Ahmad Austin Jr.May 18th, 2026, 3:45 pm

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) threw Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) under the bus for allegedly having “no plan” to keep the Bears in the city.

Overall, during the last few years, the future home of the Chicago Bears has been the subject of great debate among team, city, and state officials. While the team has its eyes set on relocating to a nearby suburb — or even crossing state lines into Indiana — the city wants the Bears to stay.

Johnson has been vocal in his desire to keep the Bears in Chicago. As noted in a report from Chicago Business, the mayor first proposed building a new stadium two years ago. With that plan falling through, Johnson recently suggested taking over the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority. This plan, the report continued, “would allow the city to control how future money is allocated while potentially expanding the agency’s authority to finance other tourism-related infrastructure projects.”

Pritzker, however, has been less than enthusiastic about the idea. Speaking to the press Monday, the governor even suggested that Johnson has no real plan, saying:

I know that the mayor has no plan. He has come up with no plan at all about how the Bears would end up in the city of Chicago, so that’s problematic. I’d love them to be in the city, but we’re three years in now and he still has no plan.

So, the Bears have said publicly, and I think they said so last Friday again, that they have now only two options, and that’s the state of Indiana or Arlington Heights. We would like them to stay in the state of Illinois, and so I’m fighting hard to make sure that they can do that, and also, very importantly, because my North Star is protecting the taxpayers of Illinois, that we have something that works for the state of Illinois, that’s fair — as we are being fair with with other businesses that want to come to Illinois or expand here — that we’re being fair in the allocation of support for a business expanding in the state, while also protecting taxpayers across the state.

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