Cleveland Browns clash with city over plan to move stadium to the suburbs

For Ryan James, co-owner of the Flat Iron Cafe, Cleveland’s oldest Irish pub, National Football League game days are a lifeline in an increasingly difficult business climate.

“We open up at 9am, and within a few hours, both floors are full of supporters,” he says. The pub bought a bus to shuttle fans the one-mile drive to the Browns’ stadium on the Lake Erie waterfront.

“We carry 150 people on that alone.”

He estimates that the eight or nine days a year that the Cleveland Browns play at home account for up to 10% of his annual revenue – a critical amount in a business with such tight margins.

But now, James and hundreds of other local businesses in downtown Cleveland are faced with the prospect of taking a major financial hit.

Except for a brief spell in the 1990s, fans have thronged downtown Cleveland on Sundays in fall and winter to cheer on their NFL team, the Cleveland Browns, for 80 years. The stadium and team have served as an economic linchpin for the downtown area in good times and bad. In parking and hotel taxes alone, the city is thought to earn about $1m per game.

But now, the team wants to move to Brook Park, a suburb south-west of Cleveland, and build a new, $2.4bn domed stadium – half of which its owners are asking to be paid by Cuyahoga county and Ohio taxpayers.

It’s an issue that communities across the country are facing as major sports franchises move to build or update facilities to make them usable for a range of events, all while asking taxpayers to kick in billions of dollars.

The Browns’ billionaire owners, Jimmy Haslam and his wife, Dee, maintain that the city of Cleveland has dragged its feet on committing to funding updates to the current stadium, and that the new stadium would drive investment to another part of the region.

The city, which owns the stadium, had offered to commit $500m to efforts to renovate the stadium at its current location.

“I don’t want to see our taxpayers get fleeced in a deal that socializes the risk back to them and puts the profits in the pockets of a few,” says Chris Ronayne, the Cuyahoga county executive.

“We’re talking about something bigger than these teams; we’re talking about community vibrancy. The move away is counter to our strategy of keeping the downtown robust.”

The Browns and the city have filed lawsuits against each other.

Currently, the city of Cleveland pays $1.3m in property taxes and insurance for the stadium annually, with the Browns contributing $250,000 in rent. The team is believed to be worth about $5.15bn, and earns about $100m a year in gate receipts alone.

The use of public funds to pay for sports facilities used by billionaire owners is a growing source of contention for cities and their residents around the US.

In Kansas City, the Royals (Major League Baseball) and Chiefs (NFL) franchises had teamed up to attempt to persuade local authorities to pay up to $1.7bn through a 40-year sales tax that, in part, would pay for new stadium suites and parking facilities. But last year, voters in Jackson county, Missouri, rejected the proposal.

In Chicago, the city’s storied Bears (NFL) franchise has been vacillating between building a new facility in the city – a move backed by the city’s mayor that would see $2.4bn of public spending – and out of town to a location 25 miles from the city center. In places such as Jacksonville, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, taxpayers are contributing billions of dollars to finance facility renovations or entire new stadiums.

Dozens of NFL teams, whose average value has doubled in recent years, argue that improving their facilities is only possible with the help of public money. In Los Angeles, however, the owner of the Rams, Stan Kroenke, paid all $5bn for the cost of the SoFi Stadium, which opened in 2020.

In Cleveland, county authorities say they are not explicitly opposed to supporting the Browns’ stadium needs at its current location.

“We can make a renovation, and you can have a conversation in the future about a new dome stadium downtown,” says Ronayne. “[But] this is the youngest of the three [professional sports facilities] downtown. This mad rush to Brook Park is just a boondoggle.”

The state of Ohio, whose legislature has a Republican supermajority, has said it plans to kick in $600m of taxpayer money through bonds, meaning that residents hundreds of miles from Cleveland with no interest in the team or the sport, could find themselves paying for this new stadium, and any interest accrued on those bonds.

The state budget that would include hundreds of millions of dollars of funding must be signed into law by Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, by 30 June. DeWine, a Republican, has previously expressed his opposition to the funding proposal and can veto bills that have cleared Ohio’s legislature, though he regularly follows the party line.

An investigation by the Ohio Capital Journal recently found that politicians who have voiced support for the new Browns stadium have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the Haslams, who also own the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer team and hold a stake in the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, and are thought to be worth about $8.5bn.

This is happening at a time that Ohio politicians are proposing cuts to the state’s education budget that would result in a financial hole several hundreds of millions of dollars in size.

But some believe that using the Browns’ current home, a valuable, visible space in downtown Cleveland just eight or nine times a year for football games, with a few concerts thrown in, is a waste.

The Greater Cleveland Partnership, the metro area’s chamber of commerce, supports the move, calling it “more practical” than investing in the Browns’ current site. Both Jimmy and Dee Haslam sit on the Partnership’s executive committee.

In Brook Park, locals say they would welcome the stadium nearby.

“I think it would be good for my business and the people of Brook Park. It’s really not even moving out of Cleveland and most of the people who go to the games are in the suburbs anyway,” says Sam Clarke, who runs a graphics design company a short distance from the site of the proposed new stadium.

“But it’s not going to matter if the owners are always making the worst moves. They can’t really ever seem to get out of their own way. You can play wherever you want but it doesn’t change the bigger issue.”

For James, a Browns fan who has run the Flat Iron Cafe in downtown Cleveland for 17 years, the stadium drama is about one thing.

“It’s just billionaires trying to make more billions, and I can’t stomach that,” he says.

“I have no respect for the organization.”