Bills Mafia Just Paid $260 Million in PSLs and $850 Million in Public Funds for a Stadium Where They Can't See the Whole Field
Aaron M. Sprecher. Getty Images.Poor, poor, pitiful Bills Mafia. These people just cannot catch a break. They've gone 0-for-4 in Super Bowls, and now it appears they've just gone 0-for-3 in home stadiums. Not that War Memorial (1960-72) was all that bad for a place lovingly referred to as The Rockpile. And Ralph Wilson/Highmark (1973-2025) had a certain rustic charm. But the one that was just opened for a public viewing is an absolute catastrophe:
Listen, this is America (until further notice). If Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula feel like sinking $2.2 billion into a stadium that looks like the blueprint was scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin using a Keno pencil by a guy on his fifth Old Fashioned at bar attached to an Orchard Park bowling alley, that's up to them. Hell, it would still be less than a quarter of their reported net worth ($9.3 billion). People with less money and poorer judgment than them have blown a lot more of their wealth on worse things than a football stadium where you can't see all the football.
But this wasn't their money. Not most of it, anyway. This is a boondoggle, in the worst sense of the word.
Bills fans shelled out over a quarter of a billion in Personal Seat Licenses for this monstrosity.
Pro Football Talk - The Buffalo Bills will pay for their stadium with, among other things, Personal Seat Licenses. It’s a fancy term for paying for the right to pay for season tickets.
And Bills fans are paying big money for that privilege.
Via Michael Petro of the Buffalo News, the Bills have raised nearly $260 million in PSLs by selling more than 53,300 licenses. The total amount surpassed the stated goal of $225 million by 15 percent.
To repeat: That $260 million was just the buy in. The cover charge, to get them in the door of the ticket office. Reports have the price of a single season ticket starting at $10,000 for the cheap seats. These ones:
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It gets worse.
Not only did $260 million of the cost come straight out of Bills Mafia's pockets, plus the ticket prices on top of that, everyone in the state of New York got hosed on this as well:
AP - Taxpayers are committing a combined $850 million to the project — $600 million from the state and $250 million from the county. At the time of the deal reached two years ago, that represented more than half the cost of construction, but now, taxpayers will be responsible for about 40%. The Bills are responsible for any overruns beyond $1.54 billion.
So even if you don't like the Bills, or don't care about football, you just paid for games you'll never see. Which only makes you different than the Bills fans with the obstructed seats by a matter of degrees. And let me just point out that there is no earthly reason for views to be obstructed. It's one thing if you're stuck behind a pole supporting the roof of the grandstand at Fenway. The place was opened in 1912, when engineering hadn't yet evolved beyond I-beam technology. But even if we hadn't, this was me earlier in the year, doing a spot-on Maximus impression at Anfiteatro Romano at Pompeii, which was buried under 22 feet of volcanic ash in 79 AD.:
The Pompeiians had sight lines figured out 20 centuries ago.
Look, I don't want to get too provincial here, just because New England and Buffalo are division rivals. After all, Boston has had more than its share of architectural fiascos. When the Central Artery was designed, it was meant to usher in a new, Jetsons-like age of elevated platforms for cars to ride through the sky, leaving pedestrians free to walk the streets unhindered. What was produced was a hideous green railroad bridge-looking abomination that cut the city off from the harbor. A mistake so bad it took $27 billion and almost 20 years of tunneling to unfuck ourselves. Boston City Hall remains to this day one of the ugliest structures ever built by humans. And when I was a kid, the Hancock Tower was raining massive panes of glass down on the sidewalks below like Zeus tossing lightning bolts. It had so much plywood covering the holes it looked more like Jenga Tower. So Buffalo is not alone on bad designing.
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Except when it comes to football stadia.
Now seems as good a time as any to remind you all how Gillette Stadium came to be built. After Mr. Kraft was lied to by the typically crooked kleptocrats in the State House about letting him build a stadium downtown near the waterfront, he was left with two options.
One, was to take the deal Hartford offered. Connecticut was going to build an NFL-ready stadium for UConn football to play in. If Mr. Kraft moved his team there, they'd still be the New England Patriots. They'd not only charge him $1 a year rental, they'd guarantee sellout revenue. Meaning if there were any unsold tickets (a ludicrous proposition now, but not out of the realm in the mid-90s), the state would make up the difference. Best of all, his share of the construction costs would be the low, low price of $0.00. Connecticut was simply building his team a brand new, fully furnished, turnkey home.
His other option was to do it the hard way, and pay for it all himself. Which is what he did. On the land he'd purchased years earlier. A dirt lot off Route 1 roughly halfway between Boston and Providence that was the location of Foxboro Stadium, the worst dump in all of pro sports.
And that's the route he took. There were no PSLs. The only money the state kicked in was the public infrastructure stuff they do for any construction project. Improve the roads, put in sidewalks, hook up the utilities and the like. That amounted to $70 million total, all of which was covered by a $5 per vehicle parking surcharge. The rest of the expenses were raised by selling the naming rights, and the Kraft family's personal wealth.
They broke ground on it 25 years ago. In one of the great metaphors in sports history, the new stadium was being built above the old, dilapidated one as the 2001 Patriots were on their way to winning their first Super Bowl. In their 2002 home opener, the first thing that went up was the championship banner. Years later, they had to expand the area where the banners hand to fit all the others. Just one of several improvements to the place over a quarter of a century:
None of which have cost anyone a thing, except ownership. As it should be.
A while ago someone suggested to me RKK deserves to host a Super Bowl in the palace he wrote all the checks for. I explained that he'll never get one precisely because he did build his own venue. The NFL doesn't want that. It wants to reward the owners who convince fans, ticket buyers and taxpayers to foot the bill while they hold onto their personal wealth. Weather or no weather, Buffalo is in play for a future Super Bowl, I can promise you. just like New Jersey got theirs.
As for me, I'm fine with how things are. I prefer a stadium fans didn't have pay for, where you can see everything from any seat in the place. Tough break, Bills Mafia. First you stop winning the AFC East, and now this.