Is the Wells Fargo Center a total piece of shit?

Claudio Dimuro at Pennlive wrote about the “Dirty Sports Venues Report 2022” at a gambling site:

Betsperts took the number of negative Yelp reviews featuring words such as “dirty” for a bunch of venues across the nation and combined them with the percentage of high-level food safety violations for eateries in each to figure out which were the filthiest. As a means to avoid skewing the final data, stadiums with a total number of reviews below 100 were left out.

It was thus concluded that the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia was the third overall dirtiest stadium, falling behind FedExField in North Englewood, Md. (number two) and the RangCentral Coliseum in Oakland, Calif.

“The Wells Fargo center takes third place, with nearly 3% of fan reviews highlighting how dirty the stadium is,” elaborates the study. “Fans highlight the arena’s dirty floors, a persistent pest problem, and poorly cleaned bathroom facilities.”

I’ve got plenty of thoughts on this:

  1. Prior to the recent upgrades, the WFC was a 25-year-old-building with 50 years of use. One of the reasons it seemed like a mess in there because it was hosting three teams, plus seasonal events, and so the amount of foot traffic in the venue was insane. It was really beat up.
  2. It’s a nice venue now with all of the money Comcast put into it. They really truly did a nice job updating and upgrading pretty much everything.
  3. I’m willing to bet most of the “dirty” reviews were written before the arena was renovated.
  4. The bowels of the WFC are total shit, but fans probably never see these areas. It’s totally worn out, the area in and around the media work room and all of the assorted spots leading up to the locker rooms and arena floor. Same deal as bullet point #1 – there’s just so much going on that these areas have been used and abused.
  5. I haven’t used the regular bathrooms in a good amount of time, but I’ve heard fan complaints.

One thing we do know is that FedExField is a total dump, and the Raiders moved out of the beat-up Oakland Coliseum, which opened way back in the 1960s. The other arenas beyond the top three were Gillette (only been once, seemed okay), Dodger Stadium, and then Mercedes-Benz in Georgia, which just opened. The data is a little goofy though, because the percentage of reviews with “dirty” in the response was actually very little for all of the arenas. Take this “report” for what it’s worth.