The NFL may want St. Louis to think that it needs to cough up a pile of stadium money to have a shot at keeping the Rams, but that doesn’t mean the league — or at least, everyone in the league — is ready to let the team move, either. Here’s Pittsburgh Steelers owner and NFL stadium committee chair Art Rooney on Friday, explaining that any attempt to move the Rams will have to go through him:
“There are still cards to be played,” Rooney told The [Los Angeles] Times in his first public comments since Kroenke unveiled his vision for a state-of-the-art stadium on the Hollywood Park site. “There’s still a process that has to work its way out, and we don’t know what the outcome’s going to be yet. That’s why we have league committees and approval processes.”
Rooney’s words were measured but his message was clear that the NFL is going to make the decisions on stadiums and relocation.
“I think we’re comfortable that we could stop a team legally from moving if it didn’t go through the process,” Rooney said.
There’s nothing actually contradictory here: The NFL (or at least Rooney) wants to assert its power to decide who plays where, especially after Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones last week implied that Rams owner Stan Kroenke could pick up and go to L.A. without league approval if he wanted to. Plus, there does seem to be a message to NFL owners here: We’ll do the best we can to shake down cities for stadium subsidies, but if we succeed, you need to take the cash and stay put, or else nobody’s going to believe us anymore when we say we can deliver the goods.
That’s how it reads currently, anyway. It’s also always possible that the NFL league office, Rooney, Jones, and the other 30 NFL owners are each all angling to prop up their own specific interests, and the notion of “what the NFL wants” is a mere illusion. Just because they’re a billionaires’ club, after all, doesn’t mean that they can manage their affairs any better than any other group of people thrown together by circumstance.
If they announced they were leaving to LA tomorrow – the tickets sales could plummet next year in St. Louis when the new LA stadium’s being built. I’m sure they’ll go through the right process, but I doubt it’ll be announced publicly. The NFL popular enough that if it was announce publicly, St. Louis could still sell out games but the gameday atmosphere would be remarkably strange.
Even if “his words were measured,” sounds like an owner of a mid-major city, where it’s cold & miserable 8 months a year, sees another mid-major city moving to the 2nd largest market to a nicer facility, so he’ll have to watch a team Forbes valuation double or triple within a decade, which is an option that the Steeler’s don’t have since that team is one of the most successful in the NFL. Though despite being an owner of a successful franchise, seeing another franchise make an huge leap forward incites resentment. It seems petty to me.
I could be wrong, it could have nothing to do with claiming LA’s massive market. Perhaps Art Rooney II, worth about $1 Billion, doesn’t like the idea of Rams owner Stan Kroenke and wife Ann Walton Kroenke, worth a combined $10.5 Billion, tack on a couple billion more….. never know how billionaires compare themselves to other billionaires. I’m sure there’s a lot of ego involved.
BRING BACK THE LOS ANGELES RAMS, 2015!!! NO LAME DUCK season in STL.
I think that allowing any team in LA would be detrimental to new or upgraded stadium efforts by the other owners. Hasn’t that been the deal since the last team left LA, to be the relocation threat so local governments will pony up the cash? How many teams have made noises about relocating to LA, only to stick around in a new or upgraded stadium?
Stan Kroenke’s proposed stadium in Inglewood has done a ton of damage to any Chargers proposal. All of the sway votes have or will be swamped with stories of Kroenke paying for his own stadium in LA and are or will ask why should we pay for the Spanos family.
The newest argument against the Chargers is that we lose Comic Con and other conventions if we don’t expand the convention center in one contiguous building. Foulconer and his Hotel buddies are more likely to chose the Convention Center as the top priority. Everyone in San Diego knows we wont do both projects, we have a large number of “get off my lawn” no on everything voters that makes anything difficult to pass.
Let’s not overcomplicated things – that happens a lot around here. Rooney is the hammer and Grubman is the chisel. Local pols are a brick. Hammer hits chisel hits brick and chips start flying. Chisel gets hot, lubricate with payola. Rinse, repeat for a year or two, presto, brick crumbles and… Public Stadium Cash, baby!
It’s a time-tested formula. Stage props like land in L.A., declarations of Stan’s will to power, Inglewood “memorandums”, etc. are valuable stage props when the circus comes to town. Ringmaster Rooney promises the greatest show on turf! I know it is just that cuz I got a billion dollar palace rising out of a hole in the ground up in Minny and the plebes got the leftover peanuts the elephants didn’t eat, hee hee. Heck, not only do they have to pay for it with tax dough, but they have to cough up seat license cash for me too! Is this a great country or what?