Redskins to DC
Spending a huge sum of money in order to build a stadium that tempts the Redskins back into DC would indeed be a terrible use of funds. Nationals Park hosts over 80 events per year. The Verizon Center is home to an NBA team, an NHL team, a WNBA team, and a smattering of other events. Those kind of usage levels are viable to help anchor a retail/entertainment district. And despite that stuff, cities still often wind up overpaying for sports stadiums. A football stadium, by contrast, features just eight home games in the regular season. That’s part of what makes the NFL so exciting. The games are rare enough that not only is every Redskins game important, every game played by the other NFC East teams is pretty crucial as well. But it’s just not enough games to be any kind of useful economic development tool.
That’s why decades ago we saw the vogue for combo stadiums. If you could build a single field and use it for baseball and football and MLS that’d be a pretty useful economic anchor. But people don’t like those combo stadiums and teams have been moving to dedicated single-sport fields. Which is find. But it means that football fields need to be exiled way out into the boonies where land is cheap and it makes sense to set such a large space aside for a facility that’s used so rarely.
33 Responses to “Redskins to DC”
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October 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
8 football games + any number of MLS games ~ 8 football games
October 14th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
The well-written Sports Economist blog has run many pieces on stadium subsidies. It seems a general rule that subsidies rarely make economic sense no matter what sports are involved. One would think that DC would be especially wary, given that the Nationals stadium does not appear to be spurring much economic development in the surrounding neighborhood.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
No Matt, people were fine with multi-use stadiums, owners hated them because they had to share revenue across sports.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@Rob, Speak for yourself. As a fan, I hated them. Dedicated stadiums are much better venues for fans. By far. Multi-purpose stadiums suck.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
The other option is to build a stadium that is used by other things — just not other sports. For example: the Louisiana Superdome, which is located downtown and holds conventions and gun shows and Tulane football and Super Bowls and Final Fours and high school homecoming dances and, yes, occasional hurricane refugees.
Now, only a dome approaches this level of versatility; not even the new-fangled retractable-roof stadia can compete. And domes have fallen out of favor, for some reason. (It’s not an artificial-turf thing, since a lot of new outdoor stadia use the same FieldTurf that domes use.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Rob,
Not really. To have a football and baseball stadium anywhere but in the Sunbelt effectively meant using artificial turf, as otherwise the damage caused by the football games in September cannot grow back enough to permit a baseball game (IIRC, the only place which tried that in the Northeast was Cleveland, with horrible results). It could be done in the Sunbelt (Miami and San Diego are good examples).
Having a football stadium with artificial turf meant far more injuries. Having a baseball stadium with artificial turf was not as bad, although it led to complaints about the ground balls going too fast.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I would be very sad to see my beloved DC United sharing a stadium with the Redskins.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Isn’t FedEx Field like 10 years old? Are they already claiming that it’s outdated?
And tying this into a little bailout perspective, with the $700 billion they just authorized, we could build brand new state of the art stadia for every professional sports team, and every division one college team (football and basketball), and probably still have a few hundred billion left over.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Put me in the column of finding the multi-purpose stadiums just fine. Example: RFK stadium – a very pleasant place to enjoy both baseball and football. The sightlines from the upper deck were awesome and there were plenty of cheap seats (at least for baseball). The new Nationals park sucks. The upper deck seats are about at the altitude of the Goodyear blimp. RFK had great seats in the $10-25 range – now the comparables are club level seats going for $50-75. It’s got a bigger TV screen and more types of food – but I don’t go to the ballpark to eat or watch TV, I go to see a live baseball game for a reasonable price. I miss RFK.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
It would be difficult to say that the Redskins’ presence spurred any economic development east of, say, 12th St. There’s no commercial zoning out there anyway, and the thing’s sited by a jail, a mental hospital, and the armory. Certainly their absence hasn’t hurt the area at all.
I loved going to games at RFK and wish they would come back; the heart wants what it wants. But they’re never coming back to a simple, egalitarian municipal stadium anyway. It’ll be Dan Snyder holding us upside down and shaking the money out of our pockets, for decades. He’s a fan from childhood, and I bet he badly wants to be on that site. Let him pay.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Matt, you obviously didn’t spend last sunday driving from Central VA to that godfosaken hole in the earth, Landover Maryland to watch the Skins throw the game, then spend 7 hours travelling the 130 miles back home. Going to FedEx field is a very time consuming, unpleasant, and expensive venture. The games never actually sell out now. there are always hundreds of tickets available for every game. They should move to a smaller, more fun stadium in the city or closer by with great rail access and some commercial development around the park to give people something to do. When I go up to DC for a Wizards game, we always have dinner, watch the game, then often go to bars afterwards before crashing at a friends house or a hotel in DC. When I go to town for a Skins game, I bring my own food, still end up hungry, and am tempted to leave early to beat traffic.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Landover Maryland was not god forsaken until little danny snyder put his mitts on it. Please take back the redskins in exchange for our Bullets. I have season tickets to the Ravens and regularly get home from Baltimore to beautiful PG County in 35 minutes. FedEx, a mere 6 miles away can take me an hour. 2 hours if I take public transportation and the shuttle.
But hang on redskin fans. The Nationals will be gone ere long and you can move in to that albatross and get a new, non-racist name to boot.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
It’s got a bigger TV screen and more types of food – but I don’t go to the ballpark to eat or watch TV, I go to see a live baseball game for a reasonable price. I miss RFK.
===
I sympathize. But man, that huge Jumbo-Mega-Tron TV is friggin’ hypnotic. It’s just so….HUGE.
October 14th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Matt’s Georgetown hatred continues unabated.
October 14th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Re: multi-purpose stadiums. I hate ‘em with the fire of all the suns in the known universe because of one example: Anaheim Stadium.
Going to Angels game prior to 1979 was nice, no problem getting tickets, lovely Dodger Stadium-esque ballpark, Nolan Ryan. Then the city of Anaheim lured the Rams and bingo! they enclosed the outfield and you had a stadium that was too big for baseball and totally wrong for football (if you sat in “right field” for football, you were miles away because they put the field on the left field line so it could be near the new press box). It was horrible and it was nice of The Mouse to tear the abomination in the outfield down before they sold the team.
Luckily, any attempt to get the taxpayers to spend so much as one penny on an NFL stadium here in Los Angeles is a non-starter, it would be political suicide. Funny how billionaire Philip Anschutz was all hot to build a football stadium next to Staples so they could steal a team (see: Vikings or Saints)/get the expansion that went to Houston but the project literally died overnight when the city said “No money, not for you”.
October 14th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
The Skins should, at least, stay as far away as they can from Nationals Park. It’s ugly and in, frankly, a bad part of Washington. That alone is reason enough to disqualify it, never mind the horrors of actually trying to grow grass in time for the baseball season after the football games tear the field up.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Dan the man-
A little bit of history on the outdoor, dual use stadium issue: Yankee Stadium, Tiger Stadium, Wrigley Field, and even Fenway Park were used for football for decades. Sure, the field was always muddy by November (several players lost their cleats in the muck at a Thanksgiving day game in Detroit in the 60s), but today’s athletes are spoiled.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:47 am
baseball and football and MLS
why not MLB and NFL and soccer?
October 15th, 2008 at 2:50 am
> To have a football and baseball stadium anywhere but in the
> Sunbelt effectively meant using artificial turf,
Isn’t this less of a problem now than it used to be, with better artificial grass?
As for MLB/NFL/MLS dual use stadiums, soccer teams dislike the baseball “diamond” dirt track in the middle of the field. Also there is the problem of NFL stadiums seating 70,000-80,000 fans whereas the ideal intimate baseball/soccer park might have 40,000 seats.
MARCU$
October 15th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Marcu$,
“Isn’t this less of a problem now than it used to be, with better artificial grass?”
Not really. Philly tried to change to one of the newer artificial surfaces for the last few years at Veterans Stadium, and it did not help.
Henry Holland brings up another problem — the stadium configuration. A football stadium should be a rectangle, much wider than tall, to reflect the shape of the field. Building a baseball stadium in that rectangle creates a monster center field, like the Polo Grounds (the only reason Willie Mays’ famed catch in the 1954 World Series wasn’t a homer was because the center field wall was about 500 feet from home plate). Putting a football field on a baseball stadium means that one side’s seats are very far from the action.
Paul,
I guess that the situation could be resolved by bringing back 60 minute men, who would be too tired to complain about getting their feet caught in the muck. Where have you gone, Chuck Bednarik?
October 15th, 2008 at 10:17 am
DC United is highly unlikely to be interested in sharing a stadium with the Indigenous Persons. DCU sees very little of the parking and concession revenue in RFK now and a new stadium deal would almost certainly assign most of that money to the NFL team for all events – Danny will insist, or it won’t be worthwhile for him to move out of his current cash cow. Given that the profitable teams in MLS are all the prime tenant (or owner?) of an appropriately sized soccer specific stadium, DCU will move to such a facility in PG County or leave town entirely before they’ll accept a deal like the current one again.
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