Welcome to the Democrat version of capitalism, Albany-style.
A few years back, the Buffalo Bills threatened to leave New York state unless a new stadium deal was approved, as NFL teams are wont to.
Aside from the Green Bay Packers, a team that is municipally owned and boasts the smallest NFL market, which makes that threat kind of a real possibility — despite the fact they have an ardent fanbase locally and are the unofficial NFL team of Eastern Canada, where NFL expansion plans have always met with resistance by Canuck politicians looking to protect the unwatchable Canadian Football League.
Nevertheless, despite the ever-present relocation blackmail of moving to Los Angeles stymied by not one but two teams finally making good on that offer, and no other cities bigger than Buffalo with stadiums up to NFL standards at the moment, Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an agreement that put $600 million in state funding toward a new $2.1 billion stadium for the Bills, with an additional $250 million coming from Erie County itself, after owner Terry Pegula threatened that he might take the team to Austin, Texas and build a stadium with private funding.
According to the New York Post, despite the fact that the facility is still a little under two years away from opening, the deal has inflated the value of the Bills by a staggering $2 billion.
The Monday Post report noted that “the NFL team’s billionaire owners sold a minority stake for a massive profit” after the team’s valuation spiked thanks to the stadium deal. So, how much of that money will the state see?
According to “critics of the so-called Buffalo boondoggle” that the Post talked to, “the state will not get any significant return on its investment.”
“This was an egregious deal. There is no other way around it,” said Dr. Mark Rosentraub, director of the Center for Sports Venues at the University of Michigan.
Yes, there really is such a thing. And, according to the director of the Center for Sports Venues, since this sports venue is built right next to the old one, there’s no actual benefit taking place for the citizens of the city.
“Had this facility been built in Downtown Buffalo it might have stimulated the economy,” he said. “But they are just replicating what they had in the same place.”
And keep in mind, as Rosentraub noted, as long as local and state government made a good-faith effort to keep the team in Buffalo, options for relocation were legally slim.
Considering that the last two NFL stadiums to be constructed were built without public funding (SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, home to the Chargers and Rams, and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home to the Raiders), this would have included simply lending Pegula the money instead of offering the billionaire almost a billion in handouts.
Pegula proceeded to sell 10 percent of the team to Arctos Partners and another 10 percent to a group led by NBA Hall-of-Famer Vince Carter after the NFL allowed private equity firms to invest up to 10 percent in franchises.
This netted him $5.8 billion.
As per the Post: “The Bills were worth $3.4 billion when Hochul agreed to the deal, according to Forbes.”
“Since then, the value of NFL teams has exploded. The average franchise is now worth $6.49 billion, and no team is valued at less than $5.25 billion, according to CNBC’s Official 2024 NFL Team Valuations.”
Not that Rosentraub blames the owner: “Pegula negotiated the best deal for his business,” he said. “The fault lies with the public sector, not the private sector.”
The public sector — or rather, the most conspicuous player in it — defended the deal.
“In 2013, the State agreed to a deal where nearly 75 percent of the Bills’ stadium renovation was funded by the taxpayers — today, this new stadium is being constructed with less than 30 percent in State funding, a figure that is substantially below other recent NFL stadium projects,” a spokesperson for Gov. Hochul said in a statement.
They also claimed that the stadium project would inject $2.1 billion into the economy; that figure is highly dubious when you consider how much economic stimulation that politicians attribute to additional economic activity and expensive Keynesian ditch-digging actually materializes. (Spoiler alert: Not a whole lot.)
Indeed, the best thing that can be said for Gov. Hochul’s deal is that at least the Bills were threatening to move. The Tennessee Titans (née the Houston Oilers before they left Texas for a better stadium deal) just got handed more money than New York gave the Bills by the city of Nashville last year for another stadium, and they weren’t even threatening to go anywhere!
Hochul announced in July that she intends to seek another term in 2026. Let’s hope voters remember how capitalism, Albany-style worked out for them in regards to her Highmark Stadium boondoggle.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
