The Indiana Bears? Why an interstate move for a cherished NFL team may work out

By every traditional measure, the Chicago Bears belong to Chicago. Their navy helmets carry the city’s initial, their fight songs name-check the lakefront, and their lineage traces back to Decatur before the franchise helped build the NFL itself. Yet after 53 seasons as tenants at Soldier Field—renting, never owning—the Bears are preparing to do the unthinkable: leave Illinois altogether.

Last week Indiana lawmakers unanimously approved an amendment authorizing a Lake County stadium authority, clearing a legislative path for the Bears to relocate 30 minutes southeast to Hammond. The reaction was swift and visceral. An Axios poll found 74 percent of fans ready to “carry a grudge” if the team skips town; former Pro Bowlers James Harrison and Joe Haden decried another cash grab; Fox analyst Rachel Nichols urged the McCaskey family to sell if they “don’t have the resources to keep the Bears in Chicago.”

But resources are precisely the issue. The McCaskeys, whose wealth is concentrated in the franchise itself, have offered roughly $2 billion toward a new stadium—about what they would have spent in Arlington Heights. The rub is the total price tag: a SoFi-style $5 billion complex that would require $3 billion in additional public or private financing. Illinois balked at the subsidy request, leaving the team to renegotiate an onerous Soldier Field lease that still demands hundreds of millions in maintenance on the league’s smallest, oldest venue.

Indiana’s pitch is simpler. The same $2 billion from the Bears unlocks a state-backed authority able to finance, build and control a year-round football palace in Hammond, a community already woven into Chicago’s orbit. No cornfield exurb, Hammond sits inside the crescent of industrial lakefront towns that stretch from Wisconsin to Gary; commuters already cross the state line for cheaper gas, and Power 92, Chicago’s hip-hop mainstay, has broadcast from Hammond studios for 20 years. By car or Metra, the trip is shorter than the 49ers’ ride to San Francisco or the Giants’ and Jets’ slog from Manhattan to the Meadowlands.

For Northwest Indiana, the upside is existential. Since the 1970s, the closure of steel mills and auto plants hollowed out cities like Hammond and Gary, turning once-thriving corridors into rust-belt relics. A publicly funded stadium—Indiana’s third after Lucas Oil Stadium and Gainbridge Fieldhouse—could anchor mixed-use redevelopment, reverse population loss and reconnect the region to the economic engine of Chicago.

Critics call it sports welfare, and history is on their side: American and Canadian taxpayers have sunk more than $33 billion into stadium construction since 1970. Yet proponents argue that capturing a flagship tenant like the Bears concentrates the cost on the fan base most willing to bear it, while spilling benefits—hotels, restaurants, infrastructure—across a depressed area that state incentives have failed to revive.

Politically, the clock is ticking. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker promises to keep negotiating with team president Kevin Warren, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson insists “Arlington Heights and Indiana ain’t Chicago.” But the Bears have already signaled they are moving somewhere; Arlington Heights remains viable, though Hammond now offers a faster, cheaper, state-sanctioned runway.

What fans fear losing is less geography than identity. The team’s heritage, however, has always been portable. Founded in Decatur, the Bears shared Wrigley Field with the Cubs for half a century before the league’s 50,000-seat mandate pushed them to Soldier Field in 1971. Even then, they spent the 2002 renovation season 140 miles south in Champaign, going 3-5 while fans made the pilgrimage. Relocating to Hammond would keep every ritual intact—navy and burnt-orange crowds, skyline B-roll, Bear Weather debates—inside a modern venue the franchise finally owns.

In the end, the question is not whether the Bears leave Chicago; it is where they land. If the answer is an Indiana lakefront 30 minutes away, the team will still play under the same emblem, backed by the same metropolis, chasing the same championship. The address changes. The identity doesn’t. And for a region left behind by the post-industrial economy, the so-called Indiana Bears might deliver something Soldier Field never could: a genuine home, and a shared future worth cheering.