The Bears already knew the pursuit of public money for their ambitious $4.7 billion stadium plan along the Chicago lakefront was going to be an uphill slog. But the Illinois state legislature has made that task even harder. 

About a month after the Bears unveiled their stadium proposal—complete with a set of flashy renderings—the legislature is set to adjourn this week for the spring without taking up any funding proposal relating to the project, and it won’t be back until the fall. 

“A proposal of this magnitude deserves sunlight and scrutiny,” state Rep. Kam Buckner told the Chicago Tribune. “Very often what has happened in this building is that things get rammed through at the last minute without much public input or transparency. So I welcome conversations that will probably begin once we’re done here [for the spring].”

The team wants public money to cover slightly more than half of the stadium cost, with $2.3 billion in private money pledged. Three phases of infrastructure development projected to total $1.5 billion are most notably not connected to any potential funding source. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson is an ardent advocate for the Bears project, but Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office has called the effort a “nonstarter,” and interest has been cool among other legislators in Springfield in picking up the issue. 

Both Confirming and Defying a Trend

That sentiment arrives amid a fast-growing skepticism in many sectors around the country toward supplying public funding for stadiums that house privately held teams owned by billionaires—particularly as the values of those teams in most instances continue to soar. That sentiment is still spreading, even as the Bears’ proposal easily beats the team-level contributions for forthcoming facilities in Buffalo and Tennessee, both in actual amount and percentage of overall development cost, and could also overtake what is being discussed in Kansas City and Cleveland. 

Jacksonville, meanwhile, is also considering a plan in which it would fund about 55% of a $1.4 billion renovation of the Jaguars’ EverBank Stadium with taxpayer dollars. 

The Bears have steadily sought to keep up the pressure on timing for the public funding, with team president Kevin Warren repeatedly saying “time is money.” The team has estimated that every year lost to delays adds more than $150 million to the stadium cost.

The second-most popular sport in the world is finally gaining significant momentum Stateside.

On Saturday, a match in Dallas between the U.S. and Canada will officially begin the 2024 International Cricket Council Men’s T20 World Cup. The biannual tournament—which has expanded from 16 to 20 teams and will hand out a record $10 million in prize money—uses a different format of the sport in which matches play out in just a few hours instead of multiday affairs.

The U.S. is holding 16 matches in Dallas, New York, and South Florida over the next month as a cohost alongside the West Indies. (You may have already heard about the $30 million, 34,000-seat temporary stadium constructed on Long Island.) 

While the U.S. likely won’t be hoisting a trophy at the end of the T20 World Cup (India, Australia, and England are the favorites), its domestic league scored a huge victory this week. The ICC granted official List-A status to Major League Cricket, which drew roughly 70,000 fans across its inaugural 15-game season last year. That means players’ performance will now count toward their career stats, which wasn’t the case in Season 1, and further incentivize top talent to consider playing in the league.

“I was very pleasantly surprised,” Anand Rajaraman, a co-owner of MLC’s San Francisco Unicorns, tells Front Office Sports. “I thought it would take us a couple seasons to show the ICC that the quality of cricket is good.”

Since the U.S. is not a full member of the ICC, an exception had to be made to give MLC its new status. “The ICC very much wants to promote cricket in the U.S.,” Rajaraman says.

Game of Expansion

MLC is expanding its schedule to 21 games for Season 2, which begins July 5, less than a week after the T20 World Cup concludes, with many top players from the World Cup expected to stick around and also compete in this upcoming MLC season. In 2025, MLC plans to play 34 games. 

The six-team league is also exploring adding four expansion franchises in the near future. In addition to San Francisco, MLC also has teams in Los Angeles; New York; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and Texas. “It was always intended to be a 10‑team league,” MLC CEO Vijay Srinivasan told The ­Guardian.

The Texas Super Kings are currently the only MLC team with a permanent home venue: Grand Prairie Stadium, also the home of the U.S. men’s national cricket team, which received a $20 million renovation in 2022. But plans are in the works for the rest of the league to build comparable stadiums built for hosting cricket. 

With MLC set up for more potential growth in the coming years, cricket’s moment in the U.S. could hit a crescendo in 2028: The sport will return to the Summer Olympics, hosted by Los Angeles, for the first time since 1900.