It has been a little more than a year since the D.C. Council decided to spend more than $1 billion of taxpayer money to help finance a stadium for the Washington Commanders. Yet that corporate welfare was apparently not enough for Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who is now looking to spend an additional $300 million to help the city’s soccer franchises.
The subsidy would finance about half the cost of renovations already planned for Audi Field, including expanding the number of seats at the stadium and adding a roof for climate control. This would be a boon for D.C. United, whose regular-season schedule will soon shift to include more winter months, a change Major League Soccer instituted to align with other leagues around the globe.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) opposes Mendelson’s proposal, which he introduced in July. That runs contrary to her long history of supporting public dollars for sports franchises, but as she pointed out, the city already has Capital One Arena, an indoor venue about the same size as Audi Field, into which the District has poured hundreds of millions of dollars. “We always want to be bringing something new,” she said. “We never want to be cannibalizing one for the other.”
That objection is sensible enough, though left unanswered is why taxpayers should be on the hook for capital investments benefiting any private business. Unlike many MLS teams, D.C. United is making money, boasting an operating profit of $12 million in 2025. The Washington Spirit, the women’s team that also plays at Audi Field, is not yet profitable, but it regularly sells out home matches. So why, exactly, do they need corporate welfare?
Keep in mind that the city already spent $183 million to help construct the soccer stadium, which opened in 2018 at a total cost of $400 million. At the time, that was the largest public stadium subsidy in the history of the league.
Mendelson believes the renovations would mean greater attendance at games and year-round events, which would allow the city to recoup its costs via taxes on tickets and merchandise. But history shows that promises of new revenue from sports venues almost never pan out. The same is true of arguments that such public investments can help boost the local economy. And it’s especially true of more subsidies for Audi Field — since it already exists.
The District faces a massive budget shortfall and has a long list of capital projects in need of funding. Like every other business and homeowner in the city, D.C.’s soccer teams should have to figure out how to renovate on their own.
The post Yet another subsidy for a D.C. stadium? Really? appeared first on Washington Post.
