We all know the attendance issues at Miami Marlins park and while the Dolphins fans show up considerably more, fans of both teams are subject to some of the worst owners in all of sports. In order to keep holding Super Bowl’s at the Dolphins’ Sun Life Stadium, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated the stadium needed significant renovations to the tune of $400 million. Not quite the Miami Realtor price but the lifestyle of south Florida doesn’t have to break the bank for taxpayers.
But when legislation failed in the state of Florida to secure that cool $400M from the taxpayers, CEO of the Dolphins Mike Dee stated “We have no intention of investing more”.
So that should be the end of it, right? In my best Lee Corso voice, not so fast.
After making it very clear that the team itself would not finance any stadium renovations, Dee took the slimy business executive move of refusing to decline that a move of the team could happen if some sort of tax payer funded renovations didn’t occur.
This is essentially putting the bill and blame on the same tax payers who were swindled from the Miami Marlins owner just a couple years earlier.
After securing $500 million for a new park from the Miami-Dade tax payers, Marlins owner Jefferey Loria dumped the entire star-filled roster, used luxury tax revenue to pocket his own expenditures, blamed the fans for not showing up to games last season when they won a grand total of 69 games and even pulled the “I’ll move the team if my new baseball park isn’t funded by tax payers” card.
In years past, these same owners have even alienated the fans that actually show up to the games.
The Dolphins have held “welcome home Tebow” game and soon, the Marlins will host an “FSU Night”. Both of those situations directly eats at the soul of any diehard fan of both teams.
Huh? How does it make sense for the Marlins to host FSU Night?
So what are the fans of Miami sports teams to do? Unfortunately, not a whole lot.
The MLB and NFL organizations support the owners, not the cities they play in and fans of their respective teams.
But the fans are held under the fire to give their tax payer money to the same organizations that never have to release a single tax record proving how much money they are actually pocketing.
If you’re a fan of a team with a great owner, thank your lucky stars you don’t have to deal with the crap that Marlins/Dolphins fans have had to deal with over the past few years. A situation that looks like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
