Crew playing in Cleveland? Browns making a move? Inside the Haslams' stadium games | Arace
The first time Crew fans got wind of plans to move a Crew game out of Columbus was near the end of June. One report, from Cleveland’s News 5, quoted Haslam Sports Group executive Josh Glessing. He said that if Inter Miami had made it through to the semifinals of the CONCACAF Champions Cup and played the Crew on May 1, the game would have been staged at Cleveland Browns Stadium.
“We wanted to ensure that we could host as many people as possible and Cleveland Browns Stadium will host three times as many people as Lower.com Field,” Glessing told the Cleveland television station.
It did not come to pass because Miami was knocked out by Monterrey in the quarterfinals. (The Crew won their semifinal in Monterrey and went on to food poisoning in Pachuca.)
More Crew play Lionel Messi: Will the Columbus Crew play Lionel Messi in Cleveland? A breakdown of what we know
The second time Crew fans heard about the potential for Columbus Crew games to be played in Cleveland was in early July when season-ticket renewal agreements were delivered. Immediately, fans noticed another price hike: Nordecke season tickets in the North end of the stadium have risen from $476 to $652. Other sections have made even bigger jumps since 2022.
They had to hunt through the fine print to find the following: “Each MLS season, the Team may play home matches (including but not limited to a MLS regular season match) at a stadium located outside of Columbus, Ohio, including but not limited to a stadium located in Cleveland, Ohio.”
Aside from those on the Nordecke Board of Directors who are part of regularly scheduled meetings with the front office, Crew fans haven’t heard much else about moving Crew games.
Dee and Jimmy Haslam, owners of the Crew and the Cleveland Browns, swim in a lavish pool that is filled with the tears of Ohio’s sports fans. They probably have an Art Modell fountain to feed it. Modell moved the original Browns to Baltimore, which led to the Modell Law, which put up roadblocks to future carpetbaggers, which indirectly led to the Haslams owning the Browns and ultimately led them to owning Crew.
Now, the Haslams want to move Messi to Cleveland. And they seem adamant about moving the Browns to a new dome in Brook Park, to be built on 175 acres they’ve agreed to buy next to the airport.
That's good for Dee and Jimmy, who have a combined net worth of around $9 billion. They see a higher-revenue version of a suburban NFL team. They see greater income as landlords. They want a “ballpark village” mixed development in Brook Park (like the Astor Park development that is going up around the new Crew stadium).
The financing will be tricky – with tax-increment financing, tax abatements, municipal bonds, county and state handouts, and such – but it’ll get done in a way that benefits the Haslams and appeases enough of the folks who are getting a piece of the pie.
But it's all for the fans.
If you cringe at the thought that the Browns of Paul Brown and Jim Brown, of Otto Graham and Paul Warfield, of Bernie Kosar and Myles Garrett (and so on, and on) moving to the suburbs to be a centerpiece for Easton II, you simply have no idea what an NFL Board of Governors meeting is like. You don’t see Stan Kroenke measuring his development against Robert Kraft’s, or Arthur Blank measuring dome his against Jerry Jones’. And so on.
You’re a sap.
If you’re one of those Crew fans who saved the team for Dee, Jimmy, Dr. Pete Edwards and the Edwards family development company, you might be a touch sensitive about dynamic ticket pricing – whereby certain in-demand games at the new Crew stadium are subject to price hikes. Dee and Jimmy’s solution? Drive 150 miles to Cleveland where you can pay less for a ticket (not counting gas, parking, meals and maybe even a hotel room) to see Messi from section 516, row 31.
Eat cake.
Said Chris LaMacchia, a member of the Nordecke board: “While there doesn’t seem to be as much urgency on the part of executive leaders from HSG to meet with supporters to discuss the ‘Cleveland Clause’ as there was a rush to put a game in Cleveland, the Nordecke has expressed our stance to members of the Crew front office and will continue to reiterate that we strongly oppose playing any meaningful matches outside of the Columbus metro area.”
There’s a big stadium around here somewhere.
Next column: A solution everyone will say can’t work.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Crew playing in Cleveland? Browns to move? Haslams play stadium games
