California
Schemin’
By
Thomas Mattera, Dirt
Diggers Digest
Most
of the hot air released at last month’s National Football League owners meeting
in San Francisco had nothing to do with ball deflation. Instead, the hyper-exclusive club, with three dozen members and a cumulative net worth of $77,000,000,000, discussed something much more important long-term than a month without Tom Brady’s chiseled jaw: the possible move of several teams to the Los Angeles area as early as the 2016 season.
The
star-struck franchises in question, the St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders, and
San Diego Chargers, have each ramped up their efforts in the last few months.
The Rams have wasted no time imploding historic structures to make
room on a plot of land in suburban Inglewood recently acquired by team owner
Stan Kroenke. Meanwhile, the Raiders and Chargers are proposing a joint $1.7
billion stadium in nearby Carson, to be paid for largely by a certain vampire
squid’s creative accounting.
These
maneuvers are nothing new. Threatening to move your team to Los Angeles is as
ubiquitous in the NFL as unpunished domestic violence and long term tax dodging. Since the league
left the City of Angels in 1995, an owner claiming to be interested in moving
there has become a perennial event, with more than half of the league’s
franchises using the football-vacant city as leverage at one point or another.
The playbook at this point is tried and true:
- Claim your current stadium is too old to compete for paying customers and is fast becoming structurally unsound.
- Insist taxpayers bear the cost of a new stadium or large-scale repairs to your old one.
- If demands are not immediately met, float the possibility of moving to Los Angeles.
- Champion the idea that a new stadium will bring much needed economic development to a struggling area. Pay no mind to the overwhelming evidence debunking this theory.
- (optional) If local officials still wont capitulate, fly in a theoretically impartial high ranking NFL official to seal the deal.
When area politicians inevitably cave, announce that you will be staying because of your undying loyalty to the hardworking fans of (insert city here).
Reap
the near instant private rewards as the value of your team skyrockets while the city deals with
the decades-long impacts of unforeseen construction costs and hundreds of millions in public debt.
The
owners of the Rams, Raiders, and Chargers have shown no interest in deviating
from this well-worn gameplan. Kroenke, a billionaire six times over who built
his empire by marrying into the Walton family and
developing shopping centers (many of them subsidized projects anchored by Walmarts),
has yet to even sit bother to sit down with officials in St. Louis to try to
broker a compromise. Yet this has not stopped the cash-strapped city from
offering a new stadium deal replete with public financing.
Not
to be outdone, the owners of the Chargers and Raiders recently announced in a joint statement that
“If we cannot find a permanent solution in our home markets, we have no
alternative but to preserve other options to guarantee the future economic
viability of our franchises.”
Unlike the Rams, however, both current California
teams face fierce pushback against public funding for
new stadiums from legislators and residents. These cities are indicative of how
American municipalities are slowly realizing the error of their ways and
beginning to demand an end to subsidized billion-dollar boondoggles.
If
the people of Oakland and San Diego stay organized in their resistance, the
owners of the Rams and Chargers may be forced have to skip all the way down to
the fine print at the bottom of the owners playbook:
- If you cannot sufficiently extort a wildly favorable deal from your current city, just move to Los Angeles.
After
all, teams do occasionally follow through on their threats and actually
relocate. Case in point: The Rams left L.A. for St Louis 20 years ago, in large
part because of the construction of the Edward Jones Dome, a building for which
Missouri taxpayers still owe millions a year in annual maintenance payments for the
next decade, even if the Rams move back West.
Additionally,
there is an obvious reason teams have and continue to make the L.A. threat even
if, for them at least, it is almost always an idle one. America’s largest
traffic jam is the nation’s No.2 media market and in the past has shown it will
support professional football. Moving there may be the best way for NFL owners
to support their real favorite team: The Greenbacks.
These
factors are not lost on the Rams, Raiders, or Chargers. Any of the three could
ultimately decide to move past hypotheticals and formally propose a move at the
next owners’ meeting in August.
It is here where they will face a group
significantly less generous than a bunch of local political pushovers. Any move
to L.A. needs to be approved by 24 of the NFL’s 32 franchises, which figures to
be a tall order.
After all, with the L.A. vacancy filled what will the rest of
the owners do the next time they feel the hankering for a shiny new stadium?
Negotiate in good faith?
Or..gasp..actually pay for it themselves?