Anthony Precourt may have been bent on moving the Crew well before the glorious rebranding, and if he is indeed moving the franchise out of Columbus, he is going about the task with the nefarious civic blindness of some of the all-time greats — conjure Art Modell, Robert Irsay, Walter O’Malley, et al. — and he will be remembered darkly, probably with a football-field-sized tifo painted with the dead-amber tones of Botticelli’s Map of Hell.

That said, Precourt has a point.

The Crew has long had an uneasy relationship with the city of Columbus. It began when the team’s founder, Lamar Hunt, was cut out of the city’s NHL expansion effort, which led to a series of lawsuits. Hunt still believed in the market, though, and in soccer, and a cadre of local owners pitched in for a piece of his soccer enterprise.

Hunt was dead and the locals were cut out of their stakes by the time Precourt bought the franchise for $68 million in 2013. (These days, the team’s worth is estimated to be between $128 million and $138 million.) Precourt’s father was fossil-fuel rich, and Precourt himself was a relatively successful businessman in his own right when he bought his new toy.

The toy came with some problems, including an aging stadium, dwindling attendance and a bottom line that bled red ink. Adding to the stew was the historic rift that lingered between team and city.

It was no secret that Crew was going to need a new stadium to shore up the operation — but the impetus to actually do something was lacking on the municipal side. Put it this way: The powers in Columbus didn’t think the Crew might leave, and there was a lease in place, so they figured they would deal with the stadium issue somewhere down the road.

And here we are. Precourt wants action and, to that end, he is threatening to leave Columbus and see his stadium built somewhere else. Don’t listen to his blather about how the building will be privately financed — there is no such thing as a 100 percent privately financed stadium. In any case, the man has a point — and he’s jamming it in your eye.

Precourt on Tuesday hid behind a desk somewhere — maybe at his office in the Bay Area, maybe in some rented space in Austin, where he is due to visit Wednesday — and teleconference-announced that he is going to build his dream stadium somewhere, maybe in Austin — or maybe in Columbus, provided a whole lot of central Ohioans buy piles of season tickets for what may be a lame-duck season.

What we have here is a double-hostage situation.

“We have to have the confidence in the marketplace in order to be comfortable building a new world-class, soccer-specific, state-of-the-art stadium,” Precourt said. “Um. Again, we have room for improvement as it relates to match-day attendance, and our season-ticket base, and the demand for corporate sponsorship.”

These situations are never good, often because the sports-team owners put their business interests above all truth. Some people dig that. I prefer honesty, and it is in short supply on one side of this tiff.

If Columbus’ movers and shakers have been traditionally slow to recognize the depth of the Crew’s problems, they have been compelled in recent months to search for solutions. They have offered to buy half the team at an independently valued price, rallied sponsors, pledged a larger corporate buy-in and studied how, and where, a Downtown stadium might be built.

As they were doing this, Precourt avoided Columbus as if it were eco-friendly and began negotiating with Austin. Last month, he breezed back in to deliver his “attendance sucks” speech, with charts, and to say he had to have a new stadium. And that was it. He provided no other details. All signs indicate they are being worked out elsewhere.

marace@dispatch.com

@MichaelArace1