A Stadium Deserves Scrutiny. So Does the Story About It.
Video taken by George Sisca II, during Wednesday’s make up match vs Loudoun United FC
By George Sisca II | SNN Commentary
The empty seats were real. What they proved was another matter.
GoLocal photographed Wednesday night’s Rhode Island FC match, disputed the announced attendance and placed its account of a sparse crowd alongside warnings about public debt and Rhode Island’s creditworthiness. By the end, a reader had traveled from a quiet section of bleachers to the prospect of taxpayers bearing the consequences of a troubled stadium.
The missing piece was the reporting connecting those two destinations.
Centreville Bank Stadium deserves financial scrutiny. Public commitments make its performance a matter of public interest, and the difference between RIFC’s announced attendance of 7,092 and GoLocal’s estimate of fewer than 2,500 deserves an answer. But an examination of the stadium’s viability requires more than photographs from one rescheduled Wednesday match. It requires attendance trends, clearly identified projections and financial records. GoLocal’s article offers a forceful conclusion with too little of that supporting work.
I cover every RIFC home match. The Saturday nights I have witnessed are community gatherings: supporters arriving with drums and chants, families filling the walkways, familiar faces returning for another evening of soccer in Pawtucket. Those experiences do not give me an audited attendance count. They do give me reason to question an account that characterizes fan support across the season without showing readers the season’s numbers.
Wednesday also came with circumstances the article leaves unexplored. The 7:30 p.m. fixture fell on a school night. It was a makeup game, moved from March after a blizzard forced its postponement.
Neither circumstance excuses an inaccurate attendance announcement. Both matter when evaluating turnout.
GoLocal builds its opening around the pleasant weather and the team’s success, as though those conditions establish how many people should have attended. Weather is one consideration in a family’s evening. So are school the next morning, work, bedtime and whether a date added to the calendar fits the plans people already made.
A comparison with other weekday fixtures would help establish whether this crowd was unusually small. A season’s attendance figures would help readers judge the strength of support. Instead, “disappointing” arrives before the benchmark.
The article invokes another benchmark without identifying it at all: the developers’ promises.
GoLocal says the crowd fell far below what developers had promised, but supplies no quotation, document or numerical target. That omission matters because a projection for annual stadium attendance is different from an average for soccer matches, and both differ from an expectation for a particular game.
Readers are entitled to see the commitment before being asked to accept that it was broken.
They are also entitled to an explanation of the competing attendance figures.
RIFC should define its announced number and release the corresponding admissions total. If 7,092 represents tickets sold or distributed, the team should say so plainly. If it represents people admitted, it should be able to substantiate that figure.
GoLocal, in turn, should explain its count. The article says its photographs were taken shortly before kickoff or during the first half and that approximately 250 additional spectators were in the beer garden or concession lines. That acknowledges an important limitation of counting occupied seats. It still leaves the counting procedure unclear.
A section-by-section tally, observation times and an explanation of how people outside the photographed areas were included would allow readers to evaluate the estimate. The size of the discrepancy makes that transparency more necessary.
Yet the article’s implications extend well beyond the count. Under a heading about taxpayer exposure, GoLocal returns to the stadium’s financing and quotes an S&P representative discussing the potential damage to Rhode Island’s creditworthiness if the state fails to make payments on appropriation-backed debt.
That is consequential information. It deserves a clear explanation of what it establishes.
The statement describes the consequences of missed payments. The article provides no evidence that payments have been missed, that an operating shortfall threatens them or that Wednesday’s turnout materially changes the likelihood of repayment.
The financial risk may warrant further investigation. The photographs do not complete that investigation.
An assessment of the stadium’s business would also account for what happens there beyond RIFC matches. URI football is already using the facility. UFL games are scheduled for next year, when Boston Legacy FC will also play its home matches there. Those events belong in the revenue picture, along with the expenses and contractual arrangements that determine what the stadium actually earns from them.
A busy calendar does not guarantee a profitable operation. But an article assessing the operation should examine the calendar and the books.
The same discipline should apply to construction costs. GoLocal reports that the stadium cost $132 million, more than 50% above what was promised. Readers should be shown the original estimate and whether the two figures encompass the same work. Cost overruns are serious enough to deserve a documented comparison.
There is a worthwhile accountability story in all of this: what was promised, what was delivered, how attendance is reported, how the stadium earns money and what taxpayers remain responsible for. Pursuing that story would serve Rhode Island.
In my coverage of Cumberland’s school redistricting, I argued that families deserved to see the work behind decisions affecting their children. The same principle applies here. Whether the subject is a school boundary or a publicly supported stadium, readers should be able to trace a conclusion back to the evidence. Asking people to trust your judgment carries an obligation to show how you reached it. .
The piece appears under “The Biz of Sports,” with photographs credited to GoLocal. No individual reporter or photographer is identified. I would like to know who conducted the count and how it was performed. A branded byline does not make the reporting wrong. It does leave the person responsible for its central factual claim unnamed.
My interest in those answers comes from being there, week after week. I have watched people make this stadium part of their lives. Their enthusiasm cannot retire a bond, but it deserves a fair accounting in a story about whether the public is showing up.
RIFC should explain its number. GoLocal should substantiate its count, identify the promises it says were missed and demonstrate the financial connections its article invites readers to make.
The empty seats are visible. The case built around them still needs to be shown.
