ALBANY — On Wednesday, Antonio Brown visited the Albany Stadium Restaurant & Bar on South Pearl Street to trade joint promotion ideas with its owner. A day later, the National Arena League canceled the Albany Empire’s season because it said that Brown, the owner, had failed to pay league-mandated assessments.
The news was a shock to the players and their fans. It also came with a sizable economic cost for local businesses looking forward to the Empire’s six remaining home games.
“The area restaurants and bars will be negatively impacted, and the loss of revenue to the MVP Arena and Albany County will be sizable,” Bob Belber, general manager of MVP Arena, said Friday.
In a text message, Belber said, “A review of lost revenue and damages to the arena is being reviewed internally with the counsel to ensure that the Empire owners compensate the MVP Arena for these damages.”
The arena could have booked numerous concerts and “generated very large net profits” by holding other events on Empire game dates, he added.
The Empire’s abbreviated season will impact the county-owned arena’s employees, including ticket-takers, ushers, concession workers, set-up and break-down crews and maintenance, Belber said.
Outside MVP Arena, nearby businesses were also feeling the reverberations.
James Anilowski, co-owner of the Albany Stadium Restaurant & Bar, a business physically embedded in the front of the MVP Arena, said 100 to 200 fans would crowd into his restaurant before Empire home games.
Now, he expects to close the restaurant on Saturdays.
“If there’s no event at all at the MVP Arena, there’s not enough people downtown here to even open on a Saturday,” Anilowski said. “This is really a Monday-through-Friday kind of place unless there’s an event here.”
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