With talks over new stadiums in their home cities stalling — or at least not progressing as their owners would like — the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders will Friday unveil a proposal to build a stadium for the teams to share in Los Angeles, a not-so-thinly-veiled threat that it is time for their cities and their taxpayers to show them the money.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the plan the teams will formally announce Friday calls for a $1.7 billion privately-financed stadium in Carson, Calif., just outside of Los Angeles. But for now, despite the constant talk of Los Angeles relocations and now an actual plan, neither team is actually serious about moving. They admitted as much in a joint statement to the Times:
“We are pursuing this stadium option in Carson for one straightforward reason: 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.”
In other words, they are going to hang the potential of a Los Angeles move over the heads of taxpayers and politicians in Oakland and San Diego in an effort to get those cities to give them hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for new stadiums.
Using Los Angeles as this sort of threat is a tried and true strategy in the NFL, where LA has become perhaps even more valuable to the league as a whole without a team than it would be with one. This is why owners constantly bloviate about how the league could make a triumphant return to the City of Angels in five, 10, or two years, moving the timeline around however they need to in order to keep the possibility just enough alive to scare other cities into loosening their purse strings (or, more appropriately, handing over the entire purse). Look no farther than Minnesota, where commissioner Roger Goodell personally warned legislators that the league didn’t want the Vikings to move out west but that, if the city and state didn’t cough up money, it’d have no choice but to consider it. The Vikings now have a new stadium on the way.
The difference is that now the league has three separate teams trying to use LA as that sort of threat, which is almost surely why the Chargers and Raiders — hated division rivals — are teaming up this way. The St. Louis Rams are also contemplating — or at least pretending to contemplate — a move to Los Angeles, and while LA could potentially end up with two teams, it likely won’t get three. By joining together, the Chargers and Raiders can push the Rams out of the picture, or at least put themselves at the front of the line with a more attractive proposal that allows them to each use LA as a leverage point against their cities.
It’s certainly possible that all three of these owners want to move their teams to Los Angeles, and that they’re willing to offer their own financing to do so. And while there are obstacles to doing so, if all three try to move it could create major headaches for the league. Still, it seems more likely that all three teams are posturing in the hopes of getting new stadiums in their current cities, hoping that St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland will blink and hand over the money. That’s already happening in St. Louis, where news of a potential relocation led to a more generous stadium proposal than the city and state had previously offered. And if history is any guide, the other two cities will try their hardest to do the same.