Chicago Bears

Soldier Field ran out of room, and the obvious move became a hard problem

The Chicago Bears entered the 2023 offseason with a specific and unambiguous business problem. Soldier Field — the team's home since 1971, extensively renovated in 2003 — is the smallest stadium in the NFL by capacity, at roughly 61,500 seats. It has no roof, which forecloses cold-weather Super Bowl bids, Final Fours, and the concert cadence that generates 200-plus event-days a year at modern domed venues. The lease with the Chicago Park District is economically constrained in ways that a modern NFL business considers structural: gate-share provisions, limited signage rights, and no meaningful ownership economics on the surrounding real estate. And the premium suite inventory is a fraction of what a market the size of Chicago should support — the third-largest media market in the country, with a Fortune 500 corporate base that has repeatedly told the team its hospitality demand exceeds supply.

The obvious move was a new stadium. The question was where — and, as the case unfolded across 2023, 2024, and 2025, that question became a much larger one: in which state. The answer would set the tax base for the franchise, its players, its coaches, its executives, and eventually its estate-planning domicile for the next thirty years. It would set the capital structure of the stadium, the split between private and public financing, and the geometry of the mixed-use real estate opportunity around the building. It would set the fan-transit pattern that determines who buys season tickets and drives the local-revenue base that (per the Packers' audited window) accounts for roughly 40% of a mid-market NFL team's revenue. And it would set the political relationship between the team and every governmental body it needs cooperation from — for the next generation.

The three-track saga, at a glance

From February 2023 through mid-2026 the Bears have run three parallel stadium tracks in public. Each has moved on its own timeline; each has its own set of counterparties, tax and financing mechanics, and political constraints. None has yet closed.

Status as of mid-2026 per public reporting from the Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, Bloomberg, ESPN, and Front Office Sports; Indiana overtures per IEDC press materials and Chicago-area coverage of Governor Braun's stated position. Nothing in this table is confidential and no non-public information is used.

The through-line across all three tracks is that the Bears have optionality. They own the Arlington Park land outright. They have a functioning (if constrained) Soldier Field lease. And they have a credible outside option in Indiana, which the state of Illinois and the local taxing bodies know exists and cannot fully discount. That optionality — not any single site — is the negotiating asset the team has spent three years building.

Arlington Park — the land, the vision, and the property-tax fight

On February 15, 2023 the Bears closed on the purchase of the 326-acre Arlington Park racetrack site in Arlington Heights, Illinois, from Churchill Downs Incorporated. The purchase price was $197.2M, all-cash. Arlington Park had operated as a thoroughbred racetrack since 1927; Churchill Downs had wound down live racing at the site in 2021 and put the land on the market. The Bears' interest was public from mid-2021, and the purchase agreement was signed in September 2021, but title took roughly seventeen months to transfer because of racetrack-license mechanics, environmental review, and a set of demolition and site-preparation questions that had to close before the deed moved.

The vision the team unveiled alongside the purchase was ambitious: a domed stadium seating roughly 65,000-70,000, surrounded by a mixed-use district of retail, hotel, entertainment, office, and residential development on the same site — a total project cost publicly estimated at roughly $5 billion. The point of the mixed-use component was economic and political: (a) capture 365-day-per-year revenue rather than the 10-game NFL cadence, (b) create the property-tax base that could justify a Payment-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes (PILOT) or Tax Increment Financing (TIF) structure, and (c) build local political support by generating jobs, sales-tax receipts, and hotel-tax receipts that flow to Arlington Heights and Cook County over the long term.

The Kaegi assessment and the impasse.

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi reassessed the Arlington Park property in the 2023 triennial cycle. The reassessed market value came in at roughly $197M — effectively matching the Bears' purchase price. Under Illinois assessment law that is the textbook correct answer: recent arm's-length sales are the most reliable indicator of market value, and a $197.2M sale in February 2023 is the definitional recent arm's-length transaction. The Bears publicly disagreed, arguing that the property's value as a development site pending approvals is materially lower than its purchase price implies, because the entitlements, infrastructure, and public-approval risk have not yet been resolved.

The mechanical problem that followed is what Illinois practitioners recognize as the multi-taxing-body impasse. Arlington Park's property-tax bill is not paid to a single government. It is divided across at least five separate taxing bodies, each of which independently levies:

• Township High School District 214 — typically the single largest slice of the property-tax bill in this part of Cook County.
• Elementary School District 15 (Palatine-based, serving the western portion of Arlington Heights).
• Elementary School District 25 (Arlington Heights schools).
• Village of Arlington Heights — municipal levy.
• Cook County, plus the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, Harper Community College District 512, the Arlington Heights Park District, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, and the North Cook Intermediate Service Center — smaller slices, but each is a separately-elected body with its own budget.

For a PILOT deal to work, every one of those taxing bodies has to agree to accept a fixed payment schedule in lieu of the assessed property tax. Any single body can veto by refusing to sign. The school districts — whose funding is roughly two-thirds property-tax-dependent — had the strongest reason to refuse: they were being asked to trade a known, adjustable property-tax stream against speculative future economic activity from a redevelopment they could not control. Through 2023 and 2024, the Bears' publicly-stated proposals were repeatedly rejected as insufficient by one or more of the taxing bodies. By early 2024, the Arlington Heights track was effectively stalled and the team was actively exploring alternatives.

The Chicago lakefront pivot — a $4.6B ask that met a Springfield wall

On April 24, 2024, team president Kevin Warren, joined by Mayor Brandon Johnson at a press event on the lakefront near Soldier Field, unveiled a proposal for a new domed stadium on the Museum Campus, immediately north of the existing Soldier Field footprint. The projected total project cost was roughly $4.6 billion. The financing structure the team proposed included approximately $2 billion in private capital from the Bears' ownership (contributed as equity plus a G-4 stadium loan facility from the NFL), plus approximately $2.4 billion in public financing to be raised through the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (ISFA) via bond issuance, with debt service to be paid from a combination of hotel-tax revenue in Chicago, an existing bond program, and additional revenue mechanisms the team asked the state to authorize.

The proposal landed in a specific political environment. Illinois faced ongoing fiscal pressure from pension obligations. The ISFA was already carrying debt from the 2003 Soldier Field renovation and the 1991 White Sox Guaranteed Rate Field construction — a debt package that had required a hotel-tax bailout in prior cycles. The state's Democratic legislative leadership — House Speaker Chris Welch and Senate President Don Harmon — had competing priorities including transit funding, K-12 education, and Medicaid expansion. Governor JB Pritzker made his position clear at multiple press availabilities in April and May 2024: he was skeptical of using public money to finance a private stadium at a time of broader fiscal constraint, and he was unwilling to champion the legislation.

What the political math looked like.

Even setting aside Pritzker's stated skepticism, the legislative math was hard. A stadium-financing bill of the scale the Bears requested would have needed:

• A Senate committee assignment and a favorable Senate committee vote — requires Harmon's active support.
• A House committee assignment and a favorable House committee vote — requires Welch's active support.
• Full floor votes in both chambers, in a Democratic-controlled legislature, with meaningful downstate and Chicago-suburban Democratic votes needed to reach a working majority.
• A gubernatorial signature — which Pritzker publicly withheld willingness to provide.

The proposal did not clear the 2024 spring session and did not return in a serious form in the 2025 spring session. By late 2025, industry reporting treated the lakefront proposal as functionally dead unless it was reintroduced with a materially smaller public-financing ask. Mayor Johnson, who had appeared at the April 2024 unveiling, had backed off active advocacy by mid-2025 as his own political capital narrowed. Kevin Warren's public statements shifted from lakefront-specific to site-agnostic language across the same period.

The Indiana courtship — Governor Braun, IEDC, and the Gary corridor

In January 2025 Mike Braun was sworn in as Governor of Indiana, having defeated the outgoing administration's designated successor on a platform that included aggressive economic-development recruiting. Within weeks the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the Governor's office had made public overtures to the Bears about relocation, with Gary, Indiana — roughly 30 miles from downtown Chicago on the I-90 corridor — named specifically as a candidate site. The pitch was direct: Indiana would deliver a competitive public-financing package, tax abatements on the stadium and mixed-use development, and a structural tax environment that would benefit every team-affiliated earner (owners, executives, coaches, players) for as long as they were Indiana-resident or Indiana-employed.

Why the Gary corridor is a credible option, not just political theater.

Three facts make the Indiana overture structurally serious, not just a talking point:

• Distance and drive time. Downtown Gary is approximately 30 miles from downtown Chicago, roughly 45-60 minutes by car depending on traffic. That is a shorter commute than several other NFL fan-experience patterns already work: New York Giants and Jets fans routinely commute from Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford NJ; New England Patriots fans commute from Boston to Foxborough MA. A Bears fan base that already drives to Soldier Field from the northwest suburbs on Sunday morning is not structurally different from a fan base driving to Gary.
• Existing NFL-stadium precedent in Indiana. Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis opened in August 2008 as the home of the Indianapolis Colts. Total project cost was approximately $720 million; the Indianapolis Capital Improvement Board and the state of Indiana provided the substantial majority of the financing via hotel and food-and-beverage tax mechanisms. The stadium hosts the Colts, has hosted a Super Bowl (XLVI in February 2012), an NCAA Final Four cadence, the Big Ten Football Championship, and 200-plus non-Colts event days a year. Indiana has a working, verified playbook for financing an NFL stadium as a state economic-development asset.
• The state income tax structure. Indiana levies a flat state income tax that was 3.05% in 2025, with statutory reductions scheduled to bring it toward 2.9% by 2027, plus a county option income tax that averages roughly 1.5% in Lake County, IN. The combined effective rate is materially below Illinois's 4.95% flat state tax. For every earner associated with the team — and their family members — that is a permanent reduction in tax burden if they establish Indiana residency or Indiana-sourced employment.

As of mid-2026 the Braun administration's overtures had not converted into a signed deal. The Bears have not committed to Indiana. But they have also not ruled it out — and the very existence of a serious Indiana option has changed the negotiating posture in Springfield and in Arlington Heights.

The state-tax arbitrage — IL vs IN, compounded over 30 years

This is the section where the Institute's state-and-local-tax and family-office framework does the heavy lifting. The Bears' stadium decision is often framed in the sports media as a real-estate or public-financing story. It is more accurately framed as a state-tax domicile decision for a business that generates roughly $500M-plus in revenue, employs a $255M-plus player payroll (per the 2025 salary cap), and pays coaches and executives in the high-seven-figures-to-eight-figures range.

The rate stack, side by side.

Rates as of 2025 per Illinois Department of Revenue and Indiana Department of Revenue published schedules. Lake County IN local income tax rate per Indiana DOR published county rates; other Indiana counties differ. Illinois corporate income tax includes the personal property replacement tax (PPRT). Illinois estate tax exemption is $4M with a graduated rate structure. This table is a summary; the actual analysis in any real advisory engagement layers in residency rules, source-income allocation, and specific individual facts.

What this looks like in the roster and front office.

Under the NFL's 2025 salary cap and the actual composition of a top-half Bears roster, the annual state-tax delta is meaningful in absolute dollars. A stylized illustration:

Stylized illustration only. Real-world jock-tax mechanics allocate income across every state a player plays a game in, using duty-day formulas. The Illinois vs Indiana delta above applies only to the fraction of income sourced to the home state. Actual advisory work sizes this precisely per individual using a duty-day model. Team-side compensation (coaches, front office) is more heavily home-sourced. The point of the table is directional magnitude, not a precise number.

The stylized total — on the order of $1M-plus per year across the roster, coaches, and front office — is small relative to team revenue. But three amplifiers make it much larger in practice.

• Amplifier 1 — compounding across a 30-year horizon. A stadium is a 30-year asset. A $1M-per-year tax saving invested at even a modest 6% real return compounds to roughly $79M over 30 years. At an 8% return, roughly $113M. The state-tax delta is a permanent structural saving that scales with time.
• Amplifier 2 — owner and executive personal income. The McCaskey family's personal compensation from the franchise, plus distributions from the ownership entity, plus non-team personal income from investments and businesses, is where the state-tax delta hits hardest. A principal earning $10M-$20M annually and living in the domicile state pays a 190-bps delta on the full amount — $190K to $380K per year, per principal, before amplifier 3.
• Amplifier 3 — estate tax. Illinois has an estate tax with a $4M exemption and rates climbing to 16%. Indiana has no estate tax. On a $6B franchise held by an Illinois-domiciled decedent, the incremental Illinois estate tax alone can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars — before the more significant federal estate tax at 40%. Establishing Indiana domicile before a controlling principal's death can save an estate hundreds of millions in state-level transfer tax alone.

What this means for the players who read this

For the players on this roster: the Illinois-vs-Indiana state-tax delta discussed in this case (4.95% vs 3.05%) has direct implications for you if the Bears eventually relocate. A $30M/year Bears player currently pays Illinois roughly $1.5M/year in state tax on home-game duty days; the same player at a hypothetical Indiana stadium would pay approximately $1.35M — a $150K annual savings for that individual player. Multiply across a 53-man roster and the team-level economics shift meaningfully. If a relocation happens during your contract, your agent should already have modeled this. If you're contract-negotiating with the Bears now, factor the possibility into your domicile-planning decisions.

Illinois property tax — why every big project fights the same fight

The Arlington Park impasse is not a Bears-specific problem. It is a structural feature of Illinois property-tax law that any large redevelopment in Cook, Lake, DuPage, or Will County will face. Understanding the mechanic is worth doing once because it applies to every subsequent case in the Institute's real-estate library.

The four features that create the impasse.

• Triennial reassessment. Cook County reassesses each of three regional triads on a rolling three-year cycle. Arlington Heights is in the north triad, reassessed in 2022 and 2025 in the current pattern. Between reassessments, values are static except for permit-triggered adjustments.
• Ad valorem levy. Illinois property tax is levied ad valorem — each taxing body sets a total budget (the levy), then the levy is spread across the assessed value in the taxing district. Individual property owners pay their proportional share of the levy. When a redevelopment increases assessed value, the levy per property drops for everyone else — but the total taxing-body budget only grows if the levy grows.
• Multi-body veto on PILOTs. A PILOT deal replaces the ad-valorem calculation with a fixed schedule of payments. Every taxing body that receives ad-valorem revenue must independently agree to the substitution. Even one holdout can block. In Arlington Heights, the property is subject to at least five separately-elected taxing bodies with veto power.
• Tax Increment Financing (TIF) mechanics. TIF districts freeze the assessed value at the pre-development level; incremental tax revenue from post-development value flows to project financing rather than to the taxing bodies. TIF requires municipal approval and typically school-district and county cooperation. Illinois TIF is more common than PILOT for redevelopment financing, but has become politically fraught because the school districts perceive it as a diversion of their tax base.

The result is that any big Illinois redevelopment — not just stadiums — typically takes 2-5 years to negotiate the multi-body agreement even before construction bids go out. Large commercial developments, casinos, arenas, and mixed-use districts run this gauntlet routinely. The Bears' Arlington project is unusual only in scale, not in the underlying mechanic.

The Halas-McCaskey estate — ownership across three generations

The Chicago Bears are one of only a handful of major U.S. sports franchises that have never been sold. George Halas co-founded what became the Chicago Bears with a $100 stake in the Decatur Staleys in 1920, moved the franchise to Chicago in 1921, and controlled it for the rest of his life. On Halas's death in 1983, the franchise passed by inheritance to his daughter Virginia Halas McCaskey and her husband Ed McCaskey. Virginia's generation held the team through the 1985 Super Bowl XX championship year, the Michael McCaskey team-president era, the Ted Phillips era, and the current Kevin Warren era. On January 30, 2025, Virginia Halas McCaskey died at 102. Her thirteen surviving children and grandchildren now hold the ownership interest, with George Halas McCaskey serving as team chairman.

This structure is a family-office and estate-planning case as much as it is a sports-business case. The Institute's positioning is that the stadium decision cannot be understood in isolation from the ownership transition — the two decisions are being made simultaneously by the same family, and the state-tax and domicile choices bear directly on both.

What the estate has to solve for.

• Federal estate tax on the principal generation. On a franchise valued at approximately $6B by Sportico, the federal estate-tax exposure at the 40% top rate is potentially in the range of $2.5B-plus — before adjustments for the lifetime exemption ($13.99M per person in 2025, scheduled to sunset in stages), valuation discounts for lack of control and lack of marketability on non-voting interests, and any pre-death gifting or trust structuring that removed value from the taxable estate.
• State estate tax. Illinois levies an additional estate tax on estates over $4M, at graduated rates climbing to 16%. Indiana has no state estate tax. Establishing Indiana domicile before a controlling principal's death can save the estate a material amount in state-level transfer tax — on the order of hundreds of millions in the specific case of a $6B franchise where a significant fraction of value passes on death.
• Generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax. Passing value from Virginia's generation directly to grandchildren or trusts for grandchildren without incurring GST tax requires GST exemption allocation. The exemption limits are meaningful but do not cover a $6B asset in full; the balance flows through the GST rate stack unless structured through non-taxable vehicles.
• Liquidity for tax. An NFL franchise is illiquid. Estate tax is due in cash roughly nine months after death. Life-insurance-funded ILITs are the standard tool for producing tax liquidity without requiring sale of the underlying asset. Well-advised family-owned NFL franchises have carried substantial ILIT coverage for exactly this purpose.
• Ownership continuity and NFL constitutional rules. The NFL constitution requires a single controlling owner. A multi-branch McCaskey family holding the franchise across thirteen grandchildren — the third generation — must designate a controlling owner acceptable to the league. This is a governance structure question that family offices with succeeding generations frequently face, and one where the standard tools (voting-vs-non-voting split, family council governance, buy-sell provisions, and an owner-representative agreement) are all directly applicable.

Standard tools already in play (or that should be).

Family offices operating at the McCaskey generational scale customarily use, and are widely reported to use, a stack of tools:

• Grantor trusts and GRATs. Non-voting minority interests appraised at appropriate discounts are transferred into grantor trusts or GRATs (Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts) so future appreciation compounds outside the taxable estate. Given that NFL franchises have appreciated at roughly 12-15% per year over the last twenty years, this is one of the highest-yield estate techniques available.
• Family limited partnerships (FLPs). Wraps the ownership interest in an FLP or LLC with control and marketability discounts documented by qualified appraisers; the discounted interests are then gifted or sold to next-generation trusts.
• ILIT-funded liquidity. Life insurance held inside an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT), owned by the trust rather than the insured, produces death-benefit liquidity outside the taxable estate. For a family with a $6B illiquid asset and a $2.5B-plus contingent estate-tax bill, ILIT coverage is a foundational tool.
• Charitable structures. A private foundation or donor-advised fund coordinated with the estate plan can absorb value at the death of a principal, satisfy any philanthropic commitments, and produce an estate-tax charitable deduction on the corresponding amount.
• Domicile planning. Establishing residency in a lower-estate-tax or no-estate-tax state well in advance of death, with proper documentation of residency (voting registration, driver's license, primary residence, majority of days in state), is a standard tool. For the McCaskey family, an Indiana domicile decision now would have permanent estate-tax implications for the next generation.

The Bears' stadium decision and the McCaskey estate plan are the same decision viewed from two angles. The domicile choice sets the estate-tax base for the family. The stadium siting choice sets the domicile choice. Practitioners advising family-office principals with concentrated, illiquid, appreciated assets should treat this case as a worked example of how these decisions interlock.

Cross-reference: Family Office Reference Guide for the multi-generation governance framework, Estate Planning Decoded for the trust, GRAT, and ILIT mechanics, and International Tax & Cross-Border Wealth for the state-of-residency framework that underlies domicile planning.

Recent NFL stadium moves — what each optimized for

The Bears are not moving to a new city. They may be moving to a new state. That distinction matters because it puts this case in a different comparable set than the standard NFL relocation. The comparables below share elements with the Bears' situation but none of them tracks exactly.

Rams (Inglewood). Stan Kroenke financed the SoFi Stadium project personally at roughly $5B, plus the NFL relocation fee of $650M. The economic case was market size (LA vs St. Louis), Kroenke's control of the surrounding real estate, and long-term entertainment-district value. California's top marginal income-tax rate of 13.3% is a permanent negative on player and executive personal income, but the LA market premium has been large enough to justify it. This is the closest comparable for the real-estate value-capture element of the Bears' Arlington vision.

Raiders (Las Vegas). The Davis family moved from Oakland to Las Vegas after Nevada delivered $750M in public financing via a hotel tax on Allegiant Stadium ($1.9B total project). Nevada also has no state income tax, permanently benefiting every team-affiliated earner. This is the closest comparable for the state-tax element of the Bears' Indiana option — though Indiana's rate is not zero, the Illinois-to-Indiana delta is a meaningful step toward the same benefit.

Bills (Highmark Stadium). Terry Pegula secured $850M in public financing from New York State and Erie County toward the $1.7B project cost, with no relocation. This is the pure public-financing comparable — and the model the Bears attempted, unsuccessfully, in Illinois in 2024. The material difference is that New York was politically willing to commit public capital to retain the Bills; Illinois so far has not been willing to commit similar capital to retain the Bears.

Chargers (LA). The Chargers moved from San Diego to LA in 2017 to share SoFi Stadium with the Rams. The market-size upside has been slower to materialize than projected, the fan base has not fully re-anchored, and the California personal-income-tax burden applies to every player and coach. This is the cautionary comparable: relocation to a larger market with a higher tax burden is not automatically a win.

What we'd want on the Bears' advisory bench

The Institute's signature framing is the Power of the Pack: each advisor is strong, all advisors properly led are unstoppable, and the Family Office CFO seat is the quarterback who runs the play. For a decision that combines stadium finance, state-and-local-tax structuring, multi-body property-tax negotiation, and a $6B family-office estate transition, the pack has to be specific.

• Family Office CFO (the quarterback). Runs the ownership entity, coordinates the pack, owns the P&L and tax posture at the holdco level, and is the single voice to the McCaskey family council. Sits at every table where the state, the stadium counterparties, and the estate advisors converge.
• State-and-local-tax counsel — Illinois. Manages the property-tax appeal process at the Cook County Board of Review, the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board, and (if needed) the Illinois circuit courts. Structures any PILOT / TIF agreement across the multi-body counterparty set. Coordinates with the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority on stadium-financing structure if a lakefront revival becomes viable.
• State-and-local-tax counsel — Indiana. Structures any incentive package with the IEDC. Coordinates Lake County property-tax and local-option-income-tax mechanics. Advises on Indiana residency and domicile requirements for principals who choose to establish Indiana residency.
• Stadium finance advisor. Structures the equity contribution, coordinates the NFL G-4 stadium loan facility (currently $500M-per-team-per-project maximum), coordinates any tax-exempt or taxable municipal bond issuance with the stadium authority in whichever state wins, and manages the interaction with the NFL Finance Committee for debt-limit approval.
• Real-estate strategist. Advises on retention or divestiture of the Arlington Park land depending on final stadium siting. If Arlington loses, the land has residual mixed-use value that can be monetized. If Arlington wins, the surrounding parcels become critical to the mixed-use district's economics. Either way, this is a real-estate question requiring dedicated expertise.
• Estate planning counsel. Coordinates the trust, GRAT, ILIT, and FLP structures across the McCaskey family. Manages the appraisal work for gift-and-estate valuation. Coordinates with the SALT counsel on domicile decisions and their estate-tax consequences.
• Government affairs / political counsel. Manages the relationships with Springfield (Governor's office, Speaker Welch, Senate President Harmon), Indianapolis (Governor Braun, IEDC), Chicago (Mayor Johnson), Arlington Heights (village board, school districts 214 / 15 / 25), and the NFL office. Runs the parallel messaging across three tracks without contradicting itself.
• Sports-business operator. Team president (Kevin Warren, in current fact) with league experience running the business side, coordinating with the football side, and interfacing with the NFL office on all league-level questions. Owns the day-to-day execution while the pack owns the structural decisions.

The Bears have most of these seats staffed. The public reporting on Kevin Warren's tenure indicates a professionalization of the front office that includes many of these functions. The reason to enumerate the pack is that the case study is transferable: every family office facing a comparable domicile-plus-real-estate-plus-estate decision needs the same seat map. The names change; the seats do not.

A modern stadium is a 365-day content platform, not a 10-game venue

An NFL team plays 10 home games in a normal year — 9 regular-season plus 1 preseason, occasionally 2 preseason. Under Institute framing (see the Institute's positioning on sports franchises as entertainment businesses), the modern domed stadium is a content platform whose economics depend on utilization across the remaining 355 days.

What a domed stadium hosts, in a typical calendar year.

• Concerts — 15-30 dates per year. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Coldplay, and the top-line stadium tour economics have permanently reset the venue calendar. A domed stadium that can accommodate a full production and route around weather routinely earns premium booking priority.
• NCAA championships and marquee college football. The College Football Playoff National Championship, a Big Ten Championship rotation (Lucas Oil is the incumbent host), Final Four rotations, wrestling championships, and gymnastics.
• Marquee-week NFL events. Super Bowl bids (only cold-weather cities with domed stadiums qualify), the NFL Draft (a rotating city assignment with major hospitality revenue), the NFL Combine.
• Corporate hospitality — year-round. Board dinners, product launches, sales conferences, gala fundraisers, private tours. This is a high-margin revenue stream that only exists if the stadium has premium spaces available on non-game days.
• Youth and community events. High-school championships, marathon start / finish lines, community events that anchor the venue's local political support.

Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis reports approximately 200 event days per year beyond the Colts' game inventory. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood has hosted a Super Bowl (LVI, February 2022), a WrestleMania, the LA Bowl, US Open Cup soccer, and a rotation of major concerts. The Bears' Arlington vision was explicitly structured to capture 365-day economics through the mixed-use district. Whichever siting outcome the Bears eventually choose, the underwriting math depends on the non-NFL event calendar as much as it depends on the ten home dates.

The state-tax structure affects this business too. Concert promoters, touring artists, corporate hospitality executives, and event contractors all pay income tax in the state where the event is booked or the venue operates. A 190-bps state-tax delta between Illinois and Indiana is a small but real factor in booking negotiations, executive compensation, and long-term operating cost. On a stadium expected to host 200-plus events per year for 30 years, that delta compounds.

Location arbitrage as a strategic input — not a footnote

The Bears' decision is a rare public example of what family-office principals across many asset classes face routinely: a location choice that is really a tax and estate choice dressed up as an operating choice. The Institute's reader is most likely to encounter this pattern in four private-life contexts:

• Real-estate development. Where to build, in which state, under which incentive package, subject to which property-tax regime. The multi-body property-tax mechanic that stalled Arlington is the same mechanic that shapes every large-project underwriting in Illinois and much of the Northeast.
• Athlete compensation. A player choosing between free-agent offers of nominally equal dollars is not really comparing equal offers if the destinations have different state tax rates. A $30M offer in Miami (no state income tax) is worth roughly $1.5M-plus more than an equal $30M offer in Chicago after tax, before jock-tax allocation. See the Athletes Wealth Playbook for the full framework.
• Business succession. A founder deciding where to establish the operating company's domicile and their own residency in the years before a liquidity event or a generational transfer faces the same estate and income-tax lattice the McCaskey family faces on the Bears. See Estate Planning Decoded for the mechanics.
• Cross-border and international structuring. The same principles that govern IL vs IN domicile choices govern US vs foreign residency for the growing population of Institute readers whose careers or families span jurisdictions. See International Tax & Cross-Border Wealth.

The unifying principle is that state and jurisdictional choice is a first-order strategic input, not a footnote. Framing it as a footnote — something to sort out with the accountant after the deal is signed — is the single most common mistake the Institute sees in family-office practice. The Bears' three-track saga is playing out in public because a family the size of the McCaskeys must resolve the decision in public. The same decision, at smaller scales, is being made in private by every family-office principal reading this case.

What to watch — the case is live and will update

This case is not closed. The Bears have not committed to a site as of the publication date. The Institute treats this as a live case that will be revised as the following developments resolve:

• Braun administration moves. Any formal IEDC incentive package publicly quantified. Any specific site selection in Gary or elsewhere in Lake County. Any Governor's-office statement raising or lowering the political-commitment level.
• Illinois legislative session. Any bill introduced in the Illinois General Assembly authorizing new stadium-financing mechanisms. Any statement from the Governor, Speaker Welch, or Senate President Harmon indicating changed openness to a public-financing package. The spring and fall session calendars are the operative windows.
• Bears public statements. Any Kevin Warren or Board-of-Directors statement narrowing to a specific site. Any formal announcement scaling back the lakefront proposal or restarting Arlington. Any statement from George McCaskey or the family council on domicile intent.
• Property-tax appeal outcomes. The Cook County Board of Review and Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board outcomes on the Bears' Arlington Park appeals. The village-and-school-district negotiations on any revised PILOT or TIF structure.
• McCaskey family transition. Any public disclosure on the succession structure, controlling-owner designation, or trust-and-foundation activity following Virginia Halas McCaskey's January 2025 death. Estate-related disclosures are typically limited but can appear in court filings or coordinated foundation announcements.
• NFL office positioning. Any Commissioner Goodell or Finance Committee statement on relocation, domicile, or intra-market moves. The NFL has historically preferred incumbency but has approved Rams, Raiders, and Chargers moves this decade.

Each of these developments would move the analysis. The Institute will update this case when material developments land.

Sources, methodology, and treatment of an ongoing story

This case draws exclusively on public sources: Cook County Assessor's Office property records and public statements from Assessor Fritz Kaegi; Illinois General Assembly bill tracking and committee minutes from the 2024 and 2025 spring sessions; Illinois Sports Facilities Authority public materials and outstanding bond disclosures; Chicago Bears organizational statements and press releases; Indiana Economic Development Corporation press materials and public statements from Governor Mike Braun's office; Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, Bloomberg, ESPN, Sportico, Front Office Sports, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel beat coverage; NFL constitutional provisions in the public record; and published state-tax schedules from the Illinois Department of Revenue and the Indiana Department of Revenue.

Numeric estimates in the state-tax arbitrage tables are stylized illustrations. Actual advisory work uses duty-day allocation for jock tax, layered residency and source-income rules, and specific individual facts. The tables here are directional and are intended to convey the magnitude of the tax delta, not to substitute for tailored tax counsel.

Franchise value is the Sportico latest published mark and is not audited. NFL franchise valuations are trade-press estimates, not financial statements. The Institute's Packers case (case-study-packers.html) explains why the Packers are the only audited data point in the league and how every other estimate should be triangulated against that book.

Estate structure for the McCaskey family is not public. The specific trusts, GRATs, ILITs, and FLPs used by the family are proprietary. The Institute's discussion in the family-office section describes tools that families operating at this scale customarily use and that generally-applicable estate practice would recommend. It is not a claim about the specific McCaskey plan.

Political and legislative dynamics are per public reporting. Statements attributed to Governor Pritzker, Governor Braun, Speaker Welch, Senate President Harmon, Mayor Johnson, and Assessor Kaegi are as reported in the outlets listed. The Institute is neither endorsing nor opposing any official's position; the analysis is descriptive and structural.

Reporting inconsistencies to flag. Public reporting on the exact split of the $2.4B public-financing ask (April 2024) between hotel-tax bond capacity, ISFA capacity, and state general-fund contribution has varied across outlets. The reporting on Indiana's specific site is loosely centered on Gary but has occasionally named other Lake County parcels. The reporting on Cook County property-tax appeal amounts and settlement offers has evolved as the appeal process has progressed. This case uses the most consistent reporting across major outlets and flags uncertainty where it exists.