The NFL had better wake up and drop a lot of its arrogant manner if it wants to get back in the second-largest market in the United States, Los Angeles. Common sense compromise is the only way they will get back there in the near future.
The NFL has not had a team in Los Angeles since 1994 when the Raiders and Rams went to Oakland and St. Louis, respectively, and there is no immediate plans for a team to return there in the near future.
The main stumbling block is who would pay for a new 75,000 seat stadium that is estimated to cost at least $1.2 billion. While the city overwhelmingly voted to support the construction of a new stadium, they are only willing to advance $350 million towards the project and no more.
The city is not willing to spend taxpayers’ money on a project that will subsidize some rich billionaire and bring little return to hard-pressed taxpayers.
They have observed the sweetheart deals in Atlanta and Minneapolis that combined put over $1 billion in billionaire NFL owners’ pockets. The city of Los Angeles is chronically in debt and cannot afford to do that. Furthermore most of these deals put the bulk of the revenues, parking, ticket prices, merchandise in the hands of the owner. The taxpayers in general have to wait a long time to recoup their expenditures.
But the NFL is blinded by its own arrogance. It cannot forgive Los Angeles for letting the Rams and Raiders go with just a yawn and refusing to come crawling back on its knees in a few years to build a new stadium–actually two–and get a new franchise.
At the same time, for North America’s No. 1 sporting league to not have even one team in the second-largest city in the United States, a metropolitan area of over 13 million people, where even lowly soccer can have two franchises is humiliating.
But the NFL is so blinded by arrogance that it cannot see that the longer Los Angeles goes without a team, the less the NFL will really matter.
Even the most enthusiastic city councilman realizes that mindlessly spending taxpayers’ money on a sports facility is not going to be popular politically. Los Angeles also has lots of other attractions such as baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, Hollywood, Disneyland and the beach to notice the absence of the NFL except for the most rabid fans.
Even when the Rams and Raiders were present, many games never sold out, meaning that the NFL blackout policy went into effect. There is no guarantee that a new team would sell out either. Why should a taxpayer want to build a new stadium when he probably cannot afford the price of a ticket and he might never see his team play at home on television?
Also during the years of “bereavement,” many of Los Angeles’s football fans have been quite content to cheer for other NFL teams and with today’s technology, they can watch any NFL game they like if they have means of doing it. They are not suffering because they have no home team.
It makes one wonder how badly the NFL wants to get back in Los Angeles. To them, the city must seem like a goose that lays golden eggs instead of the hard economic reality the city faces.
And it is so obsessed with getting back in Los Angeles to correct the “affront” the city delivered, it has postponed expansion to other cities that want a team. Not even thoughts of the billions in revenue from expansion fees, merchandising, ticket sales, and media deals that other cities are willing to offer has swayed the NFL from its Los Angeles obsession.
Sensible healing compromise is the only way the NFL will get back in Los Angeles soon. The NFL has to realize that it is not God Almighty, something the taxpayers of Los Angeles are well schooled about.
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