_{^{Written by GP}}
What the stadiums in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Buffalo actually built — and the cautionary tale Chicago keeps refusing to read
Every stadium subsidy is sold as a public works project and delivered as a church. The brochure promises jobs, corridors, a renaissance, a transformed region — the vocabulary of prosperity, deployed by men who have never had to wonder whether prosperity would arrive. What gets built instead is a place of worship: a great concrete sanctuary where a shrinking middle class gathers eight or nine Sundays a year to pay fealty to a god that bills them for the privilege. The collection plate is the tax base. The clergy are billionaires. And the one reliable miracle, performed without fail in every city that has tried this, is the transformation of public money into private net worth.

It is worth walking through the actual record — not the renderings, the record — because the three cities most often waved around as cautionary tales turn out to be cautionary about something more specific than “stadiums are expensive.” They are cautionary about who pays, who profits, and why the lesson never seems to take.

St. Louis: the gospel of the empty room
St. Louis put roughly $280 million of public money into the Edward Jones Dome in the mid-1990s, the down payment on a marriage to the Rams. For twenty-one years the city tithed faithfully. Then in 2016 Stan Kroenke decided Los Angeles was a better market, and he left — taking the team and leaving behind about $144 million in remaining debt and maintenance on a building with no tenant. The city paid roughly $6 million a year, the county another $6 million, the state $12 million, on an empty dome, until the bonds finally cleared in 2021. The faithful kept funding the cathedral after the god had moved to California.

Here is the part that should be carved over the entrance to every future stadium: the only money St. Louis ever clawed back, it had to sue for. A four-and-a-half-year lawsuit alleging the NFL had violated its own relocation rules and enriched itself at the expense of the community it abandoned ended in a $790 million settlement in late 2021 — of which roughly $275 million went to attorneys, leaving the city, county, and stadium authority to split a little over $500 million. No expansion team. No restored economy. A litigation windfall, extracted from billionaires only after courts started forcing them to open their books. That is the best-case outcome on offer: not prosperity, but damages.

And Kroenke? He moved the Rams into SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — a roughly $5 billion palace he built with his own money, no public bonds required. The lesson there is not subtle. These men can self-finance when the market is worth it; the subsidy is simply the price they make smaller cities pay for the audition. Kroenke is now worth somewhere around $12.8 billion, married into the Walmart fortune, richer than the entire enterprise he abandoned. St. Louis got the empty room and a lawyer’s invoice.

Cincinnati: the lease as a confession
If St. Louis is the gospel of the empty room, Hamilton County is the patron saint of getting fleeced while the lights are still on. Paul Brown Stadium — named, with a candor nobody seems to have noticed, after the owning family — opened in 2000 under a lease so lopsided the Wall Street Journal called it one of the worst deals a local government has ever struck. By 2016 the county had poured more than $920 million into the thing. At its peak, in 2010, the stadium debt was consuming better than sixteen percent of the county’s entire general fund — not its discretionary budget, its general fund, the money that pays for sheriffs and roads and schools — siphoned off to a football team. The lease even obligated taxpayers to buy the Bengals any amenity that a set number of other NFL stadiums happened to install, a clause that reads less like a contract than a ransom note with a renewal date.

What did Cincinnati get for being the most subsidized fanbase in football? A team that spent most of those years bad, and the privilege of watching its value compound. The Brown family franchise climbed from roughly half a billion dollars to around four billion. Mike Brown, who inherited the team his father co-founded in 1967 and is now in his late eighties, sits on a personal fortune of about $3.9 billion. Forbes assigns its billionaires a philanthropy score; Brown’s is the lowest on the scale, the mark of a man who has given away less than five percent of his pile. So the arithmetic of the most famous stadium boondoggle in America is this: a county hollowed out its general fund, a billionaire who built nothing and gave away nothing watched his inheritance quadruple, and the fans showed up anyway. That last part is not a footnote. That is the entire business model.

Buffalo: the tithe from people who can least afford it
Buffalo completes the picture, because Buffalo is poor. It is a shrinking Rust Belt city in a region that has been bleeding people and tax base for half a century — exactly the kind of place that can least afford to underwrite a billionaire’s real-estate appreciation. So naturally it committed $850 million in public funds to a new Bills stadium, at the time the largest public handout to an NFL franchise in history, roughly sixty percent of the $1.4 billion build. Erie County, unable to simply find the money, sold bonds — “Bills Bonds,” with the obligation landing squarely on the county — to cover its share.

The owner on the receiving end is Terry Pegula, who made his fortune fracking natural gas and selling the wells, bought the Bills for $1.4 billion in 2014, and has since watched the franchise’s value swell to nearly $6 billion. By 2026 Forbes put his net worth around $9.3 billion. In late 2024 he sold off a roughly twenty-percent slice of the team to a consortium of outside investors — which is to say he converted a chunk of his publicly subsidized asset into cash at the appreciated price. The public covered the majority of the building; the appreciation accrued entirely to him.

And the “life” this transforming investment will create for Buffalo? A grass field kept alive through the winter by subterranean heating and grow lights at a maintenance cost north of a million dollars a year. Smoke-breathing bison statues at the gates. Thirty-six-dollar beers. Spectacle, in other words — the sensory apparatus of the church — sold to a city where the median family would feel that beer. What it will not create, because nothing like it ever has, is the broad prosperity in the brochure. The empirical literature on stadium subsidies is about as settled as economics gets: study after study finds they fail to generate the jobs, the businesses, and the tax revenue promised at every ribbon-cutting. The money does not multiply through the community. It transfers, once, from many to one.

Whose church, whose collection plate
Stand back and the shape is unmistakable, and it is the shape of a feudal arrangement dressed in team colors. Across thirty-two NFL franchises, exactly one controlling owner is not white — Jacksonville’s Shad Khan, of Pakistani descent. The men who run the other thirty-one are, to a man, white, and to a man, billionaires. The labor that fills their stadiums is close to the inverse: roughly two-thirds of NFL players are men of color. And the public footing the construction bill is, increasingly, a middle class that is itself disappearing — asked to tithe toward a spectacle whose proceeds flow up to a tier of wealth its members will never touch.

This is the cult, precisely. Not the fandom — fandom is fine, fandom is one of the few communal joys left in an atomized country. The cult is the part where the fandom is monetized into obligation, where loving the team is converted by men in luxury boxes into a civic duty to fund their balance sheets, where questioning the deal gets you branded a traitor to your own city. Kroenke, Brown, Pegula: three white billionaires, two of whom inherited their way in, who took public money, delivered no measurable prosperity, and walked away richer. The faithful paid, prayed, and were told to be grateful for the sermon.

The cautionary tale that refuses to land
Here is the genuinely confounding thing, the thing this whole essay has been circling. All of this is known. St. Louis is documented. Cincinnati has been a national punchline for fifteen years. Buffalo’s record-breaking subsidy was front-page news. The economic consensus is not hidden in a journal nobody reads; it has been in the newspaper, repeatedly. And yet the subsidies do not shrink — they grow. New York gave the Bills $850 million; Nashville promptly topped it with $1.26 billion for the Titans, a national record, for a stadium that will hold fewer fans than the one it replaces. The cautionary tale fails as a cautionary tale, every single time, because the spectacle is engineered to override the arithmetic. You cannot fact-check a feeling, and the entire product is a feeling.

Which brings us, at last, to the Bears, who reportedly wanted something like $2.4 billion of somebody’s public money and have spent three years auditioning Chicago, Arlington Heights, and now Hammond for the role of mark. Indiana has raised its hand. It has waved up to a billion dollars in incentives and a governor eager to give a groundbreaking speech, and it will spend the next several years discovering, as St. Louis and Cincinnati and Buffalo discovered, that the renderings were the best part of the deal.

Chicago — and Illinois — nearly read the cautionary tale correctly. Faced with the demand for “tax certainty,” the legislature did the one thing none of these other governments managed: it declined to set itself on fire. That was not corruption and it was not incompetence. It was, for once, somebody refusing to pass the collection plate. The proper way for Chicago to proceed is exactly the way it has stumbled into proceeding — by recognizing that the only winning move in this game is not to play it, and by letting the next true believer learn the lesson on its own dime.

Let Indiana build the church. We’ve read this gospel. We know how it ends. And for the first time in this entire saga, the people holding the plate will be standing in another state.