A’s Confirm There’s No Financing for a Las Vegas Ballpark

By Scott Roeben, on July 19 2024
4 min read 45 comments
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At a presentation to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority on July 18, 2024, the Oakland A’s confirmed there is currently no financing in place for a proposed $1.5 billion ballpark in Las Vegas.

We aren’t talking about a shortfall. There’s no financing to pay for this venue, at all.

The bottom line: Las Vegas continues to have its chain yanked and pretty much everyone involved is complicit in the clown show.

The A’s clown car has just about run out of gas.

Nobody really understands what the Las Vegas Stadium Authority does, but there’s a Web site that says, “The Las Vegas Stadium Authority is responsible for the ownership and oversight of the NFL stadium project created by Senate Bill 1 during the 30th Special Session of the Nevada State Legislature. The Stadium Authority is also responsible for the ownership and oversight of the MLB stadium project created by Senate Bill 1 during the 35th Special Session of the Nevada State Legislature.”

We assume that clarifies everything.

This body is responsible for overseeing sports venues built with public money. You know, safeguarding taxpayers 24/7. Taxpayers gave $750 million to a billionaire to build the Raiders stadium. The guy who heads up the Authority, Steve Hill, also runs the LVCVA (Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority), the agency charged with promoting Las Vegas for the casinos (funded with tax dollars via a room tax). It’s Las Vegas, absolutely nothing to see here.

The A’s are forced to interact with the Las Vegas Stadium Authority because if all goes to plan, $380 million in taxpayer money will go toward building a new ballpark on the Tropicana site.

The Las Vegas Stadium Authority is very invested in the A’s move, as it’s perceived an MLB team will move some serious needles in Las Vegas (visitation, tax revenue, jobs, prosperity, the whole nine), at least based upon projections (largely untethered from reality) by consultants hired by the A’s.

At the meeting, A’s executive Sandy Dean laid out the financing details for the new ballpark.

By “details,” of course, we mean unmitigated horseshit.

Here’s how it went.

Confirmed: The A’s don’t have investors investing. They hope to, but if they had investors, we’d have heard about them. No smart investor is going to contribute $850 million (or any portion thereof) based upon some magical future projected value of the team. That value is a complete fabrication (just like projections of 28,000 fans attending every game), as is the assertion there are a number of interested investors. The A’s even hired a high-powered firm (Galatioto Sports Partners) to find investors, but none have surfaced. Not one.

Confirmed: The A’s don’t have lenders who are actually lending. The A’s are claiming multiple financial institutions are excited to lend the A’s $300 million, but excitement isn’t money. Excitement can sometimes result in money, like at strip clubs, but at strip clubs, there’s a viable business model.

Confirmed: While the Fisher family could contribute all the necessary equity ($850 million) to the project, there’s no real indication that’s happening. “Could” is a far cry from “will.” Wealthy people don’t get or stay wealthy by spending their own money on projects with questionable returns.

Confirmed: When we say there’s no funding for a ballpark, we aren’t exaggerating. The $380 million in public funding everyone assumes is a done deal actually isn’t. See, the A’s have to spend $100 million to get the public money. If that $100 million doesn’t exist, neither does the public funding.

It’s all smoke and mirrors from the A’s, abetted by public officials.

It’s the illusion of activity. Of progress. Of something being accomplished.

Read this slowly and repeat if necessary: Hopes and promises aren’t financing. Words and proposals and laughable renderings don’t pay for things.

Go home rendering guy, you’re drunk.

The A’s iron-clad financing plan for a Las Vegas ballpark is akin to “thoughts and prayers,” and we all know how effective those are.

Why are people, including many media outlets, so inclined to take the A’s, its ownership or its representatives at their word?

The A’s had an iron-clad, binding agreement to build a ballpark on the Wild Wild West site. They now say they’re building on the Tropicana site.

The A’s have yet to provide anything concrete related to this ongoing quagmire. The renderings are ridiculous, the financing is foggy and the team is playing in Sacramento for three years. You know, to start building that Las Vegas fanbase.

Our money’s on the Sacramento A’s staying there. Unless the team ends up staying in Oakland. Stop chortling. We’ve been saying this for a year.

You can watch a portion of the Las Vegas Stadium Authority meeting here.

You can read more about the meeting here, from media outlets that are giving the A’s the benefit of a doubt for some inexplicable reason. Here are stories from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada Independent and AP.

We aren’t seeing a ton of skepticism in news coverage, but that’s Las Vegas.

We like the takes from Field of Schemes, mostly because they agree with us that the financing plan is a “big pile of nuthin.” We’d add “steaming,” but that pretty much nails it.

And don’t get us started about the Bally’s Corp. aspect of this mess. Bally’s Corp. isn’t building a resort on its own. The company lacks the resources.

One twist in this saga did transpire in Chicago recently.

The owner of the land under Tropicana, a REIT called GLPI (Gaming and Leisure Properties, Inc.), is presumably helping Bally’s Corp. (which owned the operations of Tropicana) build a casino in Chicago with $2 billion in financing.

Could GLPI help pay for a proposed casino resort on the site shared by the imagined A’s ballpark in Las Vegas? Anything is possible, but the only way a resort on the Tropicana site is viable is if it’s the only thing on the Tropicana site. It’s complicated, but viability is based upon the number of hotel rooms, and the number of hotel room on this site is limited by FAA restrictions due to the proximity to the airport.

One tidbit not widely reported is the fact Bally’s Corp. effectively sold off all its real estate to fund the Chicago casino project. So, selling more isn’t an option to help pay for whatever gets built on the Trop site. We get the feeling Bally’s could swing one or the other project with some serious help, but not both. Bally’s chose Chicago. Time will tell.

We personally think sports have ruined Las Vegas, so it pains us to have to write about a subject that’s not even particularly Vegas-related anymore. An MLB team will be Vegas-related again when a serious team with serious owners present a real-world plan, including financing, probably in the parking lot of the Rio, unless an NBA arena is build there first.

There do need to be more voices of reason to help lend perspective to this ongoing debacle.

Las Vegas deserves a team worthy of it, and the A’s aren’t it.