Let’s be clear here. Everybody is to blame for the Chicago Bears now being probably one final step away from making Hammond, Indiana, their new permanent home for a new stadium. It started with Ted Phillips purchasing Arlington Heights without a plan for cultivating enough relationships to make it viable. Many also point to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for not taking the situation more seriously until Indiana became a serious threat last year. However, if you follow the many breadcrumbs, all of the tributaries trace back to the same man: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. More specifically, his hold over Bears president Kevin Warren.
Everything went sideways in 2024 when Warren pivoted away from Arlington Heights to pursue a new downtown stadium south of Soldier Field. Johnson was a direct partner in that entire pitch. According to Fran Spielman and Mitchell Armentrout of the Chicago Sun-Times, experienced people down in Springfield knew immediately that the entire approach was doomed to fail.
“The Bears f—– it up by going with Johnson’s stupid thing without pulling Springfield in and having there be $2 billion in state funding required,” the source said, referring to their ballyhooed 2024 pitch for a lakefront dome south of Soldier Field. “The Bears own the first full year of failure. Then there was the second year of failure, which probably the governor owns a lot of because he didn’t get his head out of the sand until December, when Indiana became real.”
It gets better. Kevin Warren was actually warned about Johnson.
So remember the story that came out about how the Bears hired several lobbyists with knowledge of the Illinois political landscape? Warren ignored their advice. What we didn’t know was what sort of advice they provided. Now we do. It appears one of their biggest warnings was to steer clear of Johnson. They tried telling the Bears president, not once but twice, that working with the mayor was a bad idea, both because of his inexperience and his lack of strong relationships in Springfield.
The Bears had a blue-ribbon lobbying team inside the Capitol that had advised Warren not to stand alone at the lakefront in 2024 with Johnson at a news conference without Pritzker, Harmon or Welch, who all quickly threw cold water on the proposal, sources said.
Unlike Warren, who appeared to have a budding political bromance with Johnson, the Bears’ lobbying team privately advised the politically naive Bears president that Johnson didn’t have the clout or the legislative know-how to get anything done, let alone a deal as controversial as this.
Chicago sports marketing consultant Marc Ganis countered that Warren shouldn’t take all the blame because he pivoted quickly to Arlington Heights “once he realized how big a disaster this mayor was.”
Johnson clearly told Warren what he wanted to hear.
It’s been evident from the beginning that the Bears’ president fell in love with the idea of keeping the team in the city. There are multiple reasons for this, starting with his experience in the Vikings’ front office when they eventually built U.S. Bank Stadium. They, too, were lined up to build in the suburbs before a pivot saw them bulldoze the Metrodome and stay downtown. That was a major success in the eyes of many. Everybody has long associated the Bears with Lake Michigan and that iconic Chicago skyline shot. Warren admitted he fell in love with it from the beginning.
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Johnson unquestionably preyed on that, selling Kevin Warren on a grand vision of a state-of-the-art stadium on the lakefront despite having no real plan on how to finance it, let alone navigate the obvious political minefield to get there. Pritzker said as much a couple of weeks ago, accusing Johnson of having “no plan” for a downtown stadium. Warren’s own people warned him about this. The man was too oblivious or pig-headed to see that he was being made promises Johnson had no way of keeping.
By the time he realized the truth, he’d already wasted a year. Yet even now, he can’t seem to quit Johnson, holding multiple calls with his people at City Hall, still discussing the hope of a downtown stadium. Lori Lightfoot gets plenty of hate for fumbling the Bears issue when it began in 2021. She should be grateful that Johnson may go down as the man who sent the franchise packing to Indiana.
