Field of Schemes Mocks Indy Eleven's Renewed Demand for New Taxpayer Funded Stadium

The Field of Schemes blog reports:

All the MLS expansion talk of late has focused on Las Vegas and Minneapolis and Sacramento, but Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir isn’t giving up without a fight. Ten months after throwing in the towel on his plan to ask the state legislature for $87 million for a new stadium — partly because his ticket tax revenue projections were completely nuts, but likely more so because the head of the state senate told him he’d have a better chance in the 2015 session — Ozdemir is back, and raring to be having the state cut some checks with his name on them:

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In case you’d forgotten the details of Ozdemir’s stadium plan since last year — and you’ve got to think Ozdemir is hoping you have — the state of Indiana would send him annual $5 million payments, which it would recoup by collecting a 10% ticket tax on seats sold at the stadium. Except that the average MLS team only sells about $8 million a year in tickets, which would only bring in $800,000 a year in tax revenue; the research arm of the state legislature says it would be more like $200,000-400,000 a year. If that’s the case, the state would be left paying off the team’s stadium costs by kicking back income and sales taxes that otherwise would go into state coffers like normal people’s income and sales taxes do.

Ozdemir is touting the team’s sellout of all 14 home games last year as a minor-league franchise as a selling point, which is all very nice, even if Advance Indiana points out that a lot of these tickets weren’t so much “sold” as “given away.” It doesn’t explain why Indiana should give him $5 million a year for his project, though — if the Eleven are doing so well at IUPUI’s 10,000-seat stadium, doesn’t that make the case that they don’t need taxpayers to build them a new one to draw fans? Or if he really thinks he can sell six times as many tickets as other teams in MLS (without an actual approved MLS franchise, mind you — this deal wouldn’t be contingent on getting a big-league team), maybe Ozdemir could take out a bank loan, raise ticket prices by 10% in lieu of a tax, and do the financing himself? I’m talking crazy talk again, aren’t I?