Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
One thing to keep in mind is that the flames could easily afford to build its own arena.
Simply spending to the floor rather than the cap would give them 20 million USD per year of cash flow to build what ever they wanted. Now would we want to watch a team only spending to the floor? Maybe not, but corporate support likely stays the same and that is what really pays the bills. But the important take away here is the NHL produces enough money in every one of their markets to build their own arenas and turn a profit.
If the NHL decided to fight the players to have a 30 million cut to the salary cap they could open a 900 million dollar facility every year and the average player salary would still be over 2 billion.
The cities of North America need to agree to not be suckered into building these facilities. Given current team valuations and player salaries there is more than enough money available within these businesses.
The sports leagues are awful corporate citizens.
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It's not about public subsidies for all teams. A large number of teams are located in areas that have sufficient population bases to make arenas work without the need for public subsidies. They get enough concerts and conventions. Many of them have overlap with an NBA team. The private economics work. The threshold seems to be around 2m-2.5m people.
Calgary is not one of those cities.
So if you want flames ownership to build this without public money, you are asking for a private subsidy. You're basically asking private actors to finance a non-economic investment. No one is going to do that. This isn't a charity.
Likewise, if the flames demanded the City of Calgary pay for the entire facility, that wouldn't be fair to the public, because we'd be asking the public to subsidizes a private business so they can make excess profits.
The solution is to have cost sharing where the flames pay for the most that can be economically justified via private business case. And the public picks up the rest.
This isn't rocket-science. While I cared less about this 10+ years ago when the dome had a good amount of life remaining on it, that is no longer the case. There is now an urgency to get a new arena built as the Saddledome reaches the end of it's useful life.