Financing an arena is not possible without a tenant to guarantee a huge number of nights.
The except for 1 exception , the only tenants in North America that can do so are sports conglomerates. (Only two non-sports groups with ‘private’ arenas, 02 in London (it’s renovations were so extensive it was as expensive as new), and the coming MGS sphere in Las Vegas)
The goal with an arena is to get it used the most number of nights possible to spread the costs out over as many users as possible. When the Saddledome was only the Flames and concerts/events in the early 90s the nightly rent produced enough revenue to generate a yearly loss of $9 million plus in ~’94 dollars.
An arena without the Flames is just not going to happen.
leases can be structured in very different ways. Headleases are way easier. No complicated financial flows, optimizations.
Why not charge CSEC by the night? Frankly the reasonable charge if concession and ad revenue is retained by the arena owner is negative: paying the Flames to play there.
The economics of arenas are counter intuitive and break our brains. Because of that it is really hard politically to get them done.