The Cleveland Browns owners released some fresh vaportecture yesterday, in the form of a CGI flyby of their proposed Brook Park stadium as viewed from a high-speed drone in a hellscape where cars and video boards move but most of the people are frozen in place. But all that aside, by choosing to debut it on X, team execs opened themselves up to comments, and oh, the comments:
Heckuva job, Browns.
“Win some games first!” is maybe not the most rational response to a $1.2 billion stadium funding demand — spending public money on a private sports stadium doesn’t become a better investment just because fans are happier about the standings — but it is a common one, as we’ve seen from all the owners who have waited until their teams were on a playoff run to issue stadium subsidy demands. “That thing is ugly” and “Not with my money” are somewhat more on point. And added together, this comes to a pretty thorough public denunciation of the Browns’ stadium plans, albeit from the self-selected sample of X users who follow the Browns account.
Meanwhile, speaking of self-selected samples, the Ohio House Finance Committee is “likely” to include Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s requested $600 million in stadium cash, according to committee chair Brian Stewart. The money would, according to Browns lawyer Ted Tywang, come from “revenues that are generated by the project that wouldn’t exist but for this private investment,” though he didn’t explain how moving the Browns from one part of Ohio to another would generate $600 million in new tax revenues. Win some games first, Jimmy!
The Bears Act over in Illinois might be far more of a direct shot at the owners of Chicago-based franchises than a serious legislative bill… but there are clearly limits to how much tolerance sports fans (more than a few of whom are elected officials) have for the incompetence, indifference, and even insincerity of owners who claim that they see their teams as “community assets,” yet run them exclusively as revenue-maximizing operations in an industry where the actual product has less bearing on the bottom line than ever before.
And as a kind of a side note: the perennial losers in the NFL seem to keep that status for far longer than in any other sport. Even the ones who have shed that title in recent years — the Lions over the last several years and the Saints during the Sean Peyton/Drew Brees era, to name a pair of examples — were coming off literal generations of bad to terrible seasons. Whether that’s down to ineptitude or apathy is up to debate, but it has to be one or the other; no team can just be that unlucky for that long.
The perennial losers in the NFL are even more egregious given the nature of the sport and how the league is structured. Football careers are short and the league is downright socialist in how it gives bad teams every opportunity to get better. It really doesn’t take much for a bad team to get into the playoffs if they have a competent coach and 1-2 successful drafts.
But that might be what enables it too. You can have a terrible team for decades and still collect the same media revenue check as the other 31 franchises. In baseball, even big-market teams like the Giants and Dodgers will run into financial trouble if managed poorly enough for long enough.
Browns /Bears are similar. As a resident of Illinois we are taxed ENOUGH! We get very little in return. The roads are in terrible shape. Losing population. The Bears have the nerve enough to raise ticket prices again! After a 5 win season. Could you imagine what they would be if they had won 7? win something, anything then we’ll talk about a new stadium. Time to tell these teams to take your franchise and go play in HELL!
And we thought the general shape of the Cybertruck was a poor choice for a vehicle; aesthetic concerns or otherwise. That notion is amplified ten-fold for this proposed stadium.
Oddly when we see the inside of the stadium’s expanse, it actually feels a bit claustrophobic…
The outside reminds of the outdoor grill box masquerading as the Rangers’ new ballpark.
I think the claustrophobia is because the ceiling is slung so low compared to the top deck. It feels more like an NBA arena or the roof of a mall than a football stadium.
This video has all of the effort, creativity, and charm of something an intern whipped up with AI. Generic rock music sample looped over, the same swooping animation done a zillion times, not even a narrator. It’s like zooming in on a building in Civ or City Skylines.
I know the Haslams are cheap, but this is absurd. Why even bother with something so half-assed? Who the hell were they expecting to watch this video and get pumped up by it?
They spent more time changing the seasons in the plaza outside then they did showing what would be in the stadium. Just gross.
They knew there was nothing much in the “new” stadium that would be any better for the common fan than what they get in the current stadium, so they have to wow them elsewhere. This is a common theme with new stadiums, the improvements are almost always in luxury amenities that regular fans can’t access, and the regular fan’s experience is the same or worse at a higher price. There’s usually a veneer of wiz-bang newness pasted onto more visible areas like the outer stadium facade and the scoreboard to try to sell the “new” feeling, maybe wider concourses with better lighting and superficially improved concession stands and some better manicured areas outside the gates, but the reality from the cheap seats is never really any better than it was in the old building.