The Bears moving to Indiana would be a soulless betrayal of a city that loves them

A few months before I was born, the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl. In doing so, they put a cherry atop their most exciting, storied season ever. It was such a big deal that in my toddler years, a Richard Dent action figure was just one piece of the ubiquitous ‘86 Bears mythology in my household—a totem object for the beginning of my life—and one of my very first news memories is of what the Chicago Tribune looked like on the day, years later, that head coach Mike Ditka was fired.

Millions of Chicagolanders my age can tell similar stories; those of living through a fandom most defined by stuff that happened before you were alive, occasionally punctuated by haphazardly successful Bears teams that usually relied on turnover creation for average offensive production. We got a Super Bowl run in 2007, and while that was fun, it was exactly this kind of ramshackle, wild-card outfit that took us there.

This past season, a generation of Chicago fans finally got a little taste of what a truly significant NFL team might feel like. Caleb Williams did things that clarified why he was the most hyped quarterback prospect of the past decade, and new head coach Ben Johnson consistently created strategic edges and cultural resilience that showed why he was the most buzzed-about coaching prospect of recent years. And this is only the start. We’ve got it made!

But at the very same time—if this week’s developments are to be believed—we could be looking at the end of the Bears’ time in Chicago. How cruel. After years of political and financial power games, surrounded by wild ideas about urban planning and development, all the noise about what will happen—or not—with plans for a potential new Bears stadium has reached absurd new negotiating heights: the Bears are threatening to move to northwest Indiana.

If you’re not from here, let’s clear something up: northwest Indiana is, in so many ways, Chicagoland. If your family is from the south side, it’s especially likely that you’ve known someone who’s crossed state lines five times a week to go work downtown. And if you listen to local radio, regional business ads are always stipulating that they also serve that one corner of Indiana.

There is a distinct spirit to crossing the border, though. You do it for cheaper real estate—my parents lived there for a little while after they got married, to save money for their first house—or to shop at firework depots, or (before we became such a Casino Nation) to go gamble. These days, a lot of Chicagoans drive through the area to hit up one of the mega-cheap weed dispensaries just over the line into Michigan, and when doing so, they always notice that the roads between Illinois and Michigan are too narrow and perpetually under construction.

Perhaps the proposed terms of a Hammond, Indiana stadium help us understand why. If Indiana is offering a cash-cow NFL team a generous heap of subsidies, and plans to take so little back in return, where exactly will the funds for their vast new infrastructure needs be coming from? That doesn’t seem to be a concern for state politicians, who just voted unanimously to approve a concept presented with all kinds of loaded terms by Governor Mike Braun—he describes their approach as “pro-growth,” and “mov[ing] at the speed of business.” (Economists have broadly discredited the idea that subsidies are good business for anyone but the teams who receive them).

Braun’s language strikes at another important characteristic of Chicagoland border-crossers: angry tax sentiment. Prickly anti-Liberal ideas are often behind regional resentments like the ones relished by the Indiana legislature right now, and if the Bears accept this package, it will be a huge win for the Chicago-hating contingent of our tri-state area (the third part of which is Wisconsin, where Chicago tourists are often referred to as F.I.B.’s, or “Fucking Illinois Bastards”). The Bears moving to Indiana would, in other words, mean a hell of a lot more than just a logistical shift.

Though the logistics would be nightmarish, too. The team’s famous practice facility, Halas Hall, is located in Lake Forest, a moneyed north shore suburb that much of the team’s roster and staff live in or around. Do they really want to ask them to move to Indiana? Because traffic in Chicago is a kind of hell, and I just got a migraine thinking about regular trips all the way through the entire city, to end up in Hammond, a city of about 80,000 people that would, in this scenario, see their population effectively double on game days. They have nowhere near the urban bandwidth for such occasions, right now.

A more suitable, but in its own way unromantic destination for the Bears is the northwest suburb of Arlington Heights. On paper it’s about as big as Hammond, but as a more direct piece of the Chicago metropolitan system, it is far more ready for the kind of crowds that a century-old franchise in the country’s most popular sports league would bring. Arlington Heights has been wooing the Bears for a long time now, and cleared the way for a deal that’s only being held up by the sudden seduction of Indiana’s team-friendly proposal.

Underpinning all of this is the idea that the Bears need a new stadium at all. Their insistence on one is often centered around the idea that an older, outdoor stadium in a cold city cannot host a Super Bowl, but I can’t think of any Chicagoans I know who are eager for that to happen here. Soldier Field, with its weird combination of Roman Colosseum structure and Gehryesque geometric abstraction, is flawed but beloved. The Bears just don’t like it because they don’t own it—the city does—and because it doesn’t offer them financial “growth” opportunities.

Another word for those: government handouts. At a time when the state is financially crippled by President Trump’s withholding of congressionally approved funds, it is exceedingly callous of the Bears to weaponize the moment for further self-enrichment. Bending the state over the negotiating pike, right now, is such a gobsmacking act of greed that if the Bears do go through with this move to Indiana, I won’t care how many MVP trophies Caleb has collected by 2030: my fandom will not continue.

The money-only logic the Bears are displaying in this situation is at the heart of what makes so many people feel hopeless about modern life. Profits only go so far before they start to defeat pride and purpose, and the Bears will be leaving so much of what matters about their franchise behind if they all care about is maximally fleecing a government. It’s bad enough that the team spent so much of my life bringing the franchise anywhere close to the glory it had before I existed. If they squander the hope they’ve only just earned with such a cynical decision, winning won’t be enough to sustain it.