The New Orleans Saints and Gov. Jeff Landry’s team are closing in on a new long-term lease of the Caesars Superdome that aims to keep the franchise rooted in New Orleans for at least another decade.
The deal, which three sources familiar with the talks say could be announced as soon as next week, culminates more than a year of grueling, often contentious negotiations between the Saints and the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, the board that oversees the state-owned Superdome.
Neither the Saints nor the LSED, known as the Superdome Commission, have announced specifics publicly. But the sources close to the negotiations say the agreement calls for a 10-year lease followed by four 5-year extensions, with the Saints retaining the right to exercise each extension. If all the extensions are agreed upon, it would run through 2055.
The deal adds a new provision—absent from the Saints’ current lease—requiring arbitration and potential “equitable damages,” measures designed to discourage any future owner from moving the team out of New Orleans. The exact amount of that relocation penalty hasn’t been finalized, but the sources said it could reach $250 million.
The deal also involves other key provisions, which could be modified as the sides hash out final details. Among them: the Saints’ share of revenues from stadium concessions on game days; terms of the state lease for offices at Benson Tower; and other future revenue streams and costs.
The two sides have wanted to sign the lease by Sept. 17 because that’s the day an NFL owners sub-committee on special events will meet to begin considering who will host Super Bowls beyond 2028. After receiving broad acclaim for hosting the game in February, New Orleans hopes to be invited to bid on the 2031 Super Bowl. But it can only do so if the Saints have a signed lease agreement in effect for the year of the game, according to league policy.
The new agreement will end a negotiation that began shortly after Landry took office in January 2024. Saints officials negotiated a similar lease extension with officials from the administration of Gov. John Bel Edwards but didn’t reach a long-term agreement before his term ended.
Exterior shots of the Louisiana Superdome colored with lights for Carnival and the BCS game in New Orleans, on Jan. 4, 2008.
CHRIS GRANGER
“We remain optimistic that a final agreement will be reached soon and look forward to announcing it at the appropriate time,” Greg Bensel, a spokesperson for the Saints, said in a text. “Until then, negotiations with the State remain ongoing, and it would be premature to comment on specific deal points.”
Superdome Commission officials also declined to comment on the deal talks.
Shane Guidry, a businessman who is a close advisor to Landry, declined to comment on specifics but said agreement on lease terms is near. “We’re at the finish line,” he said. “We want to get it done for the Saints, the taxpayers, the state of Louisiana, the NFL, everybody.”
A closely watched deal
The Superdome lease is always closely watched by business and civic leaders, but for Saints fans the real question is what it means for the team’s long-term future in New Orleans.
This round of talks carries added weight: Because the lease could run through 2055, it will likely be in place past Gayle Benson’s lifetime — the trigger for an NFL rule that will require the team to be sold to a new owner.
Landry’s negotiating team has sought to bolster the state’s legal position in keeping the Saints here for the foreseeable future, the sources said.
Benson has vowed to keep the team in New Orleans while she is the owner. And in a series of 2021 interviews to discuss the Saints succession plans, Dennis Lauscha, the Saints’ president and the executor of the Benson estate, committed to keeping the Saints in New Orleans. He has also said that the terms of this lease negotiation would be crucial to keeping a future owner here. But it remains unclear whether the new deal will have strong enough language to prevent the team from being moved by the team’s next owner beyond those 10 years.
Lauscha has been the lead negotiator for the Saints, facing off with Rob Vosbein, appointed by Landry to serve as the Superdome Commission’s chair. Vosbein is a private attorney for Guidry. Also negotiating for the state has been Shawn Bridgewater-Normand, a lawyer and the wife of radio host Newell Normand.
The Superdome Commission is expected to formally approve the deal, which will replace the current agreement that consists of a 15-year lease followed by a 5-year extension that ends in 2030.
Deals aim to avoid relocation
The price of professional sports teams has risen dramatically in recent years, making ownership the domain of multibillionaires. Forbes valued the Saints at $5.3 billion in its annual analysis of NFL franchises, a 20 percent increase from a year ago.
Lawyers and executives with experience in stadium lease negotiations in other NFL markets said that any lease deal would likely require ironclad legal terms and financial penalties after 10 years to make it difficult for a future owner to move the Saints.
The new lease would require a new owner who moves the team to pay state taxpayers as much as $250 million to cover most of the $300 million that the state owes in bonds for the recent Superdome renovation, said the people close to the negotiations. That penalty steps down sharply after the first 10 years.
Marc Poloncarz, who has negotiated two lease extensions with the Buffalo Bills as the Erie County executive, said a more important question is whether the new lease includes language that would allow the state to go to court in New Orleans to prevent a new owner from moving the team.
“Unless there’s some clause that allows the community and the state to keep the team there, they could be gone after 10 years,” Poloncarz said.
In 2021, Benson said her instructions to Lauscha are clear when it comes to new ownership.
“That’s going to be one of our stipulations when we sell the team — that it stays here,” said Benson at the time. “Dennis won’t sell it to another person that wants to take it away.”
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, center, and his wife, Sharon LeBlanc, talk with New Orleans Saints and Pelicans owner, Gayle Benson, during the King’s Luncheon held at the Kennedy Center for the Washington Mardi Gras on Thursday, January 25, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
(Photo by Chris Granger The Times-Picayune)
While negotiators aren’t yet publicly outlining the terms of the new lease, two recent stadium deals offer some comparative terms.
In 2023, the Buffalo Bills signed a 30-year lease with language that discourages a new owner from moving the team. A year later, the Jacksonville Jaguars also signed a 30-year deal with similar terms.
Nellie Drew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who has studied the leases of the Bills and other teams, said cities and states often seek clauses in the leases that would make it harder for teams to relocate.
One defense is a legal term known as “equitable relief,” which allows the government to file suit to block the team from leaving. The Bills agreed to allow this type of lawsuit in the lease and to have the lawsuit be heard in a local or federal court in the Buffalo area.
“There is no way any judge in western New York is going to let the Bills walk,” Drew said.
If a judge did allow the team to leave, the lease requires the Bills to pay back taxpayers the full $850 million they spent to build a new stadium if the departure takes place within the first 14 years of the lease signing. In future years, the amount the new owner would have to pay taxpayers would drop by 6.25% per year. By year 30, that amount would reach zero.
In the Saints’ case, taxpayers spent about $380 million to pay for the most recent renovation of the Superdome, while the Saints ponied up an additional $180 million.
The financial penalty in the new lease of up to $250 million for relocating the Saints would probably not be a deterrent for a new owner given the vast sums required now to purchase a team, industry experts said. But it’s a significant change from the current lease, which did not have a similar financial penalty.
That lease took effect in 2010. The deal included an $85 million stadium upgrade that gave the Saints more ways to make money off games in the Superdome while capping direct subsidies to the team at $6 million a year. It also transferred naming rights at the stadium to the team, which the Saints have since sold to Mercedes-Benz and Caesars for millions of dollars annually.
In lieu of constructing a new stadium, which can cost billions of dollars, the sides have continued to pour money into upgrading the Superdome, which opened in 1975 and is the fifth oldest stadium in the NFL. The state completed a $560 million renovation of the facility in 2024, in time to host Super Bowl LIX this year. It was the stadium’s eighth Super Bowl, the most of any venue in NFL history.