Let’s say you are the owner of the Cincinnati Bengals. You are on multiple lists as one of the richest men in the country. Your family bought the Bengals for $7M in 1967 and now the team is worth $4B according to Forbes or $5B according to CNBC. You get tax breaks whenever you spend a little amount of money updating your own stadium. You have what many sports owners call the single best stadium lease in NFL history. However, anyone who doesn’t own a sports team likely refer to it as “one of the most exploitative leases” in sports. The Wall Street Journal called it “one of the worst professional sports deals ever struck by a local government”. You get the idea.
Yet, I still find it mind-boggling what Cincinnati officials allowed the Bengals to keep in the original 1996 lease. I cannot understand how those public officials thought that the county would see a single dollar in revenue if every dime of it was going to the team. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article on the Bengals’ stadium in 2011. Even at this point, the stadium lease continued “soaking up unprecedented tax dollars and county resources while returning little economic benefit”.
Let’s take a look at some lease highlights:
The county agreed to “guarantee 50,000 tickets sold per game”, agreed to give the team all stadium management rights
The county agreed to give the team all advertising revenues
The county agreed to give the team all money made from food or beverages
The county agreed to pay for all stadium maintenance or capital projects
Best of all, the county agreed to give the Bengals a state-of-the-art provision that entitled the Bengals to demand from the county the best and most expensive upgrades, no matter the cost, every single year.
With this history of the Bengals essentially robbing local taxpayers every year, let’s see how the team is acting during recent stadium negotiations:
“The Bengals repeatedly accused the county of defaulting on their 1997 lease agreement, said it already should have spent more than $300 million on stadium repairs”
“The Bengals wanted to spend $4 million to improve concessions, and (the team) wanted the county to kick in $5.5 million”
“The Bengals believe the team and the county already should have started on $494 million in basic facility improvements outlined by consulting firm Gensler in April 2022”
“(The Bengals) said $137 million in repairs were needed now, a figure…increased to $300 million on April 30, 2024”
You see, the emails show that the team wants to keep the lease the way it is while the county knows that much of it must change. Bengals officials are trying to act as if the current lease “has worked well, better than people could have hoped”.
If it has worked so well, why does every public official and local resident hate this stadium lease? Why did polling data in 1995 show that, even at this time, 65%-80% of residents would rather not give any funding to a stadium for the Bengals? I am not someone who believes that a person with money should fund every single thing that they do. But the City of Cincinnati currently has almost 30% of its residents living BELOW the poverty line. Local schools, police, and fire departments have massive financial shortages. Weren’t residents promised a property-tax rollback and more school funding from the new stadium? Has the public been given more than two years of property tax rollbacks since 1996? Has any school gotten $1 more due to the stadium? In 2010, the county and team finally came to an agreement to reduce the property tax rollback.
Let’s see how the Bengals conducted themselves with this agreement:
“Then something surreal happened. The Bengals called the county and said they didn’t really have a deal—and that the team wanted a 10-year extension on its lease. That would have meant 10 more years of maintenance; 10 more years of state-of-the-art upgrades; and a total taxpayer cost, to take a conservative estimate, of well over $100 million…The Bengals accused the county of reneging on the 10-year extension, though they never said why the county would have given up so much for a few million in rent. The commissioners denied that the extension had ever been on the table. “I still can’t for the life of me explain what happened on the Bengals side,” Pepper says. According to several people I spoke with, the Bengals officials did agree to the deal—only to have Brown decide after the fact that he needed the extension” — Cincinnati Magazine, November 2011
It is as if the Bengals live in another reality. Then again, this is the same team who signed a 30-year stadium lease in 1970 and then sued the county for additional revenues in 15 of the next 23 years. In another email, the Bengals threatened to relocate because the county was not fixing stadium problems. That sounds bad for the county. The official responded by questioning why he had never been given any detailed information on these complaints, nor had he ever been given any final costs for these supposed repairs. Now, one would think that the team would give an answer to this question. Instead, the Bengals official states that “the note…hardly seems to have been written by you, so I won’t respond to it”. Brilliant and detailed answer.
That reminds me of the time that Deadspin requested public documents on the Bengals’ stadium lease and got back documents that were all blacked out. The Bengals also refuse to share their financials with anyone. To this day, I don’t understand why more cities are not telling the teams that if they want taxpayer money, they need to do what every other business in the area must do and show us their financial books.
