The Carolina Panthers’ agreement with Rock Hill to build an opulent new training camp and team headquarters is never going to be salvaged.
After talking to several sources about this messy financial dispute that has left the Panthers with a half-built facility 30 minutes south of uptown Charlotte — and lots of finger-pointing all around — there’s almost no hope.
“The Rock Hill deal is dead,” a source with direct knowledge of the situation said. “And Tuesday’s statement was the obituary.”
That source was referring to the statement from Panther owner David Tepper’s real estate company Tuesday in which the Panthers officially terminated their agreement with Rock Hill, S.C., to build a new team headquarters and training facility.
The Panthers say that Rock Hill reneged on its contractual and financial obligations, while the city of Rock Hill has said it did no such thing and called the team’s statement “misleading and erroneous.”
The wording in the statement from the Panthers’ real-estate company had some ambiguity, however. And because of that, there had been some speculation over the past couple of days that the termination was just a hardball tactic and that a new agreement between the Panthers and Rock Hill would eventually be reached.
While that would make some sense, given all the work that’s already been done and the hundreds of millions plowed into the project, it now appears unlikely.
The line in the statement that read: “We are prepared to sit down with the City and other interested parties to discuss the significant challenges ahead” was referring mostly to how the team and the city need to legally disentangle themselves from each other, a source said.
There remains a 240-acre site in Rock Hill that the Panthers bought in 2020 that contains $170 million of steel already in the ground. Somebody will have to take over that site and eventually build something.
It’s almost certainly not going to be the Panthers.
Tepper is furious with Rock Hill and S.C. politicians. Whatever you think of the Panthers’ billionaire owner personally, no one doubts he’s a very good businessman — and now a very angry one.
You only need to read the second paragraph of Tuesday’s statement to understand the anger part.
It read: “It is unfortunate that some recently decided to conduct a misguided, destructive public relations campaign to obscure their failures.”
To simplify a complicated situation, the city of Rock Hill was supposed to issue $225 million in bonds to help pay for the practice facility and headquarters, which was officially announced at a pep rally in downtown Rock Hill in June 2019.
“This is going to be a showcase down here,” Tepper said that day. “We’re going to bring people down to this region. We’ll have just a sense of excellence not only up there for the football team, but everything we do down here in Rock Hill.”
The Panthers broke ground in July 2020. On many workdays, hundreds of workers were on-site. COVID delayed construction, but until recently the facility was still planning to open in 2023 and was supposed to bring development and tourism to Rock Hill and York County, in the same way that glamorous new facilities for the Dallas Cowboys and Minnesota Vikings have drawn nearby development. The facility was supposed to also provide a venue for concerts, high school championship games and corporate events.
For a variety of reasons, though, the city of Rock Hill never issued the bonds. The Panthers halted construction in March — sources say the team now wishes it had done that even earlier — and then terminated their agreement Tuesday.
The facility had been part of the Panthers’ plan to keep South Carolina heavily invested in the team, in both a literal and figurative sense. The team was purposely named “Carolina” long ago, rather than Charlotte, because then-owner Jerry Richardson and his partners wanted to draw on both Carolinas for financial and fan support.
The team has always held training camp at Wofford College in Spartanburg, for instance, in non-COVID years. It will again in 2022. From what I understand, the Panthers will probably be in Spartanburg for their training camp from 2023-25 as well.
Before Bank of America Stadium was built, the Panthers also played eight home games during their inaugural season in Clemson in 1995.
Rock Hill, though, isn’t going to be part of the Panthers’ S.C. equation anymore.
Many questions remain about the Panthers’ future. But unless Rock Hill city leaders complete a miraculous Hail Mary, this half-built practice facility is firmly in the Panthers’ past.
