Success Quote by Art Modell

Modell is doing something brashly honest here: he’s saying the quiet part of American civic life out loud. In one swipe, he pits the slow-burn public good of libraries against the instant, televised adrenaline of a football franchise and insists the latter matters more. Not morally. Not intellectually. Politically.

The line is engineered as a provocation. “Pride and presence” are words from the language of identity, not entertainment. A team, in Modell’s framing, isn’t a product; it’s a flag. Libraries, meanwhile, are reduced to a countable, almost interchangeable unit: “30.” The number is the point. It makes knowledge look like infrastructure and fandom look like destiny.

The subtext is power: who gets to define a city’s story and where public money and public attention flow. Modell, best known as the owner who moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in the 1990s, understood leverage. Teams extract subsidies, stadium deals, loyalty campaigns, and political protection precisely because they can threaten absence. A library can’t relocate to Jacksonville.

Read this as a businessman’s doctrine dressed up as civic philosophy. He’s wagering that belonging beats learning, spectacle beats services, and that a weekly ritual shared by tens of thousands (plus millions watching) produces a stronger, more governable “we” than any number of quiet rooms full of books. It’s cynical, but it’s also an accurate x-ray of what many cities reward: not the institutions that make residents more capable, but the ones that make them feel like they’re winning.