The team’s bid signals it’s legitimately considering leaving Soldier Field, home of the Bears since 1971.
The possibility of the Bears leaving Soldier Field for a new stadium in Arlington Heights became significantly more realistic once they put in a bid to buy the Arlington International Racecourse property.
The potential relocation had been little more than speculation until team president Ted Phillips announced the bid Thursday. Phillips couched it as the Bears exploring “every possible option” and allows them to “further evaluate the property and its potential” if their bid is accepted, and it’s obvious that means relocating is legitimately under consideration.
That being said, the Bears have made numerous relocation ploys over the years to gain leverage over the City of Chicago in negotiations over Soldier Field. Arlington Heights was a possibility in the 1970s, when Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley threatened to prevent the team from using Chicago in its name and mused about the lack of interest there would be in “the Arlington Heights Bears.”
Chairman George McCaskey, whose family has owned the team since its inception in 1920, declined comment through a spokesman.
Overall, the Bears want more control over their home stadium, which isn’t actually theirs. Because the Chicago Park District owns Soldier Field, the team is limited in what it can do as far as expanding the capacity beyond its current 62,000, modernizing aspects of a 97-year-old building, selling sponsorships of certain areas of the stadium and building things like a year-round museum and gift shop.
There’d be nothing holding them back in Arlington Heights, where mayor Thomas Hayes has been openly campaigning to lure them. He called a potential Bears move a “best-case scenario” for his village Thursday.
“I’m very excited about the opportunity, but it’s certainly not a done deal,” Hayes said. “There’s a long way to go.”
Hayes said he had met with fewer than 10 potential bidders for the site. Churchill Downs, Inc. owns the property and said it plans to give an update on the sale “in the coming weeks.” A spokesperson declined comment on the Bears’ bid.
On the other end of this tug-of-war, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot sharpened her tone from saying last month she wanted to help the Bears maximize what they’re getting out of Soldier Field and came out with a blazing statement Thursday saying the Bears “are locked into a lease,” and pointing out that “many organizations are doubling down on their commitment to Chicago,” while the Bears flirt with the suburbs.
“This is clearly a negotiation tactic that the Bears have used before,” Lightfoot said. “As a season-ticket holder and longtime Bears fan, I am committed to keeping the ‘Chicago’ name in our football team.”
Then she took the cruelest swipe of all.
“Like most Bears fans, we want the organization to focus on putting a winning team on the field, beating the Packers finally and being relevant past October,” she said. “Everything else is noise.”
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Sun-Times file
That noise probably won’t quiet anytime soon.
The racetrack property covers 326 acres about six miles north of the Northwest Tollway. That’s far more space than they have at Soldier Field, it’s an advantageous location based on internal research that shows the majority of their fan base is in the north and northwest suburbs and it’s about half the trek from Halas Hall in Lake Forest.
The Arlington Heights property would be exclusively for a stadium. The team poured more than $100 million into renovating Halas Hall in 2019 and will hold training camp there for the foreseeable future.
The Bears have played at Soldier Field since 1971 and have a lease running through 2033. The organization doesn’t consider that lease to be a barrier, a source said, because it could negotiate a buyout and construction on a new facility would take years anyway.
Recently built NFL stadiums have been extravagant in design and enormous in price. The newly opened stadiums in Los Angeles and Las Vegas cost $5 billion-$6 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively. The others in the last seven years are for the Falcons ($1.6 billion), Vikings ($1.1 billion) and 49ers ($1.3 billion).
In terms of price and aesthetics, the Bears are likely to give U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis a long look as they imagine their new home. It has a 73,000-person capacity, a glass roof and glass on much of the stadium walls to allow as much daylight as possible.
That stadium opened in 2016 and has already hosted a Super Bowl, a Final Four and various other major concerts and events. Building that kind of venue would give the Bears similar opportunities that simply wouldn’t work at Soldier Field.
Staff writer Mitchell Armentrout contributed to this story.