NFL's Chicago Bears May Bolt to Pro-Growth Indiana

The latest business to pick up and leave the high-tax, high-regulation, high-crime nightmare of Illinois may be its iconic professional football franchise.

The governor of Indiana, Mike Braun, announced Thursday morning that a "framework" had been reached for a final deal that would move the Chicago Bears about 20 miles south from Soldier Field to Hammond, Ind.

"Indiana is open for business, and our pro-growth environment continues to attract major opportunities like this partnership with the Chicago Bears," Braun said. "The State of Indiana moves at the speed of business, and we've demonstrated that through our quick coordination between state agencies, local government, and the legislature to set the stage for a huge win for all Hoosiers. We have built a strong relationship with the Bears organization that will serve as the foundation for a public-private partnership, leading to the construction of a world-class stadium and a win for taxpayers."

A statement from the Bears said in part, "We appreciate the leadership shown by Governor Braun, Speaker Huston, Senator Mishler and members of the Indiana General Assembly in establishing this critical framework and path forward to deliver a premier venue for all of Chicagoland and a destination for Bears fans and visitors from across the globe."

Braun, Huston, and Mishler are all Republicans. The governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, is a Democrat and aspiring 2028 presidential candidate, and Democrats also control both houses of the State Legislature in Springfield. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, is a tax-raising leftist who was elected in 2023 over the more moderate Paul Vallas.

So many businesses and people have left the Prairie State that the Illinois Policy Institute, a center-right research group, calls it the "Illinois Exodus." "One of the major factors pushing businesses away from the state is Illinois' unfriendly tax climate," the institute said in a 2025 analysis. Companies that have moved headquarters out of the state in recent years include Citadel, which moved to the Free State of Florida along with its founder and CEO Ken Griffin; Boeing, which moved to Virginia; and Caterpillar, which moved to Texas. When Griffin left in 2022, he told the Wall Street Journal that crime in Chicago was part of the reason: "I've had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I've had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that's a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from."

President Trump has also expressed concern about crime in the Windy City. "I look at Chicago, I mean, you got a really bad governor in Chicago, and a bad mayor, but the governor's probably the worst in the country, Pritzker. But I look at how that city has been overrun by criminals," Trump said in June 2025.

Football teams sometimes solicit out-of-town offers as negotiating ploys to extract better stadium subsidy terms from their existing homes. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft's plan to move his team to Hartford, Conn., was reported back in 1998 by Mike Allen, who was then covering the Nutmeg State for the New York Times. The Patriots wound up staying in Massachusetts.

Pritzker told Illinois reporters he was "very disappointed" that the Bears did not "say anything about the advancement that's been made in the state of Illinois." He also said the news came as "a surprise."

The Bears team were valued at $8.9 billion when a minority stake changed hands in September 2025, CNBC reported. The primary owners are the McCaskey family, descendants of team founder George Halas, whose first football contract was with a Hammond, Ind.-based team called the Pros.

Pritzker's lieutenant governor, Juliana Stratton, who is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in the state (to replace Dick Durbin, who is retiring), today released a campaign commercial with people saying "Fuck Trump." The commercial also promises abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. It ends picturing Stratton together with Pritzker, who has endorsed her. Bloomberg says the Pritzker family—which also includes Obama commerce secretary Penny Pritzker, who is the senior fellow of Harvard's governing corporation—is worth an estimated $65 billion, with assets including the Hyatt hotel chain.

Labor unions in Illinois are advancing plans for even higher taxes targeted at millionaires and billionaires, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month.

It's hard to describe just how essential the Bears are to the city of Chicago. Hotel rates soar and traffic slows when the team is home for a game. The team has played at Soldier Field, on the shores of Lake Michigan, since 1971, when they moved from Wrigley Field, which they had shared with baseball's Cubs.

Illinois lost 40,017 people to domestic migration in the year that ended July 1, 2025, according to an Unleash Prosperity analysis of U.S. Census data. An analysis by First Trust found the state had lost 456,378 people, or 3.6 percent of its population, to net domestic outmigration over a roughly five-year period. As the Free Beacon noted in reporting the population flows:

The numbers point to a dynamic in some states where people have given up on reform and decided to pick up and leave instead. Economist Albert Hirschman is known for his "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" framework, outlined in Hirschman's 1970 book of that name and in Editors posts such as "The Talmud on Moving Out of a City To Avoid Taxes," July 4, 2024, and "Prairie State Spending Soars," April 1, 2024, and in a series of posts at our predecessor site FutureOfCapitalism.com, including "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty," Dec. 2, 2018. Hirschman is a character in the Netflix series Transatlantic. The basic argument is that people are loyal up to a point and will use their voices to advocate for change, but when they feel their voice is not being heard, they leave, or "exit." In the context of public schools, for example, parents may volunteer or complain or come to meetings, but at a certain point, if things don’t improve, they may pull their children out of school and enroll them in a private or charter school, or move to a different public school district.

The move to Indiana is not yet final, but it sure is looking like the Bears are heading for "exit" in the exit, voice, and loyalty framework. How it will affect the team's performance and profits is an open question. Yet if the shock of one more high-profile departure helps motivate those remaining in Illinois to adopt more sensible and pro-growth policies, or elect more sensible and pro-growth politicians, it could eventually be some sort of a win.

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