L.A. dropped the (foot)ball - From two NFL teams to none

I love NFL football, and I’m not alone. From coast-to-coast, the NFL owns Sundays in the fall and winter. And I don’t care who you are or where you live, I can already tell you where you’re going to be on the last Sunday in January next year: at a Super Bowl party watching a football game. As a New England Patriots fan (not a band-wagoneer, I’m actually from Boston), I’m lucky because I know there’s a good chance my home-town team will be playing in that game. But if I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t even care. Because if I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, I know there is no chance my home-town team will be playing. The worst part is the reason why that kid (and any other kid who has grown up here in the last 12 years) doesn’t have a home-town NFL team to root for: because the city of Los Angeles doesn’t understand that an NFL team needs a modern stadium. So while Maryland (for example) can build not one, but two NFL stadiums, the great state of California (among the top ten economies in the world) and the city of Los Angeles (the 2nd largest media market in America) can’t even build one. And that’s a crying shame because kids growing up in LA are deprived of the joy of football on Sundays.

It didn’t have to be this way - LA had both the Rams and the Raiders playing here. But the Rams were playing in an outdated stadium in Anaheim, and the Raiders were playing at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which the Rams had abandoned because it was too old). Then Personal Seat Licenses (giving fans exclusive rights to buy season tickets for a particular seat in a stadium) became the rage in the NFL. The money from PSL’s became a powerful new revenue stream to provide financing for stadium construction - which could be used to lure a team to a new city. And that’s exactly what happened. With Los Angeles unwilling or unable to work out a deal to update either building, the Rams went back to St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland - and their owners pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. At the end of the day, it was the costs associated with the Northridge Earthquake which convinced the LA Sports Commission not to renovate the Coliseum, and it was that incredibly short-sighted decision which cost LA - and the kids growing up here – their home-town NFL team.

Since then, Los Angeles has gotten further and further out of touch with the realities of becoming an NFL city. With the Rams and Raiders gone, there are only two ways to get pro football back: relocation or expansion. But when Baltimore used a new stadium and PSL money to entice the Browns to leave Cleveland in 1995, relocation was off the table. That left expansion. Unfortunately, starting an NFL team from scratch takes money – and lots of it. And when then-Governor Gray Davis wouldn’t allocate $150 million of public money to build parking garages for a new stadium in 1998, he told any potential team owner that they shouldn’t expect any love from the city or the state. The NFL got the message there isn’t really any interest in having a team here, and the great city of Los Angeles, the capital of America’s entertainment industry, was shown up by Houston, Texas (which had a $300 million stadium plan in place and an owner ready to pay the $700 million franchise fee) when it was granted the NFL’s 32nd team.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the city of Los Angeles needs an NFL franchise. This isn’t Cleveland, Ohio or Green Bay, Wisconsin – so it’s not like the city’s identity is tied to its pro football team. There is no question that the city’s bread will always be buttered by the film and television industries. But how can Los Angeles not have NFL football when the Rams were here before the Lakers or the Dodgers? It just doesn’t make any sense to me that a city in southern California (of all places) can have two pro hockey teams and no pro football team.

The worst part is how LA has been played for a fool ever since. Team owners in Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, and Seattle have all used LA’s lack of NFL football as leverage to secure some kind of public financing for new stadiums, while kids growing up in LA have to choose between the Trojans or the Bruins - and never have a team to root for on Sundays.