Sounds like the Krafts have given up on the idea of a Revolution stadium in Somerville

...as long as it doesn't go inside of Metro Boston.

The simple fact is Boston doesn't need another outdoor venue space, and it certainly doesn't need one whose nominal usage is somewhere between 25 and 35 times a year. It will be overbuilt for the 300+ days of the year it goes unused and very likely underbuilt for the times that it does see usage, especially since soccer's "arrival" is about to stick a lot of other cities dumb enough to build MLS 1.0 stadiums with a serious case of buyer's remorse.

The Seattle Sounders, one of the few teams still playing in a football stadium, manage to fill that place to capacity or near so on a regular basis. Can you imagine if they'd built a "right-sized" soccer stadium, with maybe a third of the seats?

And with the exploding popularity of soccer teams in other cities, it's going to be a real problem - real soon - for those places that built "right-sized" soccer stadiums. Let's face facts, when all those other guys come calling for handouts to renovate or perhaps to build an MLS 2.0 stadium downtown for those cities who could only manage one in the suburbs, we're going to either look wicked smart for waiting it out or wicked stupid for being one of the bunch now stuck trying to renovate or replace a soccer stadium long before the end of its useful life expectancy.

Focusing on enshrining the venerable Old Fenway Park in its rightful place in history and mothballing the entire thing as the museum relic that it is, replacing it with New Fenway Park somewhere else in the city, would be a far better use of the pent up demand for a "new" outdoor venue. Despite assurances that the old park can survive active use for another 47 years, the fact is the thing is showing its age in a way that can no longer be papered over by renovations; and with it on the Register of Historic Places, the question of exactly how much more it even could be renovated is a serious one with the potential for a very bad answer.

We need an action plan to close Fenway within 15 years and preserve as much of it as an open public space as we possibly can, and we need to replace it with an outdoor venue that will actually be used often enough throughout the year that building it is a reasonable proposition with good return on investment. Soccer stadiums just aren't.

(We can make the argument that building an MLS 2.0 stadium in a city that's hurting for outdoor venue space might make sense, but that city isn't Boston. Fortunately, since it's the "New England" Revolution, I'm sure that building a stadium in Springfield or Manchester or Hartford or Providence or Worcester or Portsmouth would not at all provoke mass disenfranchisement of the team by its fanbase, reasonable people who acknowledge and accept that the team doesn't actually belong to Boston and building in some other New England City wouldn't constitute a "move." Oops, my sarcasm is showing.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3YiPC91QUk
1:28

Of course the did finance the construction of Gillette Stadium and Patriot Place entirely through private funds.