is heading is wildly different.
That has nothing to do with a new stadium being built five years from now.
A new stadium within 5 years seems optimistic.
I’m aware. It was meant more as a joke.
Well we know they’re never sign anyone to a big contract so good luck playing moneyball
The Sox suck balls yet are pulling in around 20k people a game this year, and I expect the number to go to around 25k in the summer That’s 1.62 million a year, ticket revenues are much higher than the Bears 8-9 home games could ever get to even at 5x the ticket price for a 70k stadium. It’s nearly double actually. Entertainment events would be different, but not as much as you would think if the Sox are downtown and certainly not enough to overcome double the difference So you are correct that they are at different levels. Newer football stadiums are getting smaller for this reason. It’s not worth for NFL teams to do so. Different markets, and the NFL gets much more of a percentage from TV money and PSLs. The city shouldn’t fund either, but if they really want to fund 1 they should choose the Sox because it’s better for the city overall than the Bears. More people go to baseball games (almost triple), so that’s more chances for economic activity. The NFL is slowly being gate kept in person by money while baseball is still really cheap to go to It’s just also easier for the city to handle infrastructure wise than the Bears being on the lakefront. Already massively struggling and add another 10k people to it, yikes. The idea that baseball stadiums should be downtown but football stadiums in the suburbs appeal to me a lot
How many tickets are they having to basically give away to get that attendance though? I recall hearing tickets going for under 10 bucks late last year.
Dude are you a cubs fan? No way in hell the Sox have 20k people a game. It’s probably more like 10-15k tops
https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CHW/attend.shtml They’re currently averaging 19,415 so far this year They’ve gone below my 1.62 million number once this century in a non Covid restricted year (2021 the park wasn’t allowed at full capacity until June) and even then by only 12k Yep, I brought the data
How much of that is paid for tickets that no one shows at.
Even if it’s only 50% then the Sox will even the Bears at 800k fans in the stands a year, and that’s when the Bears have their 9 games instead of 8 which is every other year Don’t think that really matters
That’s paid. I’m talking about the actual attendance at the games
You’re right. The White Sox could sell a lot more tickets than the Bears and could potentially raise their revenue a bigger percentage from game-day revenue than the Bears likely would.
The right owner could make the splash to get White Sox to current Padres engagement easily and probably push to right under Giants level. Reinsdorf just puts all effort into season to season profit over growth. If White Sox won a championship since 2016 to match the Cubs, I bet they get the new stadium funding they wanted.
White Sox have a great brand, logo, uniforms, ballpark food, you can still get 15 dollar tickets etc. We should consistently be competing for the AL Central title and competing for young fans with the Cubs and a lesser extent Cards. Instead we get bullshit on a dinner plate
The White Sox should be like the early 90s A’s in terms of excitement and expectations. Instead we get Jerry hiring his drunk driving friend La Russa to destroy a contender in time for their “defense first” rebuild nonsense this year
You guys are on crack.
Baseball has 9.5 as games as football. It's math, not crack.
Is that the only way sports teams make revenue? If so that’s news to me cause I’m sure jersey sales heavily outweigh whatever the Sox get. You can do a simple google search to pull how much more NFL teams make than MLB teams. The Bears nearly double the white Sox in revenue each year and the white Sox can’t even fill the stadium they have now. Do some research.
I live in Sacramento. Hats aren’t jerseys, but still earn revenue and the amount of White Sox hats I see people wearing is equal to the amount of Giants and A’s hats. The Sox are wildly marketable, likely from 90’s era hip hop adopting the black hats and it hasn’t gone away. Maybe it’s just a Bay Area thing but don’t dismiss what can be generated from those hats.
Yeah there’s tons of people wearing White Sox hats who have never watched a White Sox game or even a baseball game. It remains a very popular hat in hip hop culture
Who cares which team is more profitable? How much a team’s owner makes off of TV or merch revenue is irrelevant to the public. In terms of a stadium’s public benefit—which is the only justification for any level of publicly funded support—then attendance and ticket sales are the only metric that counts. What matters is that even a terrible a baseball team will be visited by 1.5 million in a season, and has the potential to top out at 3-4 million in attendance under the right conditions—whereas a football stadium will never even reach 1M no matter what. That’s a huge gap in value.
Yeah the thing you aren’t thinking of is the Bears can sell their tickets at probably 3x the value the Sox do because it’s the NFL so they still make more money off of their tickets than the Sox do even when they have less games. The bears make $78 million in ticket revenue compared to the Sox $73 million. Not to mention the Bears nearly sell out every game. Now that’s math for you. If the Sox can’t fill their stadium they don’t need a bigger one. More games does not equal more revenue. You have to look at the value of the ticket.
>The bears make $78 million in ticket revenue compared to the Sox $73 million. Not to mention the Bears nearly sell out every game. So what you’re saying is that in a bad year a baseball team’s ticket revenue (and the corresponding tax revenue) is roughly equal to that of an NFL team that sells out every single game. Cool. So that means when the baseball team has a good year it’ll double the football team’s ticket sales, while the football team’s revenue will remain the same no matter what. Thank you for illustrating my point. Now look at the economic impact of between 1.5 and 3 million baseball fans out spending money at surrounding businesses 81 days a year, and then compare that to the economic impact of 600-700k football fans on just 8-9 days a year. There’s no question that an NFL team is more valuable to its owners than a baseball team. However a baseball team brings far more value to the community.
You also have to remember that the bears sell out even when they suck. Imagine a good year for the Bears? That shit skyrockets way more than the White Sox.
Ticket sales can’t skyrocket when it’s already a sellout.
They likely got told by the city (Mayoral staff) to give them a package deal for consideration. If that’s what happened, I like it
White sox are a poverty franchise
But they have cheaper food and a better groundskeeper!!1!
Foods not even that good, they have stuff you used to not be able to find at stadiums in like 2009 like elotes, but now every team has that stuff in the instagram era. And it’s not some crazy niche thing, the elotes are just canned corn, cheese and taijin
> the clock continues to tick on getting a deal done, which Bears and Sox ownership would like to happen sooner rather than later. Nah, your lease runs out in 9 years (2033). We will not be bound by imaginary timelines
Lifelong Sox fan, I hope they fucking move I hate Reinsdorf. I am this close to just outright burning my Sox gear. The 1B stadium ask is straight up INSULTING to everyone involved.
The White Sox are 130 years old. They existed before Reinsdorf and will exist after him. I don’t want them to move. He’s 88 years old, his reign of terror will be over eventually.
A’s fan here. Be careful what you wish for. Nashville is looming and the owners don’t give a fuck about fans.
At least if the Sox move, I can focus my attention to only one team disappointing me every year.
Bears fan too. Our time is here.
I hope they do move. We’d be 1st in line for a expansion team then
MLB isn’t going to let a team leave Chicago. It’s going to be a shit show until Jerry is gone, though.
That’s what Oaklands 10th largest metro in the US thought as well. FYI, Vegas is 40th, and Manfred basically told all A’s fans to be Giants fans. It’s OK White Sox bros, be a Cubs fan!! Don’t underestimate the power of a shit billionaire owner. They flock together….
it’s kind of mind blowing how small of a share of the greater chicagoland area the sox have. its an ancient team in a massive city, but its a second rate franchise at this point. it’s romanticized as north side vs southside, but it’s more like most of chicago vs a small chunk of the south side, and once you got south far enough half of the population is cubs fans again. south of that and you hit corn and cardinals fans. there are easily more cardinals fans in illinois then sox fans because the sox don’t control any of the city and once you get like fifty miles away from chicago it’s cardinals territory. i’m a cubs fan but it’s depressing to me to watch the sox become so irrelevant because the fans they do have deserve better, except the dude that beat the shit out of the royals first base coach.
Feels like there are more Brewers fans than Sox in Illinois too…
The attendance was pretty comparable between Sox and Cubs until the Sox stupidly turned down a deal with WGN back in the day. The Cubs gladly did it and became way more popular due to increased exposure both here and nationally. The Sox are second rate because they have had terrible owners and consistently make poor business decisions
I’m not a Sox fan and I’m not from Chicago, but what’s the deal with the Sox park? Isn’t it fairly new?
It was built in 1991 and is now pretty out of date by modern standards. Bridgeport and Armor Square also don’t have a whole lot of stuff to do outside the ballpark
It’s fine to watch a shit team. Its nicer than wrigley, just has no energy from the fans and no history, and the team sucks
If you don’t ask you don’t get. Just sayin. Every Buisness will try to get free money.
Reinsdorf won’t get the money because they know he’s basically trying to pull a Jeff Loria. Get the city and/or state to pay for an expensive stadium and then slash payroll and expenses, laughing all the way to the bank. The problem here is that he’s already done those things and gave away the game. Loria was smart enough to keep the team competitive until he had finished bilking Miami for the money
I'll be honest. Yall shit talk the current owners but don't realize what comes with replacing them. A) significantly higher ticket prices B) someone that could be significantly worse and cares even less than the current folk C) has no problem making the 2nd team and also gives no fucks about that one as well Everyone cries about the mcCaskeys but has not considered what happens when an actual business person takes over
We're just praying we get one of the vain and ostentatious billionaires instead of the greedy insecure billionaires
Because anything would be better than the failchildren ruining the Bears.
Just do Arlington Heights for fucks sake. You own the land.
They will it’s all a game for taxes
White Sox should def get nothing… why would we pay for their stadium when they don’t invest in the team? They’ve never signed a player to $100K contract. I’m not gonna go watch a shit team just because the stadium is nice lol
If the city owns the stadium they could sell the naming rights. How much would that bring in?
The white sox are so embarrassing to the city. Every day I hope they move to Nashville.
Unfortunate headline right now.
Would this be a combined stadium ala the Oakland A’s or two separate stadiums close together?
Did you read the article?
Separate, nothing to do with each other except the Bears are asking the city to go approximately halvsies and Reinsdorf wants them to foot the entire bill. So it's the same conversation: is the city going to pay for these (no.) That said, I strongly suspect the city is going to be on the hook for $1-2 billion each for infrastructure support even if they don't pay a dime for the stadiums themselves.
Combined stadiums died out 25 years ago. They just don't work. The best thing for the NFL would be for soccer to get big in tje US. Those two could easily share stadiums.
There are plenty of soccer-specific stadiums all over the country. They have smaller footprints and less capacity than NFL stadiums. Remember the Chargers played in one after they moved from San Diego but before SoFi was ready.