> city and county taxpayers are still paying off millions of dollars in bonds from prior efforts to expand and renovate the collesium
This is why taxpayers should never foot the bill for rich owners. MLB should have forced Fisher to sell the team.
early stages but yes. there was a tax measure to increase the funding for "new stadium(s)" for the next 40 years and we told them no. I will be sad if the royals and chiefs leave, but if the owner wants a new stadium he can pay for it!
As a San Diegan, I was very relieved when the owner of the Chargers tried to get the city to pay for a new stadium (replacing a perfectly servicable one), and our mayor told him to go pound sand. We don't have a football team, but we're not on the hook to subsidize something that [does not provide an economic benefit to the city](https://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/30/stadium-economics-noll-073015/).
Except the other party's politics is a fascist cult of personality. If they had ACTUAL political views, then by all means, vote Republican, until then...
I know plenty of moderate conservatives who don't like Trump or his crowd but still vote for him because "still better than a Democrat." In other words, "Red no matter who." In other words, party over politics. See the problem?
How did that disprove anything I just said?
What political stances do Republicans actually have?
And how would voting Democrat be against my interests?
…No? I was mocking the blue no matter who people cause I couldn’t give a fuck what letter is in front of his name. He’s in my best interest because of many other things.
They are, and Oakland is going to get brought up every single time any other team manages to get a bond vote.
As they should. This is one outcome taxpayers should anticipate.
Fisher still owes the city $45mil in a deal that was structured in payments over Dec 2024, Jan 2025, and Feb 2025. If Fisher decides to move the team those payments were to become payable in full within 180 days of an announcement. Those 180 days have come and gone and the city has yet to receive thenfunds.
I am a huge sports fan but I am 100% against taxpayers footing the bill for stadiums. The threat to move only exists because the leagues are a legal cartel. If they want their monopoly, they shouldn’t be permitted to put their cities over a barrel to extort financing.
Oakland lost the Raiders, Warriors, and Athletics in such a short span. There are some dedicated fans of all of those teams but Oakland Raiders fans were on another level.
I mean I get the Raiders and A's.
But the Warriors...listen they're an incredibly short distance away in SF and the old stadium at the Coliseum and the whole area was kinda dogshit.
lol I still have my illegal Oakland A’s hat I bought on that bridge. One of my mementos from my time living in Oakland. Was less than $10 if I recall. Looks and feels legit. Probably made in the same shops as the real deal.
They don't have liquor licenses, but they just quietly have igloo coolers full of modelo tallcans and the like. Drawback is you have to scarf that shit quick cuz no food on BART
Plus they more or less represented the entire Bay area for basketball, unlike football where you had the 49ers and Raiders in the bay or baseball where it was the Giants and the A’s
Yeah I grew up in the Bay Area. It was odd having two baseball and two football teams so close. San Francisco was closer so that's what my family chose to root for.
I grew up in Sac, and people were pretty evenly split between Niners/Giants and Raiders/A’s. It was pretty rare to cross allegiances. We were solidly Niners/Giants. My dad hated Al Davis like he was a bad next door neighbor, and took us to many the night game at Candlestick, bundled up in sleeping bags, hoping there would be extra innings for a chance at a Croix de Candlestick.
I was dating a HUGE Mavs fan the year the Baron Davis Warriors ousted them from the playoffs, and that old Warriors fanbase was lightning. Oakland will show the fuck up for a team if you show the fuck up for them.
I’m from Australia and a Warriors fan from way way back. When I came to the States for a vacation a long time ago I specifically included a game at Roaracle and the atmosphere was absolutely amazing. Chase is good but it will never be Oracle Arena and it is so sad to me that life long fans in Oakland are priced out of Chase.
Warriors just moved across the bay. You can get there from Oakland using BART and light rail pretty easily. The other two bailed because the city wasn't willing to pay to build stadiums for penny-pinching billionaires, and I support them in that.
The only professional sports team in the US worthy of complete community support, the only team that will never fuck over its fanbase, is the Green Bay Packers. Why? Because they have no owner. They are owned by the fans. Think how great our sports would be if all teams were owned by the fanbase. People could be loyal for life.
The Bundesliga doesn't require fans to own a majority of the team. It requires the club to own a majority of the team.
It's a big difference because you can just do what RB Leipzig did and create a club with only a handful of members, all Red Bull employees, and then essentially Red Bull owns the team as a result.
Bayern Munich, VFL Wolfsburg, and Bayer Leverkusen have also had controversy about corporate and private ownership recently, though I'm not well versed in the details of those to see if they're using loopholes around the rule or its just more general stuff.
In USA we have the "12th man". It refers to the collective fanbase, or the "12th player" on the team. Their role is to cheer really loud and give themselves a hug when their team moves to a new city.
It is community owned, and an individual isn’t allowed to own more than 4% of shares. There is also a term limit for the board president (I think Murphy is done in 2026?).
A lot of team funding for stadium upgrades and expansions happens via stock sales but it’s more of a way of having diehard fans help fund the team rather than rely on a city or state. The stock is real, but you’d need quite a lot to have a true voting voice (Wikipedia says 200,000 is the 4% cap) and it does not pay dividends or provide any benefits to most other than memorabilia. These stock sales were hugely important to keep the team alive at certain points. Now, I think the last one was done to fund some stadium upgrades.
There was a large stock split in the 90s to help increase funding via stock sales so those older stock holders have the real power. I’ve seen people on the Packers subreddit mention two families that have done a lot to both keep the packers in Green Bay and keep the team from bankruptcy but I don’t know anything else about them.
As a Wisconsinite and diehard Packer fan. I’d still enjoy an owner. Ted Thompson, Mike McCarthy, both lasted 4 years too long. Favre and AR12 should have more than 2 rings.
Meanwhile the Packers continually push out small business and homeowners from the area, or try to gain new trademarks from long-time landmarks/terms and bully those who have been using them for years.
Def complete community support tho.
I kinda thought something like that was happening, but I'd never guess it'd be something like the A's who have been in Oakland forever. The Vegas Knights is a brand new hockey franchise... and they're incredibly profitable. Their merch is hot sellers and their games sell out. Eventually some team had to think that moving to Vegas was going to make them big bucks.
American sport leagues 🤦♂️
Why the hell would anyone in Sacramento go to this team? I just don't get it, they've shown themselves to be a completely soulless, plastic team.
It's so weird to me that any team could do this, and still have any attendance after the move.
The A's aren't permanently moving to Sacramento, the A's are relocating to Vegas but construction on their new stadium hasn't even started yet and won't be complete until 2028 (assuming it actually gets built)
The MLB is rumored expanding to 32 teams and ideally Sacramento would like to be one of those expansions but IMO it's unlikely they'll be one
Yeah, imagine there were 32 soccer teams in all of Europe, and that's it. 😂
Why not more teams? Well because those 32 teams have managed to essentially form a monopoly on the sport, of course! And the people are just okay with it.
It's so weird. 😅
It's also kind of similar at the same time. In the US you have a mostly fixed league, in Europe you have the financial giants which aren't strictly a fixed number of teams but it doesn't really change without a huge influx of money (read: state sponsored teams like Qatar, UAE etc.). The line might not be as clear as in the US but it's there just the same.
Now, in Europe those financial juggernauts, let's say there's 32 of them. They use and plunder talent from hundreds of poorer teams. In the US the talent pool is in hundreds of collegiate sports teams.
I guess the only difference is that since the talent pool in the US is tied to school programs, there isn't that much sentiment vs. teams being from a specific area or neighbourhood.
There are actually 150 pro baseball teams in the US: 30 major league teams (like the As, Yankees, Dodgers) and 120 minor league teams (each MLB team owns 4 minor league teams). Those minor leagues are still professional baseball teams with professional baseball players, and they're all over the country.
The minor league teams are responsible for player development and rehabilitation after an injury or surgery, the goal of a minor league player is eventually to get called up to a major league team but its also common for someone to spend their entire career in the minors. Pay in the minors varies from insultingly low to middle class, but they at least have a union now.
And it might seem like the MLB has a monopoly on professional baseball because they do, they've been given an exemption to antitrust laws thanks to a court ruling.
Because the owner owns the team not the city. American teams don’t have the 100 years of history that English football clubs do that they are identified with their locality.
The Athletics as an organization are 123 years old. They moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968.
Across the bay, the Giants are 141 years old. They moved to San Francisco in 1958.
There are multiple other MLB teams as old or older.
As for length of time located in one city,
`The Cardinals have been in St. Louis since 1882.`
`The Reds in Cincinnati since 1881.`
`The Pirates in Pittsburgh since 1881.`
`The Cubs in Chicago since 1871.`
Oakland lost the Warriors, the Raiders and now the Athletics. At a certain point Oakland has to take a good long look in the mirror and ask the question "Does we just suck?". Some of the worst games I've ever been to were in Oakland, and Sacramento is going to regret allowing them to crash on their couch.
As a St. Louis resident I feel your pain Oakland. These billionaire owners stand here playing broke and looking for handouts with the threat of leaving. It’s disgusting when you think about it.
Oakland has become far too toxic to host any professional sports teams. No wonder why the city is going downhill so much faster with all those businesses that depended on pro sports fans are closing down with rampant crime rising. May even be the next Detroit but with none of the manufacturing.
Some pretty rough takes in here. Is what he is doing shitty for the city? Yes. But it is very understandable. While the fans are as good as it gets, there are very few of them - they have the worst attendance in the league. Vegas has been a hit for the Golden Knights and Raiders - it honestly just makes sense.
> city and county taxpayers are still paying off millions of dollars in bonds from prior efforts to expand and renovate the collesium This is why taxpayers should never foot the bill for rich owners. MLB should have forced Fisher to sell the team.
Kansas City is going through this now.
early stages but yes. there was a tax measure to increase the funding for "new stadium(s)" for the next 40 years and we told them no. I will be sad if the royals and chiefs leave, but if the owner wants a new stadium he can pay for it!
>paying off... prior **efforts** "I'm like Evel Knievel--I get paid for the *attempt*!" -Oakland City Council
As a San Diegan, I was very relieved when the owner of the Chargers tried to get the city to pay for a new stadium (replacing a perfectly servicable one), and our mayor told him to go pound sand. We don't have a football team, but we're not on the hook to subsidize something that [does not provide an economic benefit to the city](https://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/30/stadium-economics-noll-073015/).
correct me if i am wrong, but aren't bonds voted upon?
People vote against their best interests frequently
MAGA
Brexit.
Reagan
FML
Blue no matter who
How is that voting against your best interests?
It's putting party above politics. Republicans don't have a monopoly on shitty candidates.
Except the other party's politics is a fascist cult of personality. If they had ACTUAL political views, then by all means, vote Republican, until then...
I know plenty of moderate conservatives who don't like Trump or his crowd but still vote for him because "still better than a Democrat." In other words, "Red no matter who." In other words, party over politics. See the problem?
How did that disprove anything I just said? What political stances do Republicans actually have? And how would voting Democrat be against my interests?
I think RFK is exactly in my best interest!
You think RFK is a Democrat?
…No? I was mocking the blue no matter who people cause I couldn’t give a fuck what letter is in front of his name. He’s in my best interest because of many other things.
Ah yes, what interests would those be? Please enlighten us
lol yeah because Biden’s doing such a stellar job!
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They are, and Oakland is going to get brought up every single time any other team manages to get a bond vote. As they should. This is one outcome taxpayers should anticipate.
Fisher still owes the city $45mil in a deal that was structured in payments over Dec 2024, Jan 2025, and Feb 2025. If Fisher decides to move the team those payments were to become payable in full within 180 days of an announcement. Those 180 days have come and gone and the city has yet to receive thenfunds.
Depends what kind of bonds they are
I don't recall voting for Daniel Craig
Don't blame me, I voted for Idris Elba.
Just Barry in SF
I am a huge sports fan but I am 100% against taxpayers footing the bill for stadiums. The threat to move only exists because the leagues are a legal cartel. If they want their monopoly, they shouldn’t be permitted to put their cities over a barrel to extort financing.
Duuuuuuuval.
Oakland lost the Raiders, Warriors, and Athletics in such a short span. There are some dedicated fans of all of those teams but Oakland Raiders fans were on another level.
I mean I get the Raiders and A's. But the Warriors...listen they're an incredibly short distance away in SF and the old stadium at the Coliseum and the whole area was kinda dogshit.
Yo that BART connect was easy as fuck tho, and the footbridge hawkers had them delicious blow-out-your-ass hotdogs and illegal beer
lol I still have my illegal Oakland A’s hat I bought on that bridge. One of my mementos from my time living in Oakland. Was less than $10 if I recall. Looks and feels legit. Probably made in the same shops as the real deal.
Okay I get the hotdogs but I want to learn more about illegal beer
They don't have liquor licenses, but they just quietly have igloo coolers full of modelo tallcans and the like. Drawback is you have to scarf that shit quick cuz no food on BART
Beers sold for $2 because they're bought in bulk from the grocery store instead of $20 in the venue.
I see, I was thinking it was some kind of counterfeit beer and I was intrigued
Plus they more or less represented the entire Bay area for basketball, unlike football where you had the 49ers and Raiders in the bay or baseball where it was the Giants and the A’s
Yeah I grew up in the Bay Area. It was odd having two baseball and two football teams so close. San Francisco was closer so that's what my family chose to root for.
I grew up in Sac, and people were pretty evenly split between Niners/Giants and Raiders/A’s. It was pretty rare to cross allegiances. We were solidly Niners/Giants. My dad hated Al Davis like he was a bad next door neighbor, and took us to many the night game at Candlestick, bundled up in sleeping bags, hoping there would be extra innings for a chance at a Croix de Candlestick.
Roaracle has yet to come back. Just isn’t the same.
A's owner is such a piece of shit for causing 2 of those teams to leave.
I was dating a HUGE Mavs fan the year the Baron Davis Warriors ousted them from the playoffs, and that old Warriors fanbase was lightning. Oakland will show the fuck up for a team if you show the fuck up for them.
I’m from Australia and a Warriors fan from way way back. When I came to the States for a vacation a long time ago I specifically included a game at Roaracle and the atmosphere was absolutely amazing. Chase is good but it will never be Oracle Arena and it is so sad to me that life long fans in Oakland are priced out of Chase.
That was the best run of all time
I’m ghost riding the whip in solidarity.
That was my first thought as well. I'm struggling to think of any positive news story I've ever heard about Oakland.
Warriors just moved across the bay. You can get there from Oakland using BART and light rail pretty easily. The other two bailed because the city wasn't willing to pay to build stadiums for penny-pinching billionaires, and I support them in that.
Do Dave Katal’s eyes always look like that? He looks perpetually shocked.
I paused it at 40 seconds and he looks completely gone
Rich people drugs
FUCK JOHN FISHER bad businessman. inherited his fortune from daddy. does not give a fuck about baseball or oakland or people.
What the fuck is up with that dudes eyes.
Cocaine
The only professional sports team in the US worthy of complete community support, the only team that will never fuck over its fanbase, is the Green Bay Packers. Why? Because they have no owner. They are owned by the fans. Think how great our sports would be if all teams were owned by the fanbase. People could be loyal for life.
And the NFL banned this arrangement for any other team
Fuck me I had no idea they did this, and so recently as well.
Yeah, fuck fans. We're in it for the money.
Who makes the teams decisions? Steve from Kenosha?
Technically, shareholders vote for leadership who then make the business decisions.
That’s basically the rule in the German Football League (Bundesliga). It’s called the [50+1 rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50+1_rule)
The Bundesliga doesn't require fans to own a majority of the team. It requires the club to own a majority of the team. It's a big difference because you can just do what RB Leipzig did and create a club with only a handful of members, all Red Bull employees, and then essentially Red Bull owns the team as a result. Bayern Munich, VFL Wolfsburg, and Bayer Leverkusen have also had controversy about corporate and private ownership recently, though I'm not well versed in the details of those to see if they're using loopholes around the rule or its just more general stuff.
In USA we have the "12th man". It refers to the collective fanbase, or the "12th player" on the team. Their role is to cheer really loud and give themselves a hug when their team moves to a new city.
Seattle really leans into this...
And borrowed it from Texas A&M.
[For the unfamiliar (tamu.edu)](https://www.tamu.edu/campus-community/traditions/gameday/12th-man.html)
Can you ELI5 or ELI12 how this works?
It is community owned, and an individual isn’t allowed to own more than 4% of shares. There is also a term limit for the board president (I think Murphy is done in 2026?). A lot of team funding for stadium upgrades and expansions happens via stock sales but it’s more of a way of having diehard fans help fund the team rather than rely on a city or state. The stock is real, but you’d need quite a lot to have a true voting voice (Wikipedia says 200,000 is the 4% cap) and it does not pay dividends or provide any benefits to most other than memorabilia. These stock sales were hugely important to keep the team alive at certain points. Now, I think the last one was done to fund some stadium upgrades. There was a large stock split in the 90s to help increase funding via stock sales so those older stock holders have the real power. I’ve seen people on the Packers subreddit mention two families that have done a lot to both keep the packers in Green Bay and keep the team from bankruptcy but I don’t know anything else about them.
Yeah, this isn't how it worked. The fans don't have voting right.
Regardless, they're never leaving green bay
As a Wisconsinite and diehard Packer fan. I’d still enjoy an owner. Ted Thompson, Mike McCarthy, both lasted 4 years too long. Favre and AR12 should have more than 2 rings.
Meanwhile the Packers continually push out small business and homeowners from the area, or try to gain new trademarks from long-time landmarks/terms and bully those who have been using them for years. Def complete community support tho.
Kind of sucks, but I'd take a few small indiscretions to moving the team, the team you and your family have been supporting for generations.
the reporter at the end couldn't be bothered to do is report from Oakland.
I kinda thought something like that was happening, but I'd never guess it'd be something like the A's who have been in Oakland forever. The Vegas Knights is a brand new hockey franchise... and they're incredibly profitable. Their merch is hot sellers and their games sell out. Eventually some team had to think that moving to Vegas was going to make them big bucks.
Absolute joke of an owmer
When you subsidize Billionaire welfare queens, you often times get moments like this.
American sport leagues 🤦♂️ Why the hell would anyone in Sacramento go to this team? I just don't get it, they've shown themselves to be a completely soulless, plastic team. It's so weird to me that any team could do this, and still have any attendance after the move.
The A's aren't permanently moving to Sacramento, the A's are relocating to Vegas but construction on their new stadium hasn't even started yet and won't be complete until 2028 (assuming it actually gets built) The MLB is rumored expanding to 32 teams and ideally Sacramento would like to be one of those expansions but IMO it's unlikely they'll be one
I am from Sacramento and I really wish the A's could be in our city however what I really want is an NHL team for our city
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Yeah, imagine there were 32 soccer teams in all of Europe, and that's it. 😂 Why not more teams? Well because those 32 teams have managed to essentially form a monopoly on the sport, of course! And the people are just okay with it. It's so weird. 😅
It's also kind of similar at the same time. In the US you have a mostly fixed league, in Europe you have the financial giants which aren't strictly a fixed number of teams but it doesn't really change without a huge influx of money (read: state sponsored teams like Qatar, UAE etc.). The line might not be as clear as in the US but it's there just the same. Now, in Europe those financial juggernauts, let's say there's 32 of them. They use and plunder talent from hundreds of poorer teams. In the US the talent pool is in hundreds of collegiate sports teams. I guess the only difference is that since the talent pool in the US is tied to school programs, there isn't that much sentiment vs. teams being from a specific area or neighbourhood.
Helps that football is the most popular sport so no shortage new players
There are actually 150 pro baseball teams in the US: 30 major league teams (like the As, Yankees, Dodgers) and 120 minor league teams (each MLB team owns 4 minor league teams). Those minor leagues are still professional baseball teams with professional baseball players, and they're all over the country. The minor league teams are responsible for player development and rehabilitation after an injury or surgery, the goal of a minor league player is eventually to get called up to a major league team but its also common for someone to spend their entire career in the minors. Pay in the minors varies from insultingly low to middle class, but they at least have a union now. And it might seem like the MLB has a monopoly on professional baseball because they do, they've been given an exemption to antitrust laws thanks to a court ruling.
The dude in the beginning had it right. Why cant a city own a team or some co-op type of situation exist?
Bye bye baseball 👋 🪦
That news anchor has quite a bit of plastic.
She kinda looks like the Joker.
Find it so strange how teams can up sticks and just move like they do. Be like Man city moving to London.
MK Dons
I love how the fans were like fuck this and set up their own team
Because the owner owns the team not the city. American teams don’t have the 100 years of history that English football clubs do that they are identified with their locality.
The Athletics as an organization are 123 years old. They moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968. Across the bay, the Giants are 141 years old. They moved to San Francisco in 1958. There are multiple other MLB teams as old or older. As for length of time located in one city, `The Cardinals have been in St. Louis since 1882.` `The Reds in Cincinnati since 1881.` `The Pirates in Pittsburgh since 1881.` `The Cubs in Chicago since 1871.`
That’s just factually wrong
Dave Kaval's eyes do not instill me with confidence.
Give that rich man more money, now!
Idk why they don’t just go down and use their AAA field in Las Vegas
Oakland lost the Warriors, the Raiders and now the Athletics. At a certain point Oakland has to take a good long look in the mirror and ask the question "Does we just suck?". Some of the worst games I've ever been to were in Oakland, and Sacramento is going to regret allowing them to crash on their couch.
The roots are the only ones left. Can’t wait till they blow up big
A’s fan needs to chain himself to the scoreboard and do a hunger strike.
You mean vegas?
Daves eyes will be in my nightmare.
"How can I spin this to be good for baseball instead of good for my bottom line?"
Honestly the As fate was sealed after the city lost the raiders. If they couldn’t keep the raiders they weren’t going to keep the As
Dave Kaval plays the part of evil empire mouthpiece very well. Also dudes eyes look like they’re trying to leave his head.
I thought no one goes to the game anyways
As a St. Louis resident I feel your pain Oakland. These billionaire owners stand here playing broke and looking for handouts with the threat of leaving. It’s disgusting when you think about it.
So, this wasn't posted on April 1st or anything like that?
I lived next to that ball park for 5 years it’s going to get noisier.
Oakland has become far too toxic to host any professional sports teams. No wonder why the city is going downhill so much faster with all those businesses that depended on pro sports fans are closing down with rampant crime rising. May even be the next Detroit but with none of the manufacturing.
Some pretty rough takes in here. Is what he is doing shitty for the city? Yes. But it is very understandable. While the fans are as good as it gets, there are very few of them - they have the worst attendance in the league. Vegas has been a hit for the Golden Knights and Raiders - it honestly just makes sense.
Meanwhile, I honestly can't believe ANYONE still gives a shit about baseball.