Sports owners rarely bankroll stadiums. Will the A’s Fisher pay? | Opinion
The Athletics are within weeks of a scheduled groundbreaking to build the new home, a $1.75 billion stadium at the site of the former Tropicana resort in Las Vegas. But for full-scale construction to truly commence, it appears that something exceedingly rare in American sports will have to happen:
The owner of the team will have to spend a high percentage of his own personal wealth, as opposed to somebody else’s money.
John Fisher, heir to the fortune of Gap Inc. and worth an estimated $3 billion, is on the hook to pay for most of this stadium and all of the cost overruns that may happen in this uncertain era of tariffs and trade wars. Long-reported efforts for Fisher to find a new minority owner to help pay for this stadium have not materialized. Fisher must be prepared to dig far deeper into his pocket than ever before.
Will he?
Opinion writers LeBron Hill and Tom Philp have made their bets.
A groundbreaking? Yes, but…
Tom Philp: Unless something changes and fast, this could be the most phony groundbreaking in sports history, a rental bulldozer and no real money to back it up. You don’t start building a mega-project without all the financing first lined up. For a franchise with one of the lowest historic valuations in Major League Baseball, I don’t see Fisher paying way north of one billion dollars to get this stadium built.
LeBron Hill: The success of the A’s will only be possible if a mad genius is at the helm. Will Fisher be that guy? To put the Athletics on a path to greatness, owner John Fisher must channel the maniacal energy that others like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and former Lakers owner Jerry Buss put into their franchises. I believe he can be that crazy for the A’s.
Philp: Time is the biggest enemy of any big project, and the Athletics are doing things that are costing time. The first hurdle is the would-be owner of the stadium, the Las Vegas Stadium Authority. The Fishers have to ask this Authority to help make available $380 million in public support previously created by state legislation. As of this month, they have not asked. Because this process is ripe for lawsuits by opponents (namely, a well-staffed state teachers’ union) and delays, this should have started months ago.
Hill: But just listen to what Fisher has been saying. Here’s an example: “From the beginning, I’ve been committed to having this team be successful for the next 50 years. And I really saw that as (an) important part of what I stood for and what I wanted to achieve for this team. And so really, everything that I’ve done, the work that we did in the Bay Area, the work that we did in Oakland, and ultimately moving things forward in Las Vegas and here in Sacramento, were part of where I think the team needs to go to be successful.”
Owners rarely pay for their stadiums. Will the A’s?
Philp: Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is the only major sports executive I can find who put down a similar percentage of his wealth to build AT&T Stadium for $1.2 billion back in 2009. But Jones was building America’s grandest football stadium (at the time) for America’s Team. The Athletics will be the third-rate pro team in town behind the city’s Raiders (football) and Golden Knights (hockey). And Jones’ attachment to the Cowboys is pathologically personal. Fisher seems far more detached.
Hill: Why wouldn’t Fisher just move to Las Vegas Ballpark, where the A’s Triple-A team plays? I believe it’s because he cares so much about the arrival. He doesn’t just want to be in Las Vegas, he wants to be in Sin City as the A’s in a stadium designed for Major League Baseball. That’s pretty crazy so he’s off to a great start.
Philp: It’s hard to imagine a more uncertain time for Fisher to take all the risk in building this stadium project. There has been no new public cost estimate for this project since the Donald Trump tariffs on imported steel and the uncertainty now swirling around global trade. Is he really prepared to spend, say, $1.5 billion on a baseball team that was valued by Forbes Magazine ($1.8 billion) while at Oakland? The more he has to pay, the less this makes any sense for him.
Hill: If everything goes as planned, the expectations will be much higher than in Oakland. If Fisher is sincere about his love for the A’s, he’d start to focus on cultivating a culture that says being an A’s fan is cool. Going to an A’s game, both in Oakland and here in Sacramento, the fanfare is lacking. In some cases, you see more away team apparel than A’s green and gold. That very same thing could happen in Las Vegas, a tourism hotbed.
Bottom line: Is this really about to happen?
Philp: Watching this ownership over the years, the words “daring” and “courageous” don’t come to mind. It would take a new Athletics persona to emerge for this to happen.
Hill: If Fisher is crazy enough, it’ll happen.
