Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

Sports business is big business. But still, even small communities can play in this game.

This is the experience of small Santa Clara, California, the new landlord of the San Francisco Forty-Niners (49-ers) of the National Football League (NFL). The city itself is home to only 116,468 residents, located 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, and yet they are able to leverage the sports entertainment needs for a metropolitan area of 7.44 million people in the San Francisco Bay statistical area^[1].

Where does such a small community get the clout to build a $1.2 Billion stadium? Wall Street. Or better stated one of the biggest, most influential power-brokers on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs Investment Bank. See their promotion VIDEO here of the stadium project.

VIDEO – Levi’s® Stadium: A Team Effort – http://youtu.be/WT5aaKcDlf4

When the San Francisco 49ers wanted to build a new stadium in Santa Clara, California, Goldman Sachs helped structure an innovative financing plan to make it happen. Levi’s® Stadium, one of the country’s most technologically advanced stadiums, opened in August 2014 and is helping to bring further economic development to the local economy in Santa Clara.

Goldman Sachs, in many quarters, has been portrayed as an “evil empire”. They are reflective of the Big Banks and Wall Street plutocracy. They have even been credited for being one of the “bad actors” causing the 2008 Great Recession financial crisis. And yet, they persist! Good, bad or ugly, Goldman Sachs provides a necessary function in modern society; in the case of the foregoing VIDEO, they facilitate municipal financing. They can contribute to the Greater Good.

This commentary promotes the book Go Lean…Caribbean. This publication serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). While the CU is NOT a sports promotion entity, it does promote the important role of sports in the vision to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. As an expression of this vision, “a mission of the CU is to forge industries and economic drivers around the individual and group activities of sports and culture” (Page 81).

“Build it and they will come” – The Go Lean roadmap encourages solid business plans to develop permanent sports stadia and arenas at CU-owned fairgrounds. This aligns with the Levi’s Stadium in the foregoing VIDEO, where they are now due to host many other events, in addition to being the landlord of the NFL team. This was not automatic; this was a journey (a roadmap), one that started with a solid business plan and community buy-in. This “community ethos” from Santa Clara teaches us so much.

In 2011, Santa Clara voters approved a plan to build the 68,500 seat stadium for the nearby San Francisco 49ers. The groundbreaking for the stadium occurred on April 19, 2012.^[2] The official ribbon cutting took place on Thursday July 17, 2014. The first professional sporting event hosted at the stadium was a Major League Soccer (MLS) match between the San Jose Earthquakes and the Seattle Sounders on August 2, 2014. The first professional football event hosted at the stadium was a pre-season game between the 49ers and the Denver Broncos, played on August 17, 2014.

Now the stage is set. The following is a sample of other events (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Stadium) that are scheduled to start the return on Santa Clara’s community investment:

Super Bowl 50
On October 16, 2012, it was announced that Levi’s Stadium was one of two finalists to host Super Bowl 50 on February 7, 2016 (the other stadium finalist being Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida). On May 21, 2013, it was announced that the San Francisco Bay Area had defeated South Florida in a vote of NFL owners in its bid to host Super Bowl L (50).

College Football Post Season Bowl Game
The stadium will host its first Foster Farms Bowl Game on December 30, 2014 featuring the nearby Stanford University Cardinals and the Maryland Terrapins from the Big Ten Conference.

WrestleMania XXXI
Levi’s Stadium will host WWE’s WrestleMania XXXI on March 29, 2015. This will mark the first time WrestleMania is hosted in Northern California. The area will also host activities throughout the region for the week-long celebration leading up to WrestleMania itself.

Hockey
Levi’s Stadium will host the 2015 NHL Stadium Series’ February 21 game between the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks.

Soccer
On July 31, 2014, the San Jose Earthquakes agreed to play one match per year for five years at Levi’s Stadium. On September 6, 2014, an international friendly between Mexico and Chile was held.

Concerts

• On October 23, 2014, it was announced that international pop group “One Direction” would bring their 2015 “On The Road Again” tour to Levi’s Stadium on July 11, 2015.
• On October 30, 2014 Kenny Chesney announced that he would bring his “The Big Revival Tour” to Levi’s Stadium on May 2, 2015 with Jason Aldean co-headlining with Chesney. Jake Owen and Cole Swindell will open for the duo. It’s the first concert announced at the new home of the 49ers.
• Taylor Swift set to perform on her fourth upcoming tour, “The 1989 World Tour” in the Levi’s Stadium on 14 & 15 August 2015.

Not every market, especially in the Caribbean, can support these types of high profile events/bookings. So the Go Lean roadmap invites an alternative landlord approach for the occasional or one-time events, that of temporary stadiums; this point was detailed in a previous blog submission.

Whether permanent stadiums or temporary stadiums, the point is echoed that sports entertainment is big business and the Caribbean region must not miss out on the community-building opportunities. This is heavy-lifting; the communities need the technocratic support of a business-mined landlord and creative financing options. This is the role the CU will execute.

The Go Lean vision is a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean forming the CU as a proxy organization to do the heavy-lighting of building, funding and maintaining sports venues. The strategy is for the CU to be the landlord, and super-regional regulatory agency, for sports leagues, federations and associations (amateur, collegiate, and professional). The foregoing VIDEO depicts how this strategy relates to a community.

The prime directives of the CU/Go Lean roadmap are described with these 3 statements:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these  engines.

This roadmap commences with the recognition that genius qualifiers can be found in many fields of endeavor, including sports. The roadmap pronounces the need for the region to confederate in order to invest in the facilitations for the Caribbean sports genius to soar. These pronouncements are made in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, (Pages 13 & 14) as follows:

xxi. Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including … sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

xxii. Whereas sports have been a source of great pride for the Caribbean region, the economic returns from these ventures have not been evenly distributed as in other societies. The Federation must therefore facilitate the eco-systems and vertical industries of sports as a business, recreation, national pastime and even sports tourism…

The Go Lean book and accompanying blogs declare that the Caribbean needs to learn lessons from communities like Santa Clara and other sporting venues/administrations. So thusly this subject of the “business of sports” is a familiar topic for Go Lean blogs. The previous blogs were detailed:

This Go Lean roadmap is committed to availing the economic opportunities of all the Caribbean athletic abilities and the world’s thirst for this entertainment. The book details these series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies designed to deliver regional solutions:

What is the end result for the Go Lean roadmap’s venture into the business of sports? For one … “jobs”; the Go Lean roadmap anticipates 21,000 direct jobs at fairgrounds and sports enterprises throughout the region. In addition there are leisure activities, event marketing, community pride, promotion of Caribbean athletes and cultural activities.

Overall, with these executions, the Caribbean region can be a better place to live, work and play. There is a lot of economic activity in the “play” element. Everyone, the athletes, promoters and spectators, are hereby urged to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Appendix – Source References:

1. Home to approximately 7.44 million people, the nine-county Bay Area – Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma – contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks, connected by a network of roads, highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels and commuter rail. Retrieved 12-16-2014 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:San_Francisco_Bay_Area

2. Video: 49ers’ groundbreaking ceremony for Santa Clara stadium – San Jose Mercury News. Mercurynews.com. Retrieved on 2013-07-29.