I won’t make this that long of a story. I saw an Arizona Republic story about the Arizona Cardinals owner, Michael Bidwill, and his continued actions to price out any fan who isn’t a substantial millionaire. Theo Mackie wrote an interesting piece recently about how miserable this season was for everyone involved with the Cardinals and their 3-14 NFL record. Most owners would be trying to do whatever they can to get as many fans as possible into the seats next year. Not Bidwill. He continues to rip out seats in State Farm Stadium. So the thousands of fans who sat in those seats for many years and watched terrible football? Get out. Except of course any fans willing to pay for an expensive luxury suite. Bidwill will just build as many of those suites as possible.
For example, one specific part of the stadium that was never full during this entire season was a rebuilt section of the stadium called the “Casa Roja Club,” which sits at midfield and is behind the opposing team’s bench. It was built just last year and offered luxury options with ticket prices starting at $1,000 per game. What about the fans who sat in these seats in previous years? They “were forced to either relocate or pay significant price hikes.” Fans have gone to social media to vent their anger, and rightfully so. The team has been raising prices at least 10% yearly (yes, some seats may be a few more or less depending on where you sit).
When the Arizona Republic asked Bidwill about these changes, he decided to answer the question as if the reporter had said that Bidwill wasn’t improving any parts of the stadium. He brought up food choices, improved Wi-Fi, and other irrelevant things that don’t get into pricing out the long-time fans.
But most importantly, everyone should feel bad for Michael.
“Every year, we make investments into State Farm Stadium. We’re very proud of those investments. There are opportunities where we have made some substantial investments that I’m not sure we get complete credit for” – Michael Bidwill, 01/06/26, AZCentral
Poor guy.
But did you expect anything different? For almost 40 years now, a Bidwill has been the owner of the Arizona Cardinals. For most of it, the Bidwill years can be described as “one of the league’s cheapest and worst-run franchises.” Bill Bidwill was known as one of the cheapest owners in the NFL, if not all the sports. He was nicknamed “Dollar Bill” for his philosophy of “spend(ing) as little as possible on players.” No, really. He made his players buy their socks even up to the 2000 season.
The Bidwill family are what I call a Rake Family. They love stepping on rakes and then seem surprised when it comes back and hits them in the face. The Bidwill’s first few years in Arizona are a perfect example of this. When the Bidwill family moved the Cardinals from St. Louis to Arizona in 1987, they did so because St. Louis wouldn’t build them a brand-new stadium. Cardinals executives claimed that people in Arizona would. Therefore, the team moved to Arizona, and nothing was built. The stadium builders never came through, and the team was stuck for the next 18 years using Sun Devil Stadium, where Arizona State University played (and still does play) football games. Why?
Well, even though the Cardinals had barely unpacked their bags, they had:
Been sued by a small group of fans,
Planned to sell the most expensive tickets in the NFL,
Angered a number of “powerful businessmen who helped lure them to the Phoenix area” and
Asked city officials to ban all fans from drinking alcohol during games. But with one exception. Those who rent luxury skyboxes can drink…but nobody else.
As said above, when the first game was to be played in Arizona, the Bidwill family thought it was a good idea to hike up their prices to the highest in the entire NFL, averaging $38 for a ticket. Fans were not happy, but the team reminded the fans that the prices would NOT go down for the entire season. Michael’s father, William Bidwill, complained that scalpers were also screwing him over by selling his tickets for even more money. After just a few months in Arizona, the Cardinals’ “honeymoon (was) over and much of the romance (was) gone.”
When the Cardinals were trying to recruit free agent Joe Montana in 1993, William Bidwill had Montana come down to Arizona and view the team facilities. Except, when they went to the facilities, the doors were locked, and the owner could not find anyone with the keys.
The Cardinals found success for several years in the 2000s, resulting in their only Super Bowl appearance in 2009. But as the Bleacher Report wrote in a story, the Cardinals’ top brass still had almost no ability to make decisions while looking forward; in other words, they could not “think…outside of the box,” causing “plenty of problems.” This is why the Arizona Cardinals were the only team in 2010 who did not use a salary cap loophole that allowed teams to “carry unused money into the next league year.”
Their current owner, Michael Bidwill, is quite a gem. Let’s see how his employees in the office view him. Thanks to an arbitration claim filed by a former Cardinals executive, we found out that Bidwill has been accused of some disturbing behavior, including “cheating, discrimination and harassment.” Maybe that is why many employees indicated that they were “fearful of Bidwill on a daily basis, as a result of Bidwill’s erratic and often abusive interactions with them.” Is it any wonder why Bidwill got ahold of the results from a 2019 team employee survey and destroyed them before the results could be publicly released?
Ok, but the players must love him, right? Well, no. It has been almost a guarantee that the Cardinals will rank last or next to last in a yearly players survey from the NFL union. One player’s survey noted how Cardinals players look at their owner as someone who “does not provide high-quality workplace facilities” and who isn’t “willing to invest to make upgrades.” My favorite part was this last nugget. Michael Bidwill has a policy of “deducting dinner from players’ paychecks should players want to get food from the facility.”
As one NFL writer summarized the situation, the Bidwill family “has been cheap…has been ignorant, and the result has been one of the worst runs in pro football history.”
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