Inside the political fight over David Beckham and Jorge Mas’s potential Inter Miami stadium development

For Jorge Mas, David Beckham and Inter Miami, the plan is a dream.

For filmmaker Billy Corben and Miami City Commissioner Manolo Reyes, the proposal is a nightmare.

This week, almost three-and-a-half years after voters gave the city permission to bypass its normal bidding process and negotiate a 99-year lease with Mas, Beckham and Inter Miami’s other owners to redevelop publicly-owned Melreese Country Club into a $1 billion privately-financed, privately-held property that would include a soccer stadium, hotel, office park, retail space and public park, it will finally come up for a vote.

Presumably, anyway. The Miami City Commission is set to approve or deny Inter Miami’s plan to turn the Melreese golf course into Miami Freedom Park on Thursday morning, but that vote has already been rescheduled four times since the start of February. If it does occur this week, four out of the five city commissioners will need to approve it in order for the plan to move forward.

The club’s margin is razor thin. As one of the five commissioners, Reyes has been unwaveringly against the plan from the very beginning, meaning the other four elected officials — Joe Carollo, Alex Diaz de la Portilla, Christine King and Ken Russell — must all vote in the affirmative for the proposal to pass. All four have said in recent days that they remain undecided.

The Freedom Park proposal got a significant amount of new attention last week when Corben, co-founder of Miami-based Rakontur studios who directed “Cocaine Cowboys” and ESPN 30 for 30 films “The U” and “The U Part 2,” released a slick video campaigning against Mas and Beckham’s plan. It was no run-of-the-mill attack ad. The provocative short was narrated by David Samson, the former Miami Marlins president who negotiated the infamous deal that has left taxpayers on the hook for nearly $2 billion in loan payments for the MLB club’s stadium that opened in Little Havana in 2012.

The @CityofMiami is about to get f*cked on the biggest real estate deal in Miami history. @InterMiamiCF‘s stadium scheme is worse than the @Marlins Park boondoggle. Take it from THE EXPERT in this new mini-doc: tell city commissioners “Don’t #BendOverForBeckham!” #BecauseMiami pic.twitter.com/n5QuHaQKMm

— Billy Corben (@BillyCorben) April 19, 2022

Samson and Corben have publicly butted heads for years over the Marlins deal, but the prospect of Miami Freedom Park turned the longtime combatants into strange bedfellows. Speaking to The Athletic, Corben compared pairing up with Samson to fight against the Miami Freedom Park plan to Clarice Starling teaming with Hannibal Lecter to catch Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

The odd couple’s combative video (it closes with Samson exclaiming “I thought I’d be the final guy who fucked you! It turns out, I’m not!”), struck a chord. As of Wednesday morning, the piece had nearly 350,000 views on Twitter. Corben feels it generated a more immediate visceral response than anything he’s ever produced.

“We’re like the sports welfare capital of the country,” Corben said. “It’s the Miami Heat arena, the Miami Dolphins stadium, Marlins Park, which, up until the $1 billion Buffalo Bills boondoggle a couple of weeks ago, was known as the worst sports welfare deal in history. Now Miami’s like, ‘Hey New York, hold my cerveza. We’ve got more tricks up our sleeves here.’

“At some point, we have to stop, take stock and try to actually do right by the people who really own this property. And that’s not the politicians and bureaucrats, that’s the people of Miami, one of the poorest cities in the country that is dealing with every single 21st century problem in the world.”

Commissioner Reyes put things a little bit more plainly.

“This is worse than the Marlins deal,” he said.

The proposal

Inter Miami, unsurprisingly, has an entirely different view. Last Thursday evening, the club hit back at the claims made in Corben’s video, tweeting out a list of “Miami Freedom Park Facts” that included the important detail that, while Mas’ group is aiming to lease the land from the city, the project itself would, unlike Marlins Park, be entirely privately-financed.

Inter Miami does have something of a backup plan; a site the club already owns in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood. But building there would be a significant blow to club ownership. Mas said in February and reiterated to The Athletic on Wednesday morning that Overtown is “not where the stadium should go.” He’s keeping Overtown in his back pocket in case Freedom Park falls through, but he’s all-in on redeveloping Melreese, which is on a much larger parcel of land, and size matters in this deal.

While the Overtown plot has enough room for a stadium, Melreese boasts 131 acres of space, 73 of which would be developed by Mas and Beckham and 58 of which would be transformed into a public park paid for by Inter Miami if the Freedom Park plan is approved. The development would include a planned 25,000-seat stadium, at least 750 hotel rooms, a 31.4-acre retail village, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space and that aforementioned public park. Corben and Reyes said the main reason Mas and his partners want to end up there is because of those sorts of commercial opportunities, a suggestion not entirely contradicted by Mas and an attorney representing Inter Miami this week.

The club contends that Freedom Park would generate $2.67 billion in rent payments to the city over the near-century-long life of the lease; that number assumes significant increases from the minimum initial annual rent payment of $3.57 million currently stipulated in the proposed lease. Inter Miami also projects that the development will generate more than $6 billion in tax revenue over the entire lease. The organization  says the park will create 15,000 jobs, all of which, per the lease language, must scale to at least a full living wage of $15 per hour within the first several years of the agreement taking effect.

On Wednesday, Mas called Corben’s video “a perfect example of how you personify being a professional liar.” He reiterated the facts and figures pointed out in Inter Miami’s tweet from last week. He also called the deal “unprecedented” in the world of professional sports, especially in the shadow of what he called “the sins of the Marlins deal” and recent stadium deals for the Bills and Tennessee Titans, which landed $500 million in public funding from the Tennessee Legislature and may get an additional $700 million in funding from Nashville for a new stadium in the city.

“When you look at the City of Miami coming out of pocket for zero, I think the commissioners have an opportunity to really shine and to show what’s possible here,” Mas said.

Perhaps most importantly, Mas said that he feels that his group would be paying “fair market value for the land” under the current terms of the lease, a point of significant debate about the plan.

Regarding the claim that the stadium is just an entrypoint for a larger real estate play, both Mas and Richard Perez, an attorney who has represented Inter Miami on the Freedom Park deal from its onset, argued that the plan is industry standard. Perez pointed to the new, partially publicly-financed Atlanta Braves stadium and surrounding developments as an example that tying a stadium to a larger commercial build is just how things are done today. Mas went a bit further.

“Standalone stadiums on their own don’t work,” he said. “I think standalone stadiums are bad. They’re bad for the community, they’re bad for teams, they’re bad for business. When we came up with Miami Freedom Park, it was an opportunity for us to transform something into a destination that has life, that has activity, that gives something to back to a community outside of just 17 MLS games or 10 concerts or 30 events a year. That doesn’t work. So a stadium as an anchor and part of a development, in my opinion, is the future of how stadiums will be developed. And I like to think that we in Miami are doing something innovative and good with our own money, because we put our money where our mouth is.”

There’s no disputing that the Freedom Park proposal is materially different from the Marlins Park deal. But while the public wouldn’t be contributing to any of the costs associated with developing the site, it would still be leasing the land to Mas and Co. Whether or not the City of Miami is getting fair terms on that lease is one of the main points of contention ahead of Thursday’s scheduled vote. Corben and Reyes aren’t comfortable with the agreement. Inter Miami, on the other hand, thinks it’s giving the city a fantastic deal.

“This is not just a good deal,” Perez said. “It’s a sensational deal for the city.”

The no-bid agreement

As a city commissioner, Reyes’ opposition to the Freedom Park plan is based less on the relative strength of the deal, and more on how we got to this point in the first place. To him, that process has been flawed from when it began in the summer of 2018, when city commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of giving the proposal a place on the ballot for a referendum that November (Reyes opposed).

The referendum asked citizens whether the city should bypass its competitive bidding rules and negotiate a no-bid lease agreement — meaning the city wouldn’t put out a request for proposals to developers interested in the site — for Melreese with Mas and Beckham. It passed with roughly 60 percent of the vote, authorizing the city to hammer out terms, but not giving full approval to the actual project. That step can only be taken by a supermajority of the commissioners in the final vote now scheduled for Thursday.

“If we were going to develop that park, according to the City of Miami statutes, it should go through public bidding,” Reyes said last week. “That’s the only way that the residents of the City of Miami know for sure that we are getting the best deal for that land that belongs to the people. That was my objection from the get-go.”

Mas and Perez countered by saying that, though voters approved a no-bid negotiation with Mas and Beckham’s group, any other developer could have made an unsolicited offer on Melreese to the City of Miami in the intervening three-and-a-half years. According to them, none did.

“Miami is probably the most competitive real estate market in the entire United States,” Perez said. “If there was a developer out there that thought that they could make money on this, above what we were offering, they’d be lined up.”

Mas also said that Miami solicited bids for Melreese in 2004 and 2006, but that “both of them failed because no one wanted the land,” in part because of its proximity to Miami International Airport, which makes it difficult to build vertically at the site.

“Any developer, any private citizen, anyone could have made a proposal to the City of Miami if they thought they had a better use or a better idea for Melreese,” Mas said. “It hasn’t happened. This is a free market and that’s how capitalism works.”

Of course, one reason for the absence of other bids would be that Inter Miami had won the referendum for a no-bid negotiation with the city.

One developer said prior to the referendum that the city should charge $10 million a year in rent for the Melreese site – over $6 million more than the current minimum stipulated in the proposed lease. Another developer, Jorge Perez, who co-founded Miami-based development titan The Related Group with Dolphins owner Stephen Ross in 1979, also registered his opposition to the deal ahead of the measure being moved to referendum.

“I am opposed to taking a large piece of public open space and giving it to the private sector,” Jorge Perez wrote in a text to the Miami Herald that July. “I have the highest respect for Jorge Mas and his family and what they have done for Miami. So, it is difficult for me to be against this development. But this was supposed to be land for a soccer stadium, not for a billion dollar commercial venture.”

The negotiations

Though Reyes, Corben and other opponents of the Freedom Park plan may take issue with the fact that voters authorized the no-bid negotiation, that train has left the station, so to speak.

But they also have issues with some of the lease terms, which began to be negotiated in January 2019, first by Mayor Francis Suarez, a longtime champion of the Freedom Park project, and then-City Manager Emilio Gonzalez. Suarez was later joined by a trio of law firms that were contracted in the summer of 2019 to assist the city in the talks and new City Manager Art Noriega, who took over for Gonzalez in 2020.

The discussions have been long, winding and often perplexing. At one especially dramatic Miami City Commission meeting in October 2019, Commissioner Carollo suggested setting aside a corner of Melreese for a soccer stadium and opening the rest of the site for competitive bidding by would-be developers. If approved, the idea would have meant that Mas, Beckham and Inter Miami would have had to bid for any land they wanted at Melreese that wasn’t associated directly with the stadium. Suarez claimed he didn’t understand Carollo’s suggestion, prompting a back and forth between the commissioner and mayor that ended with Carollo sarcastically referring to Suarez as “lord mayor,” Suarez shouting at Carollo to be “respectful” and Commissioner Russell attempting to call the meeting to a close.

“Carollo said, ‘Why don’t we carve out the no-bid exemption for them because they have these exclusive rights to an MLS franchise, that is a unique opportunity in the marketplace, so that they can build their stadium and parking for it, but then let’s put out these other projects to bid. Because how do we know if we’re getting the best deal unless we put them out to bid?’ That was a very good point,” Corben said. “I would have supported that plan. But that was a total non-starter.”

The onset of the pandemic early in 2020 significantly delayed negotiations, with the parties not agreeing to the language that is being put before the commission this week until January 2022, when Suarez announced that the deal was ready and scheduled a vote for Feb. 23.

“We have an agreement in principle,” Suarez told the Herald at the time. “The agreement is obviously subject to approval from the City Commission.”

Suarez had a slight problem, however. The three law firms representing the city, which, by that time, had collectively been paid more than $3 million in taxpayer money for their work in negotiations, disagreed that the lease was ready for a vote. In fact, they were surprised by the mayor’s decision to bring the lease to the commission, claiming that they were not told ahead of time of his plan to do so. On Jan. 12, they sent a joint memo to elected officials outlining a “non-comprehensive list” of 28 issues that they felt still needed to be worked out.

“These are not little issues, these are material issues that are going to make a major difference in how good or bad this deal is,” Corben said.

Asked by a reporter about the memo after it was obtained by the press nearly a month after it was initially distributed to city officials, Suarez said he hadn’t seen the document, according to the Miami Herald.

“I don’t have to consult with the outside counsel,” he said in February. “The outside counsel works for me.”

Perez, Inter Miami’s outside counsel, slammed the content of the memo.

“The memo is factually wrong,” he said. “And where it’s not factually wrong, it’s out of context.”

Among other items, the memo raised issues related to:

• Parkland: The memo claimed that the lease documents do not require Miami Freedom Park operators to comply with the city’s “no-net-loss” policy regarding parkland. In fact, as Perez pointed out, Section 2.2 of that portion of the lease states that Freedom Park operators must “comply with the requirements of the ‘No Net Loss Policy’ set forth in the City’s Comprehensive Neighborhood Plan.”

Though a golf course, Melreese is currently zoned as a park. In order to change its zoning to allow for a stadium and commercial development at Freedom Park, Mas, Beckham and their partners must make up for any parkland lost in the conversion of the site.

Fifty-eight of the 131 acres that would be lost would be made up for by the $20 million public park being built at the site. Inter Miami has also pledged to give the city an additional $5 million to finish its Baywalk and Riverwalk parks. It has not yet been determined how the club plans to make up for the remaining acres of lost parkland.

• Rent: Perez did not dispute one of the memo’s other criticisms of the lease, one that is now causing the most public consternation: The fact that the proposed minimum rent of $3.57 million per year (or, if the amount is greater, five percent of gross rent revenue obtained from tenants at the site) has not been updated since the site was first appraised in 2018. It was also, according to the memo, based on the lower of two appraisals made at the time. Corben and Reyes pointed out that residential rents in Miami have increased substantially since that figure was determined, with a Realtor.com analysis showing in December that median rent in the market had increased by 49.8 percent in 2021 alone, the largest such increase for any major city in the country.

“The city is going to have to get the team to agree to a reassessment, to a reevaluation and is going to have to raise that rent price,” Corben said. “We’re not going to subsidize a billionaire’s rent at the rate it was negotiated in 2018 based on the lowest possible rate. That don’t float, even in this town. There’s going to have to be a fair market value on those acres of prime real estate in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.”

City Manager Noriega told the Herald on Monday that a new, city-appointed appraisal on the Melreese site is already underway, though he added that he does not expect the appraisal to be completed or the terms of the Freedom Park proposal to change prior to Thursday’s city commission meeting, which could be a reason for the vote to be postponed again. Notably, the new appraisal is happening more than three months after Suarez first declared the lease was ready for a vote.

“The city chose three appraisal firms and the (original) appraisal came back in at $2.2 million,” Mas said. “The minimum base rent as listed in the referendum is $3.6 million. So simple math would tell you we’re paying 57 percent over fair market value.”

Mas welcomed the reappraisal on Wednesday and said he would pay whatever rent it determined, as long as he feels the process for it is correct. He disputed the idea that increases in residential rent in Miami should have bearing on the rent for Miami Freedom Park.

“That site is the holy trinity of what got hit in COVID: Hotels, retail and office. There is no residential on that site,” Mas said. “So this argument about rents going up and everybody’s paying more for houses, there’s no residences here. It’s illegal, you can’t put residences on this property. So you have the holy trinity of the three uses that have been hit during COVID, you have significant interest rate increases and construction costs have skyrocketed. So, in my personal opinion, I don’t think the appraisal is moving. And I could probably make an argument that it’ll be lower, but I’m not going to make that argument. It is what it is. I said we’ll pay fair market value, we’ll pay it.”

The law firms also noted that the terms of the deal mean that Inter Miami might not be required to pay full rent for 10-and-a-half years after executing the lease. Additionally, under the terms Suarez is planning to bring forward, annual rent increases paid by the developers to the city for the property are capped at 4 percent, far less than the increases currently being experienced by rank-and-file residential renters in the Miami area.

The rent has become such a hot button issue over the last week that Gonzalez, the former city manager who pushed for the referendum and helped Suarez negotiate the lease in the early stages of talks before he left the position in 2020, came out against the deal on Tuesday.

“The manager has ordered a new appraisal, and the appraisal is going to be driving the numbers,” he told the Herald. “Given our real estate market, the expectation is that those numbers are going to be changing considerably for the benefit of the taxpayers of Miami. It has to. You can’t go from 2018 to 2022 and the needle hasn’t moved.”

Gonzalez’s predecessor as city manager, Daniel Alfonso, who discussed potential stadium sites with previous iterations of Inter Miami ownership, called the plan “a travesty.” He told the Herald that the idea “that somebody is going to pay you a couple of million dollars a year is a joke. They should do an honest valuation of the land.”

Asked to respond to their comments, Mas said that he “knew for a fact” that neither Gonzalez nor Alfonso had “read the agreement.”

• Ability to complete the project: The memo claims that Mas and Beckham’s group had not provided “evidence of financial capacity” to complete the project and that there was not yet a “guarantor, sufficiently capitalized tenant or large security deposit” that would protect the city in the event the group failed to live up to their obligations.

Perez disputed this assertion, saying that the lease itself requires the group to have “payment and performance bonds” in place for the full value of the construction contracts before the group is allowed to begin work on any development project at the site. Perez said this should give the city assurances that the developer has enough money to fund any individual project and that the project would be completed to a certain standard.

“We cannot put a shovel in the ground until we prove that we have the money to complete (a specific project),” Perez said. “And we have bonds in place to ensure that what we’re saying is true.”

Under the lease, Inter Miami is obligated to begin the project by first constructing the public park and then the stadium. Commercial development could theoretically begin at the same time that the stadium is under construction, but that wouldn’t have to be directly undertaken by Inter Miami. If it wants, the club could lease out the remaining parcels to other developers to construct the commercial, retail and hotel spaces. Reyes said that he has been told that Mas, Beckham and their partners do intend to do so.

Perez said that the idea is for Mas, Beckham and their partners to “put in approximately $120 million in order to… do all the (infrastructural) things that are necessary to get the property ready to go, and at that point in time, there will be a decision made as to whether they’re going to (develop each individual parcel) or if they’re going to bring in additional equity to do it.” Mas reiterated that stance on Wednesday.

Mas and Perez also noted that the lease includes deadlines for when Mas, Beckham and their partners must complete different construction projects, including for the stadium and public park. If those deadlines are not met, the city is permitted to reclaim the property and collect financial penalties from the developers. Together, Perez said, the conditions exist to protect the city from Mas, Beckham or any other developer from saddling Miami with a partially-completed Freedom Park.

Reyes told The Athletic last Friday that he had “not received any information that any of the issues (highlighted in the memo) have been solved,” and also expressed concerns about how the proposed development will affect traffic in the area, which already deals with congestion due to its proximity to Miami International Airport.

“I don’t see how anybody can vote for it when our own attorneys tell us that it’s not beneficial to the city and that this is a bad deal,” Reyes said. “This is why I’m not voting for it.”

“They want to build a stadium as an afterthought,” he continued. “What they want to build is this huge, huge commercial development.”

Representatives from the Shutts & Bowen and Fowler, White, Burnett law firms that negotiated on behalf of the city and sent the memo outlining their concerns with the lease did not respond to requests for comment.

The vote

It’s possible the commissioners’ vote will be pushed back once more. It’s already changed several times, moving from Feb. 23 to March 9, then to March 10, then to April 7 and then back to April 1 before being slotted for Thursday. Regardless of when it takes place, Reyes doesn’t plan on voting in favor of the proposal unless there are substantial changes made to the lease terms.

Reyes didn’t speculate as to how his fellow commissioners might vote. All four told the Herald in recent days that they haven’t yet made up their minds, with Carollo saying that there “absolutely” would be a discussion of terms on Thursday and that he didn’t believe the commission was close to voting on the Freedom Park plan.

Russell, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Marco Rubio, has tied his vote to not losing any parkland in the Freedom Park deal. He said recently that he’s “absolutely unhappy with where Freedom Park is on its no-net-loss policy right now.”

Reyes and Russell are the only two commissioners who do not appear to have received any campaign money from MasTec, the engineering and construction company started by Mas’ father and currently chaired by Mas. According to the Herald, the firm gave $97,000 to Carollo’s campaign for re-election in 2021, the third-most that any individual or entity gave to the campaign. MasTec also gave $10,000 to a political committee that supported King’s 2021 election bid; the company was the 11th-largest donor to her campaign. Additionally, MasTec gave $50,000 last October to a committee tied to Diaz de la Portilla, who was not up for re-election in 2021, but who represents the district that includes Melreese.

MasTec gave $25,000 to Suarez’s initial campaign for mayor in 2017. Suarez has been a vocal booster of the Miami Freedom Park plan from its inception, even sitting with Mas to take questions about the project from the Herald editorial board in 2018. In addition to his role as mayor, which is technically considered a part-time position, Suarez has two private-sector jobs: one with law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and another with private equity firm DaGrosa Capital Partners. Suarez, a real estate attorney, has in the past cited confidentiality rules while declining to identify his clients or disclose the work he’s done for them. Quinn Emanuel does not represent clients in transactions or matters that require city hall approval, according to the Herald.

It was also reported by former Herald journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Elaine de Valle in March that Inter Miami offered Noriega, the city manager, a job that would pay him a six-figure salary if the Miami Freedom Park deal gets approved. As city manager, Noriega is one of Miami’s chief negotiators regarding the terms of the lease. Reyes said Noriega has recommended the deal to the commissioners.

“I don’t know if he’s gonna go work for (Inter Miami), I don’t know if they have a deal, but I can assure you that he is totally in favor of this deal and the contract that is going to be brought before us,” Reyes said. “The mayor has been the head cheerleader and the city manager has been the main negotiator in favor of the Mas family.”

Mas torched the report when asked about it on Wednesday.

“It’s patently false and ridiculous,” he said. “The people who throw around lies like that, you know, there’s going to be consequences to basically accusing people of being corrupt.”

Asked if he would ever hire Noriega to a job with Inter Miami, MasTec or any of its subsidiaries, Mas said, “I’m gonna repeat it: That’s ridiculous.”

Noriega, Suarez and city commissioners Carollo, Diaz de la Portilla, King and Russell did not respond to interview requests made by The Athletic last week.

Corben was far less circumspect than Reyes when asked what he thinks will happen with the Freedom Park plan. He said that he’d be “very surprised” if the vote isn’t delayed for a fifth time. He did make clear, however, that he thinks the plan will eventually pass, even if it takes another election cycle to get four commissioners in place to vote for it. If there is a vote on Thursday, he thinks Carollo, Diaz de la Portilla and King would go for the plan, but he isn’t ready to put Russell in their camp.

“I don’t know that he wants to fall on his sword for Jorge Mas and David Beckham, because he’s a young guy who thinks he has a political future,” Corben said of Russell. “If he’s doing the calculus right now, he knows that this is going to sink him. Even if they come up with a quid pro quo, even if they sweeten the pot for him, this is political suicide.”

Mas told The Athletic that he wasn’t sure if the Freedom Park plan actually will be voted on at Thursday’s meeting, but he feels confident that a vote will occur in no more than a few weeks, at the absolute latest. He thinks the plan has the votes to pass the commission.

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be going in front of the City of Miami Commission (Thursday),” he said.

What’s next

If the plan is approved, Mas, Beckham and Inter Miami would need commissioners to upzone the site from its current park status to allow for stadium and commercial construction. Perez said that some elements of the deal would likely be negotiated during that process, including a full transportation plan and approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which would need to sign off on aspects of the project because of the site’s proximity to the airport. Should the lease be approved on Thursday, Perez said that Inter Miami would hope to get the zoning change finalized by the end of 2022.

At that point, Mas, Beckham and their partners would take control of the site. They could then begin environmental remediation process (tests in 2019 showed that the Melreese golf course was contaminated by arsenic; cleanup costs, which Inter Miami has pledged to pay, are estimated at more than $30 million), seek approval for building plans and permits and, eventually, begin constructing the park and stadium.

“As Jorge is fond of saying, that’s when the real work starts,” Perez said.

If they get the go-ahead from the commissioners on Thursday, Mas is hopeful that Inter Miami will complete the stadium late in 2024 or early in 2025.

Both Reyes and Corben insisted that there isn’t anything personal about their opposition to the plan, though Corben has long been a vociferous and public opponent of Suarez, who has put a lot of time and effort into the Freedom Park plan.

“I told Mas and I’m telling everybody, this is nothing personal,” Reyes said. “This is a business deal. And his business is to make as much money as he can. My business is to protect the interest of the people. That’s why they elected me for and that’s what I’m gonna do, regardless of the consequences.”

Corben even went as far as to say he feels a little bit of sympathy for Beckham, who has been involved in the effort to bring MLS to Miami since 2014. He’s stuck through the changes to the ownership group, scouted out several different stadium sites dating back to an initial parcel he looked at with former part-owner Marcelo Claure at the Port of Miami and helped bring Mas on board in 2017 to resuscitate the attempt to start a team. But today, nearly 10 years after kicking things off in South Florida, he still finds himself in a fight for a more permanent home for his club.

“I believe that Beckham came here with relatively good intentions,” Corben said. “He just wanted to bring the beautiful game to beautiful Miami, right? He loves this game. This game is his life. All he wanted was enough land to build a soccer park and some parking lots, that’s all he wanted. Look at the initial property he was looking at with Marcelo Claure. They wanted some property at the port, they bought a property in Overtown which was just enough space. Then Jorge Mas comes in, the king of Miami, and he says, ‘No, no, no, no. There’s no money in a soccer stadium. What we need is a shopping mall, an office park, a hotel, retail. We need a real estate hustle.’”

Mas, Beckham and their partners would almost certainly be enriched by obtaining the lease for the public land, primarily through developing or subleasing portions of the site that don’t encompass the stadium or park. The city of Miami could benefit too, of course, through the direct economic gains that Mas and Inter Miami claim would follow their proposed development and through the transformation of a portion of a current golf course into a larger park that would be available for more general use than Melreese Country Club.

Corben and Reyes said they don’t have a problem with the prospect of the Inter Miami owners making money, they just want to ensure that they don’t do so at the expense of regular Miamians.

“I do resent them trying to compare it favorably to the Marlins Park deal, because, to a certain extent, that’s like comparing apples to Orange Bowls,” Corben said. “The Melreese deal is that in a lateral way. The money is not coming from bonds or from the tourist tax or from the general fund if the tourist tax falls short, but it’s coming in a criminally discounted rent. It’s like death by 1,000 clauses. It’s the opportunity cost. And that, in and of itself, dollars and cents wise, I think will ultimately make it worse than Marlins Park.”

“The amount of land that was negotiated in the Marlins deal was very small (the stadium occupies 17 acres), but here, we’ve negotiated 70-some acres,” Reyes added. “This is worse, and there is no assurance or any bond that will fully protect the City of Miami if this fails.”

Mas said he thinks that calling the Freedom Park plan worse than the Marlins Park deal is “malicious, uninformed and ignorant, frankly.”

If passed, it’s safe to say that Mas is correct that he and his partners would pay more in rent, property taxes and other benefits given to the City of Miami than other owners of professional sports teams have given to their local municipalities in other stadium deals. But, as Corben pointed out, that’s a very low bar. To him, the question shouldn’t be if Mas and his partners are giving more than other sports organizations have in the past, but if they’re giving enough for a large, publicly-owned piece of land in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country.

Ultimately, Corben’s viral video and Reyes’ staunch opposition to the plan are about getting better terms from Mas, Beckham and their partners for Freedom Park. Their work could very well make an impact, potentially through the ongoing reappraisal or possibly through additional negotiations.

Either way, don’t be surprised if this drama extends beyond Thursday. Inter Miami’s long search for a stadium in their hometown might yet take a little longer.

(Top photo: Sam Navarro / USA TODAY Sports)