TED Talks Daily - The hidden world of stadium deals | Good Sport

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

Stadiums are not just a place for sports fans to cheer on the home team -- they're also concert venues, convention centers and even serve as makeshift shelters in emergencies. Stadiums are important. So why does it seem that instead of enjoying them, cities end up dealing with the mess (and the bill) that dealmakers leave behind? This is an episode of Good Sport, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, hosted by Jody Avirgan. In this episode, Jody talks to David Samson, the former president of the Miami Marlins (and a in charge of one of the "worst stadium deals in history") about what really happens in a negotiation room. Then Jody speaks to sports economist Andrew Zimbalist and urban planner Mirela Fiori to ask directly if -- and how -- we can build stadiums better. Transcripts for Good Sport are available at go.ted.com/GStranscripts

TED Audio Collective. For more, visit audiocollective.ted.com and check out Good Sport wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home

might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption

and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. On April 4th, 2012, the Miami Marlins opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium.

The Marlins' new stadium was pretty snazzy. Colorful sidewalks led you to the stadium doors, and inside you'd see replicas of work from famous artists, Moreau, Lichtenstein. If the Marlins scored a home run, a rainbow sculpture sprang into action, Marlin fish spinning and leaping over neon lights and palm trees. There was a swimming pool, tropical fish tanks, a bobblehead museum. This whole new stadium, with its dazzling features, happened in large part because of one guy.

His name is David Sampson. I get credit for having negotiated a great stadium deal in Miami and for keeping the Marlins in Miami. Okay, yeah, not everyone thinks it was a great stadium deal. Ask people in Miami. Go ahead, Google worst stadiumlins in Miami. Okay, yeah, not everyone thinks it was a great stadium deal. Ask people in Miami. Go ahead, Google worst stadium deals in history. It'll pop up.

But anyway, David Sampson was president of the Marlins during the stadium negotiations. The deal he brokered was for a $500 million ballpark. The Marlins, mostly their owner, Jeffrey Loria, covered about a third of the cost. And who covered the rest? Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami, which means the people of Miami. Their tax money covered the majority of the price tag, $350 million. That's a pretty expensive ballpark, even though when you're talking about ballparks, the numbers are always really big. The promises are often big, too.

But 10 years later, the fish tanks are gone and so is the pool. The youth baseball academy that they'd promised finally broke ground in 2021, nine years behind schedule. And get this, because of how the city financed the loans for their portion of the deal, Marlins Park has ended up costing Miami taxpayers more than $2 billion, four times the number that was initially discussed. I want to know how these deals come together. So yeah, that's why I wanted to talk to David Sampson, the guy who says he gets credit for this great deal. Guys like David make deals like this happen. Guys like David who talk like this. When you're negotiating anything, forget a stadium. When you're negotiating with your significant other about where you want to go on vacation

or where you want to go to dinner or what color you want to paint a bathroom. In my house, we call that a conversation, but you can call it a negotiation. But go ahead. Well, make no mistake. Everything paint a bathroom. In my house, we call that a conversation, but you can call it a negotiation, but go ahead. Well, make no mistake, everything's a negotiation. There are no conversations. Yeesh, can you believe this guy? But look, that is who is in the room. I am fascinated by negotiations like this,

by deals like this. I love a beautiful new stadium, of course. Every sports fan does. I love taking my daughter to Citi Field for Mets games. She doesn't understand baseball at all, but we really enjoy the stadium. We love the ice cream. We love when Mr. Met falls off the top of the dugout. And at the same time, I know that Citi Field cost a ton of money, about $850 million. The taxpayers of New York chipped in for most of that. There was a fight from the neighborhood in Queens about what the development would do to local businesses.

When you go, the stadium does feel kind of disconnected from the neighborhood it's plopped down in. That's sometimes how it goes with deals like this. So I'm skeptical of the way new stadium deals come about. There's all this fraught negotiation, all the upended neighborhoods, all the broken promises about revitalizing the local economy, all for what at times can feel like a billionaire owner's shiny new toy. A new stadium deal can be the crowning achievement for a mayor or a city council,

and it's a product of our obsession with our home teams. But do we need to ask what school or park or roads didn't we fund in order to build this thing? In a stadium deal, you get this little microcosm of lots of other things. A vision for a city's future. A sense of how that city will prioritize its investments. Of what a community's leaders truly value and where they are willing to compromise, what's responsible and what's ethical. And you should know, when David Sampson is in the room, all those big questions, what's

ethical, they don't matter. What should we do here ethically never, ever comes up when you're negotiating a stadium deal. My name is Jody Avergan, and this is Good Sport from the TED Audio Collective. On this episode, we ask, is there such a thing as a good stadium? If you're trying to figure out how someone convinces local politicians to spend taxpayer dollars on a home plate fish tank, Andrew Zimbalist can help. Zimbalist is professor emeritus at Smith College who focuses on the economics of sports. And when I spoke with him, he gave me a checklist of how to evaluate a stadium deal. Andrew likes to start with the big numbers on the deal, total cost and the balance,

how much the owner is paying versus how much the community is shelling out. What's the amount that's being invested of public money at the end of the day to enrich a private owner of a sports team. These days, lots of owners are billionaires or even multi-billionaires. So yes, a team is expensive. But for many of them, it's just another investment, another item in the portfolio. But on a new stadium, these billionaires still want to turn a profit as quickly as possible. So they ask for subsidies to get the thing built. How much does

the city have to put out? And that has to do with the leverage that the owners have. And it's an interesting economic question. How do you parse those two elements out? How much should the subsidy be? There are lots of different subsidies that can cover the cost of a massive new ballpark. One of the big upfront costs is the land. Stadiums use lots of it. Occasionally, an owner will buy the land for a stadium, but often the land, which, mind you, might be used to build something like a school or a park, that land is seen as something the city needs to subsidize to get the deal done. It's possible that the city will turn over 30 acres of land to the ballpark and not charge anything for it.

Or if they charge something for it, they won't charge the full value for it. Another thing to look at, taxes. How much of a tax break does the city include? The city isn't negotiating with you or me on our taxes, but they certainly are with a sports owner. Is there a tax? Is there a sales tax? Is there a property tax that the team has to pay?

The next big question, what else might exist on this land besides the stadium? Because in most cities, space is limited. If you're going to give 20 or 30 acres of land over to the development of a stadium, does that mean that you can't build a new school that you need? Does it mean that you can't build a new city hall that you need? Does it mean you can't build low-income or middle-income housing that you need? When I go back and visit someplace I used to live, like all of us, I notice. I notice what's new. I notice what's not. There's often new apartment buildings, but maybe I'll also notice the same park playground I played on when I was a kid, the chain on the swing a little rustier, or the same housing development that looks 10 years older, 10 years more run down.

And often, in many cities when I'm visiting, I'm driving around, and yep, there it is, a brand new stadium. All of these, the school playground, the housing development, the stadium, their choices, decisions, ones our elected officials made, deals they cut in some room somewhere. I think a lot of the frustration there is that it comes down to, as these deals often come down to, you know, a five-person commission and the one swing vote on that commission. And it's really about how do we get that person to vote for this deal? And it feels like the public is cut out of this. Yeah, well, welcome to America. It's not surprising to see political practices reproduced throughout the economy, throughout the society. It's not surprising to see the class structure reproduced by these deals. It's not surprising to see deals where wealthy people become wealthier. It happens everywhere.

That's why I wanted to talk to David Sampson, the guy who was the agent for the rich Miami owner, the one brokering the deal that would make that owner even richer. The guy who says ethics are never a consideration when you negotiate a stadium. Who the heck is this guy? My name is David Sampson, and I am 54 years old. I started my career as just a tiny little boy in elementary school. No, that's not true. I was not Doogie Houser. I was a baby. I had diapers on. You should know, and you can probably tell already, David tends to exaggerate. But I don't think anyone who is part of these deals is going to give you like a 100% unbiased account. And David was in those rooms. So I do think he's worth listening to. At the end of the day, when it was down to the, are we in or are we out? It was me and just two other people on the other side.

So we're talking about literally three men in a room. It's three men and a baby. That's pretty much what it was. There were logical reasons why the Marlins would benefit from a new stadium. They were sharing the old stadium with the football team, the Dolphins. And it really did make sense to have a new stadium where They were sharing the old stadium with the football team, the Dolphins. And it really did make sense to have a new stadium

where they could close the roof during rain, which the previous stadium didn't have. Otherwise, they'd have to keep canceling and rescheduling home games. But the most useful tool in a negotiation like this isn't logic. It's emotion. Anytime you are talking to someone, you are negotiating with that person. You are trying to convey something to them. You're trying to get them to understand what you want or to do what you

want or to do what they think they want, but it's really what you want. But when someone is negotiating who is emotional, you've already won. It's over. And people get emotional about sports stadiums. There's a sense of civic pride with your local sports team and a sense of loss if they leave. Just ask old timers in Baltimore who still remember when the Colts skipped town in the dead of night or basketball fans in Seattle who lost their beloved franchise to Oklahoma City. It's the reason why these deals keep happening happening because the politicians do not want to be responsible when a team leaves a city they don't want to be responsible for anything negative associated with that professional sports team and there's that emotional pull that you can tug on and you win every deal and so you're saying that the owners and the people negotiating on their behalf, they know that.

They know they have that leverage. A hundred percent. Every time. The very thing that makes sports special, the emotions, the pride, it's what David exploited in his negotiation. He tugged on that by making it seem like Miami really could lose the Marlins. I hate to not give myself credit because it's sort of cool what I did, but the reason anyone could have done it is that I knew and everyone knew that there was no way that Miami was going to let the Marlins leave Miami.

That threat or negotiating tactic will leave. I'm always curious kind of how real that threat is. Sometimes it feels to me like a threat that you know is just going to be a useful threat, but it's not really a possibility. Well, again, go back to your conversations that I call negotiations. How often do you say something where you say to yourself, there's no way I'm going to allow that to happen, but I'm going to say it. And I'm going to say it hoping that the other person believes what I'm saying and will act accordingly. David wouldn't call it a bluff, but I will. And to make it believable, he flew to San Antonio.

He met with city officials there. Did they want the Marlins? Were they willing to build them a shiny new stadium? His performance made the threat seem real. And people in Miami noticed. They started to think, wow, we could really lose the Marlins. Franchises use other cities as leverage, period. And the only people who don't realize it are the people who run the cities.

And it worked because a politician is probably not going to lose their job over a few schools closing. But lose the home team, your career is over. And that means when it comes to these negotiations, team owners can ask the city for a lot of help. The magic number for a stadium deal is as much as team owners dare ask for. A billionaire sports team owner will just turn to a city and ask for help when, I don't know, maybe they could just pay for the stadium their own damn selves. Or maybe I should put it this way. Billionaire owners hold so much power in these negotiations that their ask for the stadium, the tax breaks, the land lease, it comes to be seen as normal, expected even. But if you just take a step back, at least from my point of view,

and from a lot of Miamians' point of view, a deal like this is insane. $350 million in taxpayer money eventually ballooning to $2 billion? In David's point of view, there's no taking a step back. Up close and in the room, he saw this as a middle-of-the-road stadium deal. He maybe thinks he could have asked for more. The reputation is that the stadium deal in Miami was very one-sided. But the irony is when that deal was cut and approved, there were many owners angry with us because they thought the deal was far too government-friendly and not team-friendly enough. Right. But measuring the response of fellow owners isn't the only way to gauge response to a deal. It's the only way that I care to gauge it,

right? Because those are the people I'm competing with. You bring up the best point. When I run a baseball team, I'm competing with the 29 other teams and what they're willing to pay a player. I don't care about fan bases. I don't care about the media. I don't care about fans, right? That's not my job. I'm not competing with the fan base in St. Louis. I'm competing with the owners in St. Louis and the president of the St. Louis Cardinals. I need to make smarter signings, make better deals. So I have a competitive advantage. There's no, there's no thought of the public in that room when you get down to it. The answer is that fans and Miamians, the subject never came up. Since David didn't listen to Miamians, allow me to pick a few choice examples of their outrage. The Miami New Times called the stadium a, quote, festering silver plated pustule,

a grotesquely huge can opener or just an obscene ode to wasted cash. In Bleacher Report, they said Marlins Park represents a perfect example of how not to build a publicly funded stadium. I don't think David saw those headlines. There could be people protesting. There could be people taking ads out in the paper, people suing me. There could be anything, and it didn't matter. I needed certain votes in a commission. That is politics. That is what representation is. Don't complain to me about what the politicians are doing who are

voted into office by those who do vote. What was it that Andrew Zimbalist said? Yeah, welcome to America. These deals, they're just going to reflect larger power dynamics, democracy in action. In 2017, former baseball great Derek Jeter bought the Marlins and he fired David Sampson. Sampson's career as a baseball president was over. So he did what people do when they leave the sport. He's become a commentator. He has a podcast where he shares his takes on just about everything when it comes to the business of sports. My head has changed to education. I think one of the ways that I was able to operate for 18 years

is that it was important that the majority of people were in the dark. To me, anyway, it seems like he is genuinely trying to decode the business of sports for regular people. I wouldn't call him a whistleblower, but sort of a master of the dark arts who's now willing to share the secrets of how billions of dollars get moved from taxpayers to owners. David talks about stadium deals on his show. Most recently, he's been weighing in on a contentious deal in Miami over a soccer development.

That one included even more egregious giveaways to developers. David's one of the few people willing to actually go there. You're not going to get a current team president to talk about stadium financing because we would never do this, because we would never want you to think that there's even an inch of give. And so I take pretty seriously the responsibility I have. It's not a crisis of conscience at all. I very much agree with everything I did when I was president and I wouldn't do anything differently. So I don't have a crisis of conscience. I'm just in a different place in my life now. When someone tells you twice in 30 seconds

that they aren't suffering from a crisis of conscience, I suppose you have to believe them. There's no change of heart there. There's no regrets. So what might change if there's a little more transparency? You deserve to know what's happening, but it's not going to change the outcome. And you may call me cynical on that, but politicians and owners of sports teams or

owners of companies who want to do business in a particular city, we still have ways to get stuff done that you just you just wouldn't understand even if you read it. But you saying that the kind of transparency that you value and that you're advocating for wouldn't actually change an outcome. It would not. So what are we talking about here? We're talking about trying to make people feel better about their lot in life.

I'm talking about education. I'm talking about at least having knowledge of what's happening to you while it's happening. And if you want to go into politics and try to make changes, then do that. If you want to go into business and try to make changes and do things differently, then do that. That is a pretty bleak outlook, right? David's saying we need more transparency. At the same time, he's saying that's not really going to be enough to flip a negotiation.

But I don't know. I feel like there must be at least one example of a stadium deal gone right, or if not right, then at least better, or one that reflects a more interesting way of thinking about these things. One where people felt included in the process and reaped some larger benefit once it was all said and done. There has to be something we can look for, for hope. And I couldn't have been more surprised where I maybe found the answer. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Before I started working on this episode, I was eager and curious to see what a good stadium deal might look like. I figured it would come down to subsidy levels or givebacks to the community. A lot of stuff in the real weeds of how these deals go down.

And when I spoke with the economist Andrew Zimbalist, I asked him if he could think of a place where it felt like the deal was at least neutral, if not beneficial, to a city. He named a few recent sports stadiums here in the U.S. that were built with a little more public input where the land was purchased outright. But I still wanted to know if there was anything that felt like more expansive thinking that broke out of that three men in a room approach. I was surprised when he mentioned this. Another interesting example in my mind with the Olympics is Barcelona in 1992. The Olympics, the mother of all sports boondoggles. I kind of couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Sure, hosting the Olympics is a different animal than building a single stadium in one city. But many of the big questions are the same. What are we getting? What are we giving up? Is sports being put ahead of other priorities? What kind of people are we cutting deals with to make this happen? And these days, I think many people feel like hosting the Olympics can be a truly raw deal.

I've seen so many photos of Olympic stadiums left abandoned, overgrown, sometimes just 10 years after the big event. There's been cities that have pushed back against the Olympics, Colorado and Boston, for example, because they just don't think it makes financial sense. But not Barcelona. Not in 1992. Barcelona made the Olympics work for them.

Some people said, hey, we could host the Olympics and have the Olympic requirements facilitate the changes we're making. And that's how it worked out. They used the Olympics to facilitate and help finance the plan that they laid for their city. What was the secret? Vale. A ver.

So I called someone in Barcelona. Que bueno. Y lo quieres decir en español también? Mi nombre es... Decirlo otra vez? Sí, dile. So I called someone in Barcelona. Mirella Fiore is the director of the master's program in urbanism at the University of Catalunya. And she thinks that the Barcelona Olympics truly transformed the city for the better, beyond just the sports facilities, and in ways that are still felt today. Barcelona's leaders did this by working the Olympics and the money that comes from hosting the Olympics into an already existing vision for the city's revitalization. The story begins about 20 years earlier, in the early 70s, when Spain was climbing out from under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco,

out of decades of political and cultural repression. Before Franco died, there was already an important neighborhood grassroots movement, a movement obviously against the dictatorship. In 1972, the Federation of Neighborhood Associations was created here in Barcelona, and it built on the already existing neighborhood movement struggling for better conditions. So when Franco died, a period of transition began. Barcelona's neighborhoods were fighting for local change. The Federation of Neighborhood Associations asked for the kind of improvements you might expect. They wanted paved streets, they wanted traffic lights, they wanted trash pickup.

And the advocacy that these neighborhood associations did established a process and an expectation that government would respond to local demands. So when Barcelona embarked on a massive development plan in the wake of Franco, the neighborhoods were involved. It wasn't always an easy conversation, but the neighborhoods had a voice and a vision about connecting different parts of the city. They had a vision to position Barcelona as the center of a great region. And for this, it was most important to open the sea and build infrastructure to set up the neighborhoods. Barcelona's city planners wanted to move the manufacturing away from the waterfront and make the beaches friendlier to tourism.

They wanted to rework the highways to make it easier to get around the city. And at some point, the planners had a kind of genius idea. They would put in a bid to host the Olympics. Cities often want to host the Olympics because of pride or because they think it might boost tourism. And it can. Barcelona wanted those things too. But maybe unlike other places, Barcelona also kept in mind their larger urban development plan. The Olympics could help.

They could build stadiums for the Olympics, sure. But they could also use the money that would come in from the Olympics to cover some other infrastructure projects. Projects that both serve the Olympics and their longer-term goals for revitalizing the city. It would be expensive, but instead of one-time-use stadiums, they were building structures they planned to use for years and decades to come. Morella says that the neighborhood associations influenced this planning. Not every demand was met. These are negotiations. There's trade-off. People will be disappointed. But the neighborhood associations were in the room, so to speak. And if you ask me, that's what makes the difference. These local governments were able to better recognize the city's demands because they were there, in that place, from the larger population. And this, I believe,

was important because it reinforced the principles of democratic government. To hear Morella describe it, post-Franco Barcelona kind of feels like what we imagine when we think of the democratic process. The public working together with their local representatives, calling them out when needed, keeping them accountable. I'll say I was in Barcelona recently and, you know, just in my time there, I did notice some of this. The waterfront, it feels vibrant. The neighborhoods in the city feel connected, but also unique. It's been 30 years. Obviously, lots has changed, but people still brought up the Olympics when I talked to them about their city.

Barcelona continues to transform itself and has changed all this time. But the period of change starts with the Olympic Games. That was a great contribution. This has been really valuable for the city. Okay, so what have we learned? The key to a productive sports development deal is to suffer under dictatorship for more than 30 years, have a populace open to community-level socialism,

have the Olympics come along at just the right time. Are you taking notes? This is the plan. No, look, for real, that's not going to happen everywhere. This is a very different era and a very different country. There are no tidy answers here, but there are some things to keep in mind the next time you hear about a new stadium proposal. For one, remember that the deals are being cut by guys like David Sampson in that room on behalf of billionaire owners. Now that you've spent some time with him, how does that make you feel? Does it seem like the system is maybe

a little tilted in their favor? Just a bit? And so what are you going to do about it? How can you make it so that the right elected officials are sitting in that room across from David Sampson? Ones who aren't afraid to piss off a developer. Ones who feel accountable to you and your values. Well, I, for one, am going to remember what David Sampson told me. Stadium deals are emotional. He thinks that works to his advantage, but I think it can work in the other direction too. These things are emotional. And if you care, not just about sports, but I think it can work in the other direction too. These things are emotional. And if

you care, not just about sports, but about your city and your community and how it spends hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe ballooning to billions of dollars, then get emotional about this. Realize that a stadium deal is this perfect encapsulation of our democracy. And that's something worth fighting for and paying attention to by voting, by agitating, by showing up at the city council meeting on a Tuesday night to ask for the school or the park to be put in line ahead of the stadium. We can do these things. And if the owner is still not listening, tell them to build their own damn stadium. On the next episode of Good Sport.

I'm still surprised with myself how much I've gotten into Formula One. How a docuseries on Netflix cemented a motorsport into American fandom. What does it mean to grab our attention when there's more competition than ever? Good Sport is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Jody Avergan, and the show is produced by TED. This episode was written and produced by Pansy Rutsch. Our team includes Isabel Carter, Camille Peterson, Sarah Nix, Jimmy Gutierrez, Michelle Quint, Ben Van Cheng, and Roxanne High Lash. Jake Gorski is our sound designer and mix engineer. Special thanks to Constanza Gallardo for voicing the translations in this episode.

Fact-checking by Diana Batista and Julia Dickerson. Thanks again to Andrew Zimbalist. He's written many great books about the business of sports. Check him out. And for more David Samson, check out his podcast, Nothing Personal. If you have questions or comments about this episode or anything at all, be in touch. Our email is goodsportatted.com. Also, if you enjoyed this episode, here's an idea.

Go to your podcast app, click share, and text it to a friend. Even better, text it to a friend who may not think that they would listen to a sports podcast, but they might listen to this one. You never know. Thanks again for listening to Good Sport. My name is Jody Avergan, and we'll see you soon. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games. PRX