NYC 2024 or 2028

[Quaker2001]

10 hours ago, Nacre said:

It seems I am not making myself clear.

1) Seattle could have built a stadium for a combination of the NFL, college football, the IAAF Championships, the Pan-American Games, etc for less money than the cost of its two huge football stadiums. The reasons it did not do so were not financial, but rather all of the things you pointed out.

2) I am not arguing that Seattle either should or could host the Olympics. I am saying that even one of the lesser cities in the USA could clearly afford the sporting infrastructure for the Olympics if it really wanted to try for an Olympic bid. American cities simply prefer to spend the money on national rather than international sport.

It isn't the cost of the athletics stadium that is holding back a New York bid, but rather the sports and real estate market in New York.

Semantics. I think we're looking at this similarly, we're just expressing it differently.  However..

The cost of a stadium doesn't end when the construction is complete.  It still costs money to maintain it less it turns into what they have in Athens (among other places).  They, like Rio, had the money to build those stadiums.  How'd that work out for Athens?  Remains to be seen what happens with Rio.

I know we're trying to define what "could" happen being based on having money and nothing else but come on, let's have a more intelligent discussion than that.  The "cost" of a stadium that could host track and field is much more complex than the cost of construction.  And - in case this doesn't go without saying - the idea of spending money on something is to get a return on your investment.  International sport in this country doesn't do that.  Teams and their owners do.  So yea, the market (and common sense) dictates these things, but when I say "can't", I don't mean that the money isn't there.  I mean that there is no sensible business plan that's going to emerge that would make it sensible and even a billionaire with cash to burn isn't going to make that decision.

[Quaker2001]

9 hours ago, Nacre said:

In fact Manchester City (which shares owners with NYCFC) plays in a stadium that was built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Moreover New York could force them to accept a convertible stadium like Stade de France by denying them permitting for any other stadium option. Let them build a new convertible stadium in the park in Queens and New York would have its Olympic stadium. The problem is that the people of Queens don't want the park land taken away, and taking public land to give it to a private developer might be political suicide for whatever mayor proposed it.

As for Husky Stadium, I am already aware of that stuff. My point is in fact precisely that college football, the NFL, etc are big business. There is no shortage of capital for sports in the USA, either private or public.

The advantage European cities have over American cities is not a willingness to spend/waste money subsidizing sports. It is having government-run sports ministries that spend public money on national athletics stadiums, velodromes, etc instead of spending that money on domestic sports leagues.

Note that I am not criticizing countries/cities for either spending model. (Except Seattle's baseball palace.) I am just saying that it is silly to pretend that the USA is a virtuously thrifty country when our cities are giving billions and billions of dollars to private sports teams.

Who here is pretending that the USA is a virtuously thrifty country other than.. no one.  Your second to last paragraph is spot on.  I think we all know that's how the game is played here versus elsewhere.

Your second paragraph however is ignorant.  How exactly does a city force a team into accepting an undesirable situation by denying them any alternative?  That's not something that would actually happen and if it did, guess what happens.. that team goes and finds another city that will give them what they want.  If a stadium in Queens isn't the answer, then they'll look for another solution.  And if they can't find one, they'll continue where they are now.  There's not some sort of Jedi mind trick they can use here.. "you will play in a convertible stadium." No, it doesn't work that way.  Again, this is the dynamic at play of public versus private ownership.  If the city tried to hoodwink NYCFC into something like that, you know what the response would be?  "You want a convertible stadium, you build it."  If you know your history, there was some controversy over the fate of City of Manchester Stadium after the 2002 Commonwealth Games and whether to leave the track in or not.  It was decided to remove the track in order to make the stadium better suited for football since hosting athletics would be less than useful if it compromised the stadium's viability for football.  Sounds an awful lot like what would happen here in the US.

[JMarkSnow2012]

10 hours ago, Nacre said:

In fact Manchester City (which shares owners with NYCFC) plays in a stadium that was built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

 

The important thing about that, which distinguishes it from the Olympics, is that in Games mode, it only had a 38,000 capacity, which was increased by the permanent and drastic conversion, to 48,000.

[Rob2012]

2 hours ago, Quaker2001 said:

If you know your history, there was some controversy over the fate of City of Manchester Stadium after the 2002 Commonwealth Games and whether to leave the track in or not.  It was decided to remove the track in order to make the stadium better suited for football since hosting athletics would be less than useful if it compromised the stadium's viability for football.

Are you sure? The plan was always for Man City to move in and one end of it was just scaffold-seating in Games mode. If that was suggested after the Games I can't believe it was ever a serious suggestion.

[JMarkSnow2012]

6 hours ago, Quaker2001 said:

It was decided to remove the track in order to make the stadium better suited for football since hosting athletics would be less than useful if it compromised the stadium's viability for football.  Sounds an awful lot like what would happen here in the US.

Absolutely. Athletics / football conversion is always problematic because the dimensions of a football field (any code) are so much smaller than the dimensions of an athletics track. Baseball would make more sense, because at least the width is about right, but even that, as Atlanta showed, needs some serious temporary seating to adjust for length.

[Quaker2001]

7 hours ago, Rob. said:

Are you sure? The plan was always for Man City to move in and one end of it was just scaffold-seating in Games mode. If that was suggested after the Games I can't believe it was ever a serious suggestion.

My apologies, I mis-represented the "controversy" as just sour grapes and criticism on the part of some in the British athletics community..

Athletics' stadium claim is pipe dream

[JMarkSnow2012]

1 hour ago, Quaker2001 said:

My apologies, I mis-represented the "controversy" as just sour grapes and criticism on the part of some in the British athletics community..

Athletics' stadium claim is pipe dream

The last paragraph of that linked article mentions the Sapporo Dome. Different conversion, but it does illustrate the scale of effort which needs to be made to convert efficiently between two sports with different playing area specifications:

 

[zekekelso]

 

[FYI]

It's all a moot point, really. We have our best candidate for now, until further notice.

[TeamBlakeUSA]

2028 Is Long Ways Away.

[gromit]

On 9/20/2016 at 10:42 PM, zekekelso said:

 

And this transformation cost Hampden Park about 8,000 seats from its listed Football Capacity

I believe a more extensive modification proposed for the Estadio La Peineta would have resulted in a loss of 12,000 seats from the football stadium though potentially because the stadium would be more rectangular than Hampden's oval design.

Essentially if the requirement is minimum 60,000 seats and you don't want a white elephant with no tenant you are looking for a minimum 70,000 seat football stadium