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Football is family…until the two sides don’t see eye to eye about financing for stadium. Then football becomes a business as I previously discussed here. If your city refuses to chip in on a new stadium or cannot afford to, you can expect to see your favorite team in another city. Just ask the cities of Oakland and San Diego California. Both lost (or will lose) their team for failure to play ball the NFL way.
It all began about a year ago with the Rams moving back to Los Angeles behind the mighty checkbook of Stan Kroenke. The NFL had always wanted LA, but never had the means to get anything done. After all, the only football stadiums that received public money were multipurpose stadiums built in the 1960s. Kroenke solved that issue by putting up the money to get his Inglewood project done. The league couldn’t say no to that. Their goal, was to “get LA right”. However, in their desire to get LA right, they may have destroyed the football climate in California by stabbing longtime fans in the back. But again, this is just business at the end of the day. One thing they may not have foreseen will be the impact on future stadium projects.
With the Rams and Chargers occupying Los Angeles, the NFL has officially lost it’s most reliable ace: “build your team a new stadium or we’ll move it to LA”. With the preverbal boogieman gone, the NFL runs into a big problem. Which city becomes their leverage city? Las Vegas would’ve been a good option, but they’ve already committed the Raiders to play in the gambling mecca. San Diego would be a good option, but they’ve already shot down attempts to build stadiums with public money. St. Louis probably doesn’t want to risk another Rams fiasco and would likely only want an expansion team of their own. Logistically speaking, London is a mess that the NFL isn’t even close to figuring out. And finally, I doubt the owners of the Cowboys and Texans would be too keen on allowing a team into San Antonio. Let’s face it, the NFL overplayed their hand with their commitments in Los Angels and Las Vegas. They’ve left themselves vulnerable to cities opting to fight it out over public money for a stadium doomed to rarely ever do what they claim to.
So what are the alternatives? The smart thing to do would be investing in renovations. With the rising cost of stadiums, it’s likely this will become to go to option for owners wanting something shiny and new to sell to the fans and fill up their wallets. Other than that, they may run into trouble if any city decides to play hardball in negotiations. We’ll see how future stadium negotiations go, but it looks like the NFL may have boxed themselves into a corner for the future. After all, where will you move a team if a city dares to say no?
