Editorial: Soccer-loving Joe Mansueto comes through for Chicago and its Fire

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

We're longtime fans of The 78, the 62 long-fallow acres of former railroad-owned land bordered by Roosevelt Road to the north, Clark Street to the east, 16th Street to the south, and the South Branch of the Chicago River to the west.
It was our preferred site for the Chicago casino, given that it offered excellent existing public transportation, potential river frontage for a convenient suite of waterfront bars and restaurants that could have added to Chicago's riverwalk and would have displaced no one. Once the Lori Lightfoot administration made a different choice for gamblers over this swath of property owned by Related Midwest, we opined last year that the same plot of land would then be an excellent choice for a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox, which could have enjoyed much the same benefits.
In both of our editorials, we emphasized another attribute of The 78 that often gets overlooked: its unique geographic ability to activate the potentially symbiotic relationship between Chicago's Loop and both Bronzeville and Chinatown. Its development will remove what for too long has been dead land and thus a psychological barrier that has been a detriment to expanding the economic promise of the South Loop further into a part of the city that we see crucial to Chicago's future. Especially if it is accompanied by housing that could attract young, Black, college-educated professionals who have left the city and who we badly need to return.
Can a $650 million soccer stadium for the Chicago Fire, a privately funded plan long known to us as a work in progress but officially announced Tuesday, do all that? It may seem unlikely, but we think it can.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and the city's essential billionaire investor, Morningstar founder Joe Mansueto, is no fool.
He has a sense of humor too.
We had quite the chuckle over our coffee Tuesday at what he told The Wall Street Journal as he explained why he had chosen just to write a very big check, as distinct from going cap in hand, Chicago Bears-style, to City Hall or Springfield.
'It would definitely slow down the process to have to engage with political leadership to secure financing,' he told the paper.
Ya think, Joe?
Always easier to pay your own way, especially in Chicago. But huge public benefit can, and we think will, result.
Take a look at what has been happening in Nashville thanks to Geodis Park, a 30,000-seat soccer stadium that opened in 2022, is the home of Major League Soccer club Nashville SC and will later this month host three matches as part of the newly expanded 2025 FIFA World Club Cup, putting relatively small Nashville in the company of New York, Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles, among others (not Chicago).
Geodis Park cost around $350 million, an amount almost fully funded by the team and its billionaire owner, John Ingram.
As soon as the stadium opened, development around Geodis Park exploded fast.
'Townhomes have replaced older, single residencies and a growing younger demographic has emerged,' The Tennesseean reported on the one-year anniversary of the stadium. Within a matter of months, the paper said, a local development and investment firm had bought 20 duplex rental homes next to the stadium, even as real-estate values near the stadium rose and developers started to build new housing aimed at younger people. Bars and restaurants moved in too. And they're packed whenever there is a game. Fresh infrastructure also arose for ride-shares and scooters and it was hardly lost on Nashville's city leaders that much of this new tax revenue was accruing from families who live outside city limits.
Granted, there were naysayers who wanted the neighborhood to stay the same but then that brings us back to the advantages of The 78; it's a big piece of empty land.
That's why it was marketed as Chicago's 78th neighborhood, a riff on the 77 official community areas identified by the University of Chicago in the 1920s. All of this, of course, could still fall apart. And as with any big development project in Chicago, there likely will be those who use race and politics to snag a piece of the pie but, as he well knows, Mansueto has insulated himself and his beloved soccer club against most of that.
So, as soccer fans, we congratulate Mansueto on getting to The 78 and making a firm plan before all the other players who've tried but sent the ball either wide of over the crossbar. This isn't the first time Manseuto, said by Forbes to be worth close to $7 billion, has used his formidable resources for the good of the city (remember the glory days of Manseuto's Time Out Chicago, which boosted our arts and entertainment scene?) and, of course, the University of Chicago already has myriad reasons to be thankful for one of its graduate's copious amounts of philanthropy.
Soccer needs a dedicated stadium where fans can fill the place: Once this gets cooking and FIFA continues its long-overdue efforts to grow the U.S. game, we wonder if 20,000 seats will be enough. We'd have thought The 78 would have room for another 5,000 or 10,000.
But that's up to Manseuto and the Chicago Fire, of course. Just as Evanston should be thankful to the Ryan family for the new football stadium at Northwestern University, almost all built with private funds, so Chicago should appreciate Mansueto for this investment in Chicago sport.
Frankly, we don't have that many generous and entrepreneurial billionaires left in Illinois, given how we have chased a few of them away. But here's a $650 million reminder of how important they are to a city. They can score goals and give us all something new to cheer.
Thanks, Joe.