Panthers owner David Tepper tends to mean what he says.
That’s a bit unusual for a billionaire, but when Tepper speaks, it’s usually worth listening to – so when he jokingly made mention of a roof over Bank of America Stadium in order to draw the Final Four a few months ago, some laughed it off. But those who were paying attention saw the beginning of an idea. Same goes for the prospect of an MLS team that Tepper mentioned in his press conference when he purchased the team – Tepper and his team made their formal bid for a professional soccer team in Charlotte last week and will be in Orlando tonight for the All-Star game to network with the league.
Emphasis on Two States, One Team? Enter the team’s soon-to-be facility in South Carolina.
Tepper attended Panthers practice today at Wofford College in Spartanburg and stuck around afterwards to speak to a few reporters. Here’s what he had to say.
On the retractable roof….
When you do a retractable roof, you have to do a whole big thing for this part of the country, you can’t have little holes like other cities have – I’m not going to mention other cities by name. But you need a big thing, so I’d really like to see basketball played here, too. Go with the ACC sometime and talk to them and try to do a broad strategy with North Carolina [and] South Carolina and have something done. If we can do football and if we do end up with a soccer franchise and then have all the other events there, you can do a Final Four or something like that – that would be like the cherry on top.
It’s not idle chatter, it’s something I’d really like to see done. To say that I’m going to do it next year or the next year would be not true, I’m kind of BSing, but something in the future and say hey to the governor or North Carolina, to the mayor and you have to be aspirational because this is a great area and we have to realize how great it would be.
Would you like to do it in Charlotte?
I would like to do it in Charlotte – yes, I would like to.
What was the feedback you received from the MLS after you placed the formal bid a couple of weeks ago?
Like you, Jourdan, they loved me. **chuckles** I think the ultimate feedback, I think they came out with this statement afterwards and it was a very simple statement. You saw they mentioned St. Louis first, they mentioned Charlotte second and they mentioned Sacramento third. I think that put us in the conversation. So I didn’t say it – they said it. So I don’t really have to say anything about that.
Would that new stadium be at or near the existing site?
Listen, if we could do it, we would do that – to have something in Charlotte is great. If we can do it someplace near where we are, where you can have so many people walking there, that’s just a great place for a stadium. So you’d like to be as close as to where you are, if you could be, in the future. There’s different land around, we may have to do something – again, it’s going to be with the city. We can’t do stuff by ourself; it’s hard, first you have to change a lot of zoning and other sort of things, you have to get it done.
Have you had preliminary conversations with the Governor’s office or the city about that sort of thing?
You’ve got to do the same things I’m saying here – you’ve heard me say it, it’s nothing new. Have we sat down to a plan yet? To do a ten year plan? No. But I think that – I don’t know you’ve noticed, we’ve been doing a lot of things here. So we’ve got a lot of stuff done, even on the facilities side. It’s not like we’ve been idle. First things first, like the bubble. I don’t know if you’ve been to the cafeteria [at the stadium] to appreciate how small that cafeteria is. We basically took a 1,000 square [foot] player’s cafeteria, made it 2,500 square feet and then added another 1,500 feet outside for players to sit. Think when that happens when you go from 1,000 to 2,500 – you guys haven’t written that up at all. We did something else called the Fifty3 Club that we put in if you’ve heard about that. We did something with this practice facility, you heard about that one, too? All this shit takes time! We haven’t been sitting around, we’ve been pretty busy doing stuff.
If we want to take a long-range plan to start thinking about this stuff. If it’s seven years, eight years, nine years out – we have to start thinking about it, talking about it – and you guys can say “Hey guys, how great do you want the Carolinas to be?” If in this case, it’s in North Carolina, it’s Final Four basketball, do you want to have that or not? I’m going to say it again. How the heck – I’m going to use heck – can you not have a Final Four in North Carolina when Indianapolis has one all the frickin’ time! It’s ridiculous! There’s some pride involved there.
I keep reminding people that my college was a member – is a member – of the ACC, but anyways, I’d like to see that at some point – besides all the other stuff.
When you look at what Mercedes-Benz Stadium did for downtown Atlanta, how could [a new stadium] change the way people perceive Charlotte?
Charlotte, and I’ve said this before – Charlotte should be, is destined to be, the sports entertainment of the Carolinas. It’s in the center of the Carolinas, it’s untapped territory, we’re starting to move that way – I don’t know if we’ve opened it up or people have been by there, when you see even the bubble – where we have it and how we have it set up for the dual purpose it can serve. When you see that bubble, think secondary convention space. There’s a parking lot right outside that bubble, you can just go right off Cedar and drop off and go right around. Any space as big as anything at the convention center down there – how fast is that vs. walking ten minutes through the convention center – and with absolute safety of being inside to get dropped off. It’s kind of an interesting idea, right? We didn’t just build a bubble over there.
So if we do the bubble and have that here for three years or not or whatever, we’ll have something else there eventually.
Have you had preliminary conversations with the football side about an extension for Cam Newton?
No.
Are you concerned about the timelines of the extended bids of St. Louis and Sacramento causing problems in the short-term and if so, what will you do to counter it?
I’m not concerned about short-term plans, I mean, they’ve been around for a while and we’re trying to do as much as we can do. It’s a question for them to balance out different things when they’ve been working with somebody. In my mind, this market – view the soccer market as an hour and a half from the stadium – is seven million strong. Three million households. That’s double the size of measuring an hour and a half around either one of those cities. So this is a big untapped market. In the case of St. Louis, last time I looked they have a baseball team, so that’s some summer time competition. That alone would be a great thing, so hopefully we can do it, so we’ll see what happens.
When do you expect a decision or an announcement on training camp either here in Spartanburg or elsewhere next year?
We’re still determining that. It’s something to think about in our situation – forget about everything else, but there is a bubble there. And I hear it rains sometimes. And I hear it’s 100 degrees sometimes. I don’t really hear it, I’m sweating my ass off right now. It’s a question of football – and I’ve said a million times – it’s about football and making sure we’re the best we can be. So whether we come here or whether we go there and eventually we will be down in Rock Hill, it’s going to be about the best we can be – that’s what’s going to drive that decision. It’s going to be a football decision.
Fair to say you’re shopping it around?
We’ve got that bubble sitting there [and] you have a lot of familiarity here [in Spartanburg]. So those have to be the top two choices.
