Last week, a new angle in the debate over White Stadium’s merits opened up with reporting and analysis focused on the Wu administration’s back-and-forth with the women’s pro soccer team’s ownership. Opponents seized on the notion that Wu somehow acted improperly in advance of a city-issued Request for Proposals that ultimately produced the deal with the BOSNation team that’s now advancing.

It all reads as an anti-climactic bunch of sour grapes. And when one considers the history of stadium speculation that’s happened in this town over the years, it seems downright silly.

Case in point: Roughly a decade ago, the Kraft family engaged in unilateral and private negotiations with the University of Massachusetts to site a professional soccer stadium for the New England Revolution here in Dorchester’s Columbia Point neighborhood. The idea was eventually scuttled and the state-owned land targeted for the stadium is instead now under a lease agreement with private developers, who intend to build-out a massive mixed-use community called Dorchester Bay City.

But, let’s back up a moment. When news broke about closed-door talks between the Krafts and UMass leaders, there was a good deal of excitement from some quarters, mainly soccer fans. But there was also a healthy dose of criticism about the opaque nature of the deal. Why was a hush-hush deal happening without an open bid process?

After all, the site in question — the former Bayside Expo Center— was and is owned by the UMass Building Authority, a quasi-public entity. UMass acquired the 20 acre-site for $18.7 million in 2010, the result of a foreclosure by a previous owner (Corcoran Jennison Co., who own the Bayside Office Center where The Reporter is a tenant) who had hoped to build something closer to what Dorchester Bay City is expected to be.

In 2014, the Bayside site became a focal point when boosters of the 2024 Boston Olympic bid included it as its prospective Olympic Village in a bid that was initially successful, but ultimately abandoned amid pushback in 2015. It was in the immediate aftermath of the abortive Olympic bid that the Kraft contingent took a keen interest.

When word of “preliminary talks” surfaced initially in 2016, a spokesman for the UMass’s President Marty Meehan told us: “We’ve worked closely with the Kraft family in the past and have a shared desire to create new opportunities for our students and for the Commonwealth.”

The Krafts later claimed that they were “invited to put together a stadium proposal” in 2015.

Once it went public, the idea earned mixed reviews.

Congressman Stephen F. Lynch— who’d tussled with Robert Kraft years before when the sports mogul eyed his district’s South Boston waterfront for a potential new home for the Patriots franchise— called it a “bad idea.”

Others, including this author, were open-minded, but thought that it was odd that there was no traditional bidding process to identify the “best and highest use” available in the marketplace. UMass eventually did just that with an open and fair process that resulted in multiple responses and the Dorchester Bay City project, which could yield UMass more than $230 million in lease payments.

The Krafts could have been a contender.

Curiously, they never put in a public bid once one was offered to everyone. In a cryptic statement in May 2017, Robert and Jonathan Kraft bemoaned that they had invested “millions of dollars and thousands of staff hours” on the stadium planning.

They even debuted a rendering of a luminous 20,000 seat stadium (pictured above) that had never surfaced until after the Krafts declared it dead.

It was a strange sequence that smacked of entitlement by folks who wanted a sweetheart deal without the headaches of public scrutiny. In the current debate over White Stadium, it seems even more bizarre as Josh Kraft and other Wu opponents take pot-shots at the White Stadium process.

It all reeks of selective memory, at best, and hypocrisy at worst.

Josh Kraft wasn't a player in the UMass deal, apparently. But his family was and is very much a party to the ongoing negotiations with Boston and Everett to site a new version of the Revs stadium near Encore Casino. And he's been a vocal critic of Wu's positions on the Franklin Park-White Stadium front, all of which makes him open to this critique, especially as a would-be mayor for Boston.

Whatever their foibles, at least the Wu administration put out an open RFP for White Stadium that anyone could have answered. The mayor and her administration allowed for extensive public input over nearly two years of a process before signing an agreement that includes clear guardrails for the city's taxpayers.

None of that was part of the equation a decade ago when The Reporter and others blew the whistle on the no-bid Kraft-UMass plan.

Let’s keep that in mind as this current White Stadium stadium discussion unfolds.

Bill Forry is the executive editor and co-publisher of the Reporter.