SBJ Football: Can Hall of Fame Village ever recover?

Is the Disney-NFL Media deal going to happen before the season? I don’t know, but take this under advisement: Two NFL sources say they’ve received an informal heads up that there may be a special league meeting in August on the topic.

The short, red ink-soaked life of the publicly traded company developing a mixed-use project at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, is limping to an end, with its main investor hoping to take it private by October.

But the incomplete construction site will be visible for yet another Enshrinement Week starting July 31, the city’s time to shine each summer. More than a decade after the Hall of Fame board first approved the plan -- and more than six years since the original completion date -- the robust economic engine that was promised is nowhere close to fruition.

One former employee and Canton resident is demanding answers for what she calls a “betrayal of our trust’ and “a misuse of tax dollars.” Stacey Horning, who worked at the Village for three years, has been posting TikTok and Instagram videos under the handle “Hall of Fame Village Truths” in recent weeks. No regulatory agencies or government lawyers have alleged wrongdoing to date in the 11-year-old development, but she hopes to change their mind, at the very least focusing on the decisions that led to the public tax dollars going into the project.

“The information I’ve given them will hurry them up to give us some justice here in Canton, because Hall of Fame week is in two weeks,” Horning told me. “It’s something we’re all very proud of, and really, really enjoy, and now we have this big giant mess, and it looks terrible.”

In a prepared statement, a Hall of Fame Village spokeswoman says the go-private is intended to provide financing to maintain operations, finish the site’s incomplete water park and build a new hotel. If the merger is consummated, it will be owned by HOFV Holdings, an entity controlled by Stuart Lichter, who owns Industrial Realty Group, the original joint venture partner with the Hall on the development before it went public in 2020. He’s the single largest shareholder of the public company now.

Big promises, and a deep hole

Lichter will have a tall challenge to simply keep the company afloat, much less finish building. In one of its last SEC reports, the public Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Co. (OTC: HOFV) reported $252 million in debt. In 2024, it lost $30 million on $21 million in revenue, a figure that declined at a time when executives were counting on quick revenue growth. The go-private will only proceed if Lichter can raise $145 million in new financing and restructure the lease.

In October, the Village missed a payment on a ground lease for the water park, and now lender Blue Owl Capital has a security interest in nearly all of the physical property on the site, including its lease to Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium. Since then, an Industrial-affiliated lender has been keeping the business afloat while the go-private is completed.

I could fill another newsletter with specific financial figures and underperforming deals over the years. But take a step back and look at the big picture, and it’s stunning how thoroughly the Village concept has failed to live up to the promises of 2014-2015.

Approved by the Hall’s board in late 2014, the three-phase plan originally was described as a $476 million project. But costs grew far beyond that. Early plans called for a four-star hotel, a conference center, a retirement home for NFL veterans, a VR-enabled “experience,” youth fields and restaurant/retail. CSL International produced a study in 2015 claiming it would generate $15.3 billion in economic growth over 25 years and lure 3 million visitors by 2025.

Clearly, the Village was far too ambitious for a small city with stagnate-to-declining population. Within three years, red flags were everywhere, with vendors complaining they were being stiffed and new loans coming in to keep it afloat, catching the eye of the New York Times. Every SEC filing once the company went public via a SPAC merger showed debt that far exceeded cash reserves and annual revenue, often by many multiples.

Executives continued to paint rosy projections all along the way. At one point, short-seller Bleecker Street Research calculated that “to hit their waterpark [revenue] guidance, HOFV would have to capture every single person that flew into the Akron-Canton Airport from Jan. 2017 to December 2019 … and do it all in one year.”

There’s a bigger story to be told about the Village one day, but for now, Cantonites like Horning just want the project finished and the city to benefit from what has been built, namely Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium -- widely regarded as a top-notch venue post-renovation -- and the play fields. “Have you seen the water park site? It’s just half-built with tarps around it,” she said. “Everyone in Canton is pissed about that.”

Almost all my calls today included some mention of NFLPA Executive Director Lloyd Howell and the ongoing drama at the union. This morning, ESPN reported that at least two player reps who voted for Howell to replace DeMaurice Smith in 2023 didn’t know about a 2011 sexual discrimination lawsuit against him.

That follows close on the heels of disclosures that the union, under Howell, agreed to keep the results of the salary-guarantee collusion ruling secret, and that Howell has a consulting gig at The Carlyle Group, which could soon own stakes in NFL teams.

Most business types find the Carlyle angle fairly ridiculous, noting that the aerospace/defense investment group is not privy to the sports group’s work, and that if they are, the conflict of interest is arguably more of a problem for the NFL than the NFLPA.

But the fact they’re talking about Howell at all is telling, and not in a good way. Most business people don’t follow the union closely, unless they think their internal problems will affect CBA negotiations or trigger a leadership change. And they’re paying attention now.

Another point: All this secrecy and internal NFLPA debate over who knew what, when, has its roots in the NFLPA’s secretive selection process of Howell in the first place. Like I said at the time -- a union is a membership organization, and while I understand why leaders might prefer to act in private, keeping secrets from voting members is asking for trouble.

Nearly 3,000 youth athletes and their families are converging in Canton today for the second mid-summer NFL Flag Championships, an effort to create a football equivalent of baseball’s Little League World Series tradition. It will be similar to last year, but attendees will see new efforts to build out a youth-to-Olympics pipeline of flag opportunities.

To that end, 20 collegiate women’s flag programs are on-site today, promoting their programs, and separately, 150 local high school girls did combine-style work outs in front of college scouts this afternoon. There will be college information sessions each of the next two days as well. “As colleges are adding programs, that increases demand from high schools, because they want to make sure their girls are well-positioned for those opportunities,” said NFL Flag head Stephanie Kwok.

On TV, the tournaments will look much different. ESPN and NFL Network, which are together showing 33 games (14 on linear), are taking production out of the 20,000-seat Tom Benson Stadium into the adjacent ForeverLawn Sports Complex. They lose the built-in TV production infrastructure of the stadium, requiring a large build-out on the fields, but they’ll get a better scene -- one that feels more like an event, said ESPN VP/Production and “Monday Night Football” producer Steve Ackels. “Last year, to encapsulate the real feel of the whole event was challenging because were in Tom Benson Stadium,” Ackels said. “It was very sparse with fans. It looks great because of the field, but it didn’t feel intimate.”

Not unlike the LLWS, Ackels said, they want the broadcast to show good youth sports action but also a large family-centric gathering. With the televised games on the open fields, you’ll see teams practicing, families watching together and other games in the background. ESPN is adding commentators with flag-specific experience and will emphasize the participating teams’ home towns more, hoping to build geography rooting interest.

The capstone broadcast of the weekend will once again be the Boys Under-14 and Girls high school championship games on Sunday, set for 4-6pm ET on ABC. Barring major news, that’s guaranteed to get a viewership increase. Last year, those games were pre-empted by ABC News’ coverage of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the campaign, instead airing on ESPN.

Flag championship seeking new home

This could be Canton’s last year for the NFL Flag event. No host city has been announced yet for 2026. “The NFL is looking at other locations that will best continue to elevate the flag championships,” an NFL spokeswoman said. Canton’s appeal is obvious in a way -- it’s centrally located, the playing fields are basically new, and in theory, the teams coming there steer potential business to the Hall of Fame itself and the Village.

But Canton’s small size isn’t ideal. The usual NFL Flag requirement that teams must stay in hotels reserved by organizers is dropped this week, “due to the limited inventory available.” The NFL always considers other locations for its major events, but the search underscores the Village’s long-term challenges. Any scenario in which the Village eventually meets its revenue projections would seem to include being the long-term host to the NFL’s own mass participation event.

• Sony’s newly engineered NFL Coach’s Headsets will soon be appearing on the sidelines with a series of new innovations to ensure proper noise-cancellation, vocal clarity, comfort and durability regardless of the weather, notes SBJ’s Joe Lemire.
• Buffalo-based New Era expanded its relationship with Bills QB Josh Allen, adding an equity piece, a job, office and a LinkedIn page, notes SBJ’s Terry Lefton. As New Era’s “director of Billustration,” Allen, who will be the lead in New Era’s NFL campaign launching next month, is the first New Era endorser to receive equity.
• NFL VP/Public Policy & Legislative Affairs Jonathan Nabavi left the league to join FanDuel in the newly created role of VP/federal affairs, reports SBJ’s Bill King.