I’m not a political man, so from strictly a politics standpoint, I do not know why most people in Illinois are unhappy with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
However, after saying last week that he wants to try to get a Super Bowl at Soldier Field in Chicago, I’m starting to assume that people don’t like him because he may not be the smartest guy out there.
(Image via SBA-List.org)
Sure, a Super Bowl in Chicago sounds like a good idea…until you actually look into the details.
Soldier Field seats around 61,000 people, good for the lowest capacity of any NFL venue. Why? Well remember when the city decided to build the Bears a new stadium literally inside the old one? Yeah, it’s not easy to fit a ton of seats literally inside another venue.
The fact that the stadium is so enclosed actually makes for a fantastic in-game atmosphere. Every fan is so much closer to the field, so no matter if you are in the first row of the lower deck or way up in the nosebleeds, you are right on top of all of the action. However, that same quality makes it nearly impossible for Soldier Field to add more seats to its capacity.
People need to realize that unless Soldier Field is able to increase its seating capacity, there really is not much of a chance to have a Super Bowl in Chicago.
More than anything, the NFL is a business, and the Super Bowl is not only the biggest NFL event, but the biggest event in all of sports. They could have the Super Bowl in a 200,000 capacity stadium and it would sell out, so why would Roger Goodell elect to have a Super Bowl at the smallest stadium in the league? That would be a horrible business decision on his part, and unless many of the people on the panel who help Goodell make this decision are Bears fans, I don’t know why they would support this.
If the Super Bowl was in Chicago, many Chicagoans would want to attend, and why not? After all, the Super Bowl is called The Big Game for a reason. However, many of the tickets sold for Super Bowls are given to large corporations who sponsor the NFL, so in a small capacity stadium like Soldier Field, how many tickets that are going to be sold actually will belong to fans that purchased them?
A topic of concern to many fans out there is that the weather is what is keeping a Super Bowl away for Chicago. That could be the case, as maybe the NFL wants to wait and see what a Super Bowl is like in New York before they bring one to another cold weather city. However, the capacity issue seems much more pressing, and from a business standpoint, means a whole lot more that the temperature outside.
Whatever the case may be, Rahm Emanuel needed to do some more thinking before he said that. After all, it’s going to be up to him to figure out how to increase the seating capacity in order to get The Big Game into this great city.
So, until you have a plan for that, Rahm, don’t come out and make it seem like you are doing the city a favor.
Rahm Emanuel probably has a better chance of seducing Nancy Pelosi than seducing the NFL into a Windy City Super Bowl. (Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images via About.com)
