Seattle Move Shows That Fans Just Don’t Matter

In the aftermath of the deal between Oklahoma City-NBA franchise holder Clayton Bennett and the city of Seattle, which allowed Bennett to break his lease with the city’s “financially inadequate” basketball arena, there is one question that needs to be answered: Why didn’t fans, the very people who support professional sports, have a seat at the table? Didn’t Bennett and Seattle officials consider the loyalty of the SuperSonics fans who have put their hard-earned dollars into the franchise? Aren’t fans important?The answer is no.As one prominent sports team owner put it to me a few years back: “Nothing comes from the fan. Support comes from customers. Big difference. Fans scream on talk radio. Customers bring their kids, their families, their wives, their dates, their companies, their business partners. They have lives and don’t talk to the radio talk show hosts.”Bennett didn’t even use the “fans matter” or a “team brings a lot of money into the community” argument in the lawsuit. He had an economic professor at the University of Alberta, Brad Humphreys, testify that he studied the relocation of every major professional sports team over the past 40 years, and discovered no discernible harm to the local economy of the cities that lost teams.“When a team leaves, they don’t take that consumer spending with them … it simply gets spent on other entertainment activities,” Humphreys said.The truth is owners want a new revenue-producing facility that comes with government financial support whenever they can find it. Bennett has the Oklahoma City local government in his back pocket promising him and his ownership group hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to make his basketball business a go.In 1995, Art Modell left behind a huge and supportive fan base that supported the Cleveland Browns for almost four decades for the big-money offer to play in Baltimore. Cleveland elected officials ignored Modell’s request for a new stadium, Modell needed cash desperately, and he took the Maryland offer. Modell broke the hearts of Browns fans, but business is business.Major league sports — whether it is MLB, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, or MLS — is dependent on three areas: government support, cable TV contracts, and corporate support. Fans rate way down on the list of needs. Federal government support for sports allows owners to depreciate players contracts as if the players were aging cars. It also gives owners the ability to extract huge sums out of cable TV because the government in the 1980s gave struggling cable networks the right to be bundled into a basic expanded tier and sold as one entity instead of allowing customers the right to choose the channels they want. The government also allows companies to write off some of the costs of buying luxury boxes and club seats for business expenses. It is those people whom owners want filling their seats, since they can and will spend money.Everybody in America — young or old, sports fans or non-sports fan — is paying in some way for sports, whether it is through taxes or cable TV bills or tax breaks or incentives.The Bennett vs. Seattle trial took place not very far from the old Kingdome, where back in 1984 there was a number retiring ceremony that the Seahawks ownership organized. The no. 12 was retired, the idea being that the Seahawks crowds were so loud that they were the “12th man” on the field. Of course that didn’t stop a new owner, Ken Behring, from attempting to move the team to Anaheim in 1996, because he felt the Kingdome could not withstand an earthquake. The truth was he thought the stadium had too limited a revenue stream. Behring’s Seahawks players were ordered to go to Anaheim for offseason workouts in March instead of the team’s Seattle area practice facility. The Washington attorney general’s office sued Behring for attempting to break his Kingdome contract that was to end in 2005. Behring lost the case and his Seahawks franchise would have to abide by the lease.For owners, it is about courting politicians and business leaders, not fans. Sports team owners have a lot of sway with politicians and often are major contributors to campaigns on both sides of the aisle. Local governments build stadiums and arenas, although occasionally there is a referendum where the community is allowed to vote on whether they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on sports facilities that traditionally are civic money losers or deemed inadequate.Sports fans aren’t a big enough bloc to pass a referendum and need non-sports fans help getting a building’s finance secured in a vote. When referendums lose — Pittsburgh, Seattle, Milwaukee, and Charlotte are four cities that voted down sports stadiums/arenas — politicians override the vote and pass arena/stadium funding legislation.The new stadiums and arenas are allegedly “fan-friendly,” which is really a code word for hiked prices. In the mid-1990s, former Rangers player Mike Backman, who was scouting for the Washington Capitals, said that the Caps’ management was looking forward to getting out of Landover, Md., and into downtown Washington, D.C., just so the team could change the then-blue collar Caps fan base into an upscale crowd of the Washington elite.Upscale facilities are an important asset and recruitment tool for free agents in sports. There are more than whispers around NHL circles that neither the Islanders nor the Edmonton Oilers can compete for top free agents because they play in older facilities and that players’ agents aren’t interested in putting their clients in those facilities.That notion should be a slap in the face of fans, but they take it. The fans had no say in ultimately what happened in Seattle, despite a history of financial support for the Sonics. That’s the way it is these days: Fans just don’t count.evanjweiner@yahoo.com

Seattle Move Shows That Fans Just Don’t Matter

Seattle Move Shows That Fans Just Don’t Matter

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