Nigeria Stampede in Abuja"s stadium kills jobseekers - 16 March 2014

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Nigeria Stampede in Abuja"s stadium kills jobseekers - 16 March 2014

The Daily Show - Qatar stadium

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The Daily Show - Qatar stadium

Need a New Stadium? Threaten to Move Here

Nothing rips out a fan’s heart quite like seeing a hometown team pack up and move to another city. (Or, as the case may be, not seeing a hometown team pack up and move to another city.) While there may be legitimate reasons for franchises to relocate—bankruptcy, low ticket sales, Jay-Z buying a stake—many recent threats to move have one common factor: stadium funding. If your local government decided against spending $ 400 million of public money to add a few more luxury boxes to Xtreme Cola Guzzle The Flavor® Memorial Arena, get ready to hear your team’s owner talking a lot about the following cities. But which threats will have you back in your seat next season, and which will leave you crying into your Houston Oilers jersey? We’ve got you covered:

Los Angeles
LA has been the NFL’s biggest bogeyman ever since the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995. Most recently, in his push for a new stadium, Raiders owner Mark Davis said that Los Angeles is “always” on his mind. Miami Dolphins CEO Mike Dee raised the specter of relocating Perfectville to LA after Florida opted against giving the team $ 3 million a year for 30 years for stadium renovations. The City of Angels also looms over teams like the Rams, Jaguars, and Bills, and it served as a believable enough landing place to get Minnesota to agree to a $ 975 million deal to make sure the Vikings didn’t leave. The threats aren’t empty, though—LA has two proposed stadium sites that are “shovel ready” along with a massive media market without professional football. With no NFL expansion plans, it seems less a question of if a team will move there and more a question of when.
Relocation likelihood: 5/5 moving vans

 

 

 

Toronto
The Buffalo Bills have played at least one home game in Toronto for the past few seasons, but they were able to convince the state and county to agree to a $ 271 million stadium renovation deal at the end of last year that comes with a 10-year lease (although the team can opt out relatively cheaply after seven). While the Bills enjoy a relatively large fan base in the area, Toronto officials could look elsewhere in the meantime, with Jacksonville and New Orleans getting special mentions. Whether it’s the Bills, Jags, Saints, or another team who likes Scott Pilgrim enough to move, relocating a franchise to Toronto would be a lot easier than moving one to London. Let’s just hope everyone on Twitter gets their “Are they gonna punt on third down?” CFL jokes out of the way quickly.
Relocation likelihood: 3/5 moving vans

 

 

 

London
While Londoners prepare for a barn-burning matchup of winless teams, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has made no secret of his interest in putting a franchise across the pond. It’s a nice bargaining chip for the league and its owners—as the St. Louis Rams tried to get the city to agree to a $ 700 million stadium deal, the NFL scheduled them for three years of London home games. This year, the Jacksonville Jaguars were scheduled for four straight London games, with the team’s owner calling the Jaguars “the home team for London.” The league is even pushing a fun club called the Union Jax. Despite these moves, there are plenty of obstacles to putting a franchise in the United Kingdom anytime soon, including huge travel times, players reluctant to move overseas, and the potential for incessant football/football jokes during broadcasts. (Not everyone is so pessimistic.) If a team moves to LA soon, expect London to make a nice new bogeyman.
Relocation likelihood: 2/5 moving vans

 

 

 

BONUS NBA/NHL SITE: Seattle
Your favorite football team might be safe, but that doesn’t mean your local basketball or hockey team is sticking around. Fans of the SuperSonics came tantalizingly close to regaining a franchise this year, only to see the Sacramento Kings stay put. The NBA, on the other hand, saw an extremely effective strategy for getting local officials to help pay for a $ 448 million new arena in downtown Sacramento. As teams like Milwaukee negotiate new stadium deals, expect threats to turn the team into the new Sonics to come early and often. Seattle also sits pretty as a large market without an NHL team, making the strategy just as useful for hockey owners. The Edmonton Oilers management team took a scouting trip out to Seattle after negotiations with Edmonton over a new arena got off to a rocky start. Both leagues have also discussed expansion, however, so it’s possible the Emerald City could see new franchises without having to poach them.
Relocation likelihood: 4/5 moving vans

 

 

 

Culture | Mother Jones

Need a New Stadium? Threaten to Move Here

Tennis Fans: A Stadium Roof Is Coming. So Is Regis Philbin

Enlarge image i

Television personality Regis Philbin participates in a Fox Sports 1 press event to launch the new show Crowd Goes W!ld.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Television personality Regis Philbin participates in a Fox Sports 1 press event to launch the new show Crowd Goes W!ld.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

The ugliest, most ill-conceived physical addition to sports scenery was the construction, a few years ago, of the Arthur Ashe tennis stadium at the U.S. Open. Typical U.S. supersize. We’ll be bigger than everyone else, so there.

Alas, in the upper reaches of this charmless behemoth you need a GPS to find the players somewhere down there at sea level. Worse, should it rain, which it has a wont to do in New York, there are no players on the court and you get wet.

The United States Tennis Association should have spent the money to build a roof over an attractively smaller stadium, but it was not the wise little pig. The USTA likes to advertise the Open, which starts Monday, as the largest annual athletic event in the world. And indeed it is, indisputably, a huge moneymaker, both for New York and for tennis. What makes the Open so especially financially attractive for the host city is that so many of the fans come from out of town and do it up big, staying in hotels, eating out, going shopping –– unlike typical team-sports fans who just pop on over to see their local heroes play, and maybe spring for a beer and a hot dog.

And, of course, along with New York, the USTA really cleans up, putting some of that profit into what is always called “developing” American tennis players, although none seem to develop anymore.

But faithful U.S. tennis devotees are now happy in the knowledge that the USTA has finally promised to also develop a roof. The greater irony is, too, that fans of all sports are generally being more selective about going out to see sports rather than just staying at home as viewers. Television sports are a bonanza.

For example, even if you personally can’t stand sports, if you are gritting your teeth having to read me on NPR, like it or not, you are still anteing up more than $ 5 every month on your standard cable contract for ESPN –– far more than you pay for any other network. Never mind that you don’t want ESPN. At least I come free.

To get in on this sports TV humbug, Fox just opened its new all-sports network. The centerpiece is a talk show hosted by Regis Philbin, who says his credentials for the job are that he’s a fan.

I hate to tell the Fox people this, but the last thing sports fans want to listen to is another fan. If you are a fan, you don’t want to hear jack from another fan, because, hey, you know more. Instead, you want to hear from experts and analysts, and fired ex-coaches and washed-up ex-players, the artless in-the-know crowd.

Poor Fox. Poor Regis Philbin. This is no way to start a sports network. Better a fan pay to sit in the top row of the Arthur Ashe Stadium and hope it doesn’t pour down rain on the poor devil.

News

Tennis Fans: A Stadium Roof Is Coming. So Is Regis Philbin

Cover Ups, Corruption and Death: What Private Prison Co. Doesn"t Want You to Know about Its Stadium Sponsorship

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This week, Florida Atlantic University announced a deal to rename its football stadium after GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the world. The deal came with a $ 6 million dollar price tag, the “largest one-time gift in the history of FAU athletics.”

But GEO Group has a history of human rights abuses that it would rather keep secret, especially once 30,000 screaming football fans begin seeing the company"s corporate sponsorship. So, in all the excitement surrounding the announcement, GEO took to quietly covering up parts of its shady past–by scrubbing its Wikipedia page.

As Brave New Foundation’s Jesse Lava reported, a GEO Group employee deleted the entire “controversies” section of the company’s Wikipedia page and replaced it with some glowing propaganda. Before GEO’s lackey doctored the article, it outlined a slew of horrific abuses in the company’s prisons, including reports of squalid conditions and the deaths of dozens of prisoners.

Wikipedia editors quickly noticed the changes and restored it to its original form Wednesday evening. The highly educational, yet alarming article is available for your perusal—controversies and all—here. And just before they changed it back, Wikipedia took a jab at the company that tried to game its netizen-dependent editing process, posting this delightful disclaimer on the top of the page:

“The article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links.”

But the Wikipedia cover-up is just the beginning of this story"s deceit. Details are emerging on how the GEO’s stadium buyout is only part of a university-prison circle jerk of unprecedented proportions. As the New York Times notes, GEO Chairman George Zoley, and several other employees in the ranks, are all alumni of Florida Atlantic University. And GEO Group’s headquarters sits only four miles away from campus. GEO and university officials laughably claim that the deal is strictly philanthropic, and in no way, shape or form a corporate sponsorship, or, worse, a way to recruit new employees and desensitize people to the horrible private of for-profit prisons.

But marketing professionals have trouble taking that claim in good faith. They say slapping your name in huge letters over an ocean-view stadium hosting America’s most revered sport is probably more than an act of compassion.

“If it"s pure philanthropy, you don"t ask for your name to go on the stadium,” Don Sexton, a Columbia University marketing professor told The Huffington Post. “The only reason you want your name on the stadium is because you want to get something back.”

HuffPost’s Chris Kirkham reports a potential ulterior motive for GEO’s $ 6 million dollar deal with FAU. Private prison critics say the public university donation is part of a grand plan to “gain influence with state and local public officials who decide whether to hand out contracts.” Kirkham notes that GEO has a rich history of shelling out for favors:

“For the last three election cycles, the GEO Group has donated more than $ 1.2 million to the Florida Republican Party. Republicans in the state legislature last year came close to approving a massive expansion of private prisons in south Florida, a deal that the GEO Group mentioned frequently in calls with investors.”

Unfortunately, the local press has swallowed the prison company"s propaganda. The Florida Sun-Sentinel praised the deal for going “a long way toward addressing the financial challenges facing FAU"s athletics program.” The paper even made a suggestion for the new, $ 6-million name: “Owlcatrez”– a pun on the university"s mascot.

 

But many civil rights groups say that universities shouldn"t prop up a company soiled by human rights abuses simply to support oversized football stadiums. GEO Group runs a string of for-profit prisons that violate basic human rights. As SB Nation reports, ”The company was the operator of the infamous Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a prison for 13- to 22-year-old inmates convicted as adults for crimes committed as juveniles. A 2012 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, as detailed by National Public Radio, found that prison personnel engaged in “systemic, egregious and dangerous practices,” from failing to provide educational and medical services to actively assisting and engaging in gang fights. The report found that prison staff had engaged in sexual activity with inmates “among the worst that we"ve seen in any facility anywhere in the nation,” activity which included the prison warden taking an inmate out of the facility to a motel for sex.”

 

Fri, 02/22/2013 – 09:17

 
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Cover Ups, Corruption and Death: What Private Prison Co. Doesn"t Want You to Know about Its Stadium Sponsorship