Category: Los Angeles NFL team

So here’s some things that happened on Friday:

• The San Diego Union-Tribune reported (in an article no longer online in its original form) that the Los Angeles Rams (we should start calling them that now, right?) and San Diego Chargers had reached agreement in principle on a deal to share the Rams’ new Inglewood stadium.
• Chargers owner Dean Spanos issued an open letter to fans stating that “our team will stay in San Diego for the 2016 season” and while he has an “option” to move to L.A., “my focus is on San Diego.”

So what does this mean, exactly? Clearly, Spanos has gotten Rams owner Stan Kroenke to agree to give him the rest of the year to lobby San Diego to cough up more money to keep its team — or as Spanos put it in his letter, to “determine the best next steps and how to deploy the additional resources provided by the NFL.” (That’d be the extra $100 million that the NFL is offering Oakland and San Diego as a sweetener for stadium deals, something that was completely unthinkable when it was St. Louis asking for it.) So expect some nasty, nasty stadium talks to continue the rest of this year, with Spanos clearing his throat and glancing in the general direction of Inglewood anytime someone suggests he kick in more of his own money.

The big question San Diego needs to be asking now is at what point Spanos will feel comfortable walking away from the table and going to Los Angeles — which unfortunately is unknowable, since the details of the deal between Kroenke and Spanos aren’t public. In fact, we have no way of knowing if the details have even been spelled out yet — it’s entirely possible that Spanos went to Kroenke and said, “Stan, let’s put out an announcement, I gotta light a fire under San Diego, we can work out the rest later,” and Kroenke grunted enigmatically.

In short, the NFL owners are playing this perfectly, levying move threats while openly proclaiming their love for current NFL cities (the better not to provoke pitchforks and torches) and holding their cards close to their vest. Which shouldn’t be surprising, as this is the business they’re in, but it’s always inspiring to watch evil geniuses at work up close. If the Chargers do end up getting the cash and staying put, it’ll be interesting to see if Raiders owner Mark Davis can pull off the same trick with Oakland.

Unsourced reports! We got more unsourced reports about what’s going to happen to the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders!

Reports #Chargers will announce move to LA next week blocking #Raiders return. Raiders then to #San Diego.

— Fred Roggin (@FredRoggin) January 16, 2016

And sure enough, execs of the Chargers and the Los Angeles Rams (guess we should start calling them that now, huh?) met yesterday, and afterwards issued this statement:

We have concluded our first meeting. We mutually have agreed not to publicly discuss details of this or any future meeting.

Okay, so that doesn’t sound like an agreement is imminent. But it could be! And sources are predicting it, and correct predictions can come from all kinds of sources!

In other news, NFL owners are saying that it was the pretty pictures that Stan Kroenke provided of his planned football theme park in Inglewood that swayed them to approve the Rams move, after initially leaning toward the shared Chargers/Raiders plan in Carson. If true, this is absolutely terrifying — not because the pictures aren’t pretty (as pictures of people wandering hand-in-hand through a futuristic dreamscape go, they’re top-notch), but because it means that NFL owners are susceptible to Calvin’s clear plastic binder. Me, I would have wanted to see some actual financial numbers, even if they were half made-up, but that’s not how these guys roll, apparently.

Multiple insider-type NFL columnists (Mike Florio, Kevin Acee) are reporting that, according to league sources, there’s a poison pill of sorts in the agreement to move the St. Louis Rams to L.A. that could help encourage Stan Kroenke to cut a deal with the San Diego Chargers to play in his new Inglewood stadium: The league has barred Kroenke from starting to sell naming rights, club seats, PSLs and sponsorships until 2017 — unless he brings in a second team before then, at which point he can start selling those immediately.

If true, this is really fiendishly clever of the NFL owners. Without this clause, Kroenke would have almost no incentive to offer a fair deal to shack up with the Chargers, since he’d know he’d have them over a barrel. Instead, he now has a carrot for an early agreement — as does Chargers owner Dean Spanos, who’ll know that the sooner he signs on to Inglewood, the better a lease he’s likely to get from Kroenke.

Spanos now has a big decision to make, because under normal circumstances he’d want to use the Inglewood threat to try to force San Diego into upping its stadium offer, but since that would likely have to wait for a public vote in November, it would eat up all of his leverage with Kroenke. One report that Spanos and Kroenke are already hashing something out was immediately shot down by a Chargers spokesperson, but team execs have otherwise been silent on their plans.

Meanwhile, more of those “league sources” tell Acee that Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis is interested in maybe moving his team to San Diego — either at a new stadium or a renovated Qualcomm Stadium — and, and … you know, with all these unnamed-source leaks and so many factions still in play, it’s really impossible to know what’s truth and what’s people trying to spin perceptions, so let’s just stop there. Instead, enjoy Rams and Chargers fans telling Deadspin all the ways they’d like to see Kroenke and Spanos die gruesome deaths.

After a long day that dragged well into evening (for East Coasters, at least), the 32 NFL owners finally voted on which teams to approve moving to Los Angeles, and the verdict was: Stan Kroenke has approval to move the St. Louis Rams immediately while building a stadium in Inglewood, while Dean Spanos has until next January to work out a deal to have the San Diego Chargers join them, with Mark Davis getting second dibs on having the Oakland Raiders share digs with the Rams if the Chargers turn it down.

In other words, pretty much exactly what I predicted on Monday. Yay me! (Though with the writing on the wall at that point, it wasn’t that tough of a guess.)

I’ve written up a long analysis of the winners and losers of this decision for Vice Sports, so please go there now if you want the full blow by blow. For here, I’ll just note a few highlights from The Decision: NFL Edition:

• Man, Stan Kroenke sure wanted to move to L.A., didn’t he? He’s now on the hook for $2.66 billion in stadium construction costs (according to his claims, anyway, but even if it’s only $1.8 billion that’s still a lot), plus $550 million in relocation fees, which even for a guy with a $7.5 billion net worth is a significant chunk of change. He’ll be able to avail himself of the L.A. market for personal seat licenses and naming rights, and $200 million in NFL G-4 money, and about $180 million in sales tax kickbacks, and … and I still don’t see how he’s ever going to make back his investment, given that only one team in football is worth $2 billion more than the Rams were in St. Louis, and that’s the Dallas Cowboys, who are a case unto themselves. Branding his development as some kind of NFL theme park had better be history’s most successful business move ever, that’s all I can say.
• All y’all who said the NFL would never approve a stadium plan that was mostly private money, they just did. In fact, this is the third stadium in recent years with relatively little in the way of public subsidies, following the San Francisco 49ers and the New York Giants and Jets. I wouldn’t presume to think this is going to be a trend — plenty of teams in smaller and less subsidy-averse markets are still getting money thrown at them — but it does show that in particular circumstances, owner-funded stadiums can and will happen.
• There are a lot of shoes still to drop. First and foremost, Spanos and Kroenke need to start talking about a lease deal for a shared Inglewood stadium, something that hasn’t even begun to happen, given that 24 hours ago Spanos still insisted he’d never consider such a thing. At that point, a new two-front game of chicken will begin, with Spanos simultaneously playing the “I can just go back to San Diego” card with Kroenke and the “I’m outta here if you don’t cough up a stadium” card with San Diego. Meanwhile, Davis is almost certain to start playing footsie with St. Louis for its now-rejected $477 million stadium subsidy offer — in his post-meeting statements last night, he made a point of talking about “Raider Nation” without breathing the word “Oakland” — though he’s unlikely to pull the trigger on anything until he sees whether the Los Angeles option is entirely closed to him.

That’s it for now — like I said, head over to Vice if you want more. Though one more item that I didn’t get to include in the Vice piece is this jaw-dropper from Kroenke post-decision:

Stan Kroenke just said the Rams moving will "help a lot of people with lower incomes." Yes, I'm sure that was his motivation for doing this.

— Michael David Smith (@MichaelDavSmith) January 13, 2016

Yep, that’s what it was all about: Think of the children. That’ll be sure to get at least a footnote in the next edition of the stadium-grubbers’ playbook.

[UPDATE: One more twist that hadn’t occurred to me when I filed my Vice story: What happens to PSL holders in St. Louis? Looks like they could try to sue for the right to buy Rams tickets in Los Angeles, which even if it would almost certainly fail, would be frickin’ hilarious.]

Today and tomorrow are the NFL meetings where owners will vote (or not) on which teams will be allowed to move to Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times’s Sam Farmer says there could be a breakthrough in the deadlock:

On the brink of a vote that could return the NFL to Los Angeles, a consensus is building within the league for the St. Louis Rams and San Diego Chargers to share a stadium in Inglewood.

Multiple league officials and owners not involved with the Inglewood project, or the competing proposal in Carson, say there is momentum to pair the two franchises in what one owner describes as a “transformational” project backed by the Rams.

That would be huge indeed, since so far Chargers owner Dean Spanos has expressed no interest in sharing digs with the Rams in Inglewood, while Rams owner Stan Kroenke doesn’t want to go in on the Chargers site in Carson. So if everyone’s on the same page now, that’s exactly the kind of compromise that could lead to—

“On December 7, the Chargers made clear in writing that we had zero interest in the Inglewood project, and nothing has changed since then,” Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said Monday in a statement to USA TODAY Sports.

Oh.

There’s still a chance that the Times report indicates that owners are planning to deliver Spanos an ultimatum: Either join the Rams in Inglewood or stay put in San Diego. (Farmer also reports that there’s a growing interest in holding the vote by secret ballot, which would make it easier for Spanos’s friends to vote this way without having to admit to it, though with only 32 people in the room it won’t be too hard to guess who voted how.) Though it’s equally likely that the unnamed owners who spoke with Farmer are just trying to create momentum for their plan by leaking it to the press, rather than reporting honestly on it, and the stalemate is still in place. Won’t know until we hear how the vote goes, really.

This is total speculation and tea-leaf reading, but I’m more and more leaning toward putting my money on what I suggested yesterday, an agreement that’s contingent on a deal being worked out — either “We approve the Rams and Chargers moving if they can work out a shared stadium deal” or “We approve the Rams moving, and the Chargers can too if they agree to share the Rams stadium.” That would kick the hard part — working out an agreement between Kroenke and Spanos not just on where to play but on how to divvy up the costs and revenues of a shared stadium — back to those two guys, and at least leave the rest of the league feeling like they’ve accomplished something this week. Though it would still mean we wouldn’t be sure which teams if any were moving where for several more weeks or months, and could end up leading to some really sad lame-duck seasons in 2016.

Or it could still prove impossible to get 24 votes for any one plan, and nothing could get decided. There’s really no predicting what a roomful of rich guys will do.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell declared stadium proposals in St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland to all be “unsatisfactory and inadequate” on Saturday, which is … exactly what you would expect the NFL commissioner to do in this situation, frankly. The guy is facing a vote of owners that needs 24 of 32 people in the room to agree on something, so this way all butts are covered, since any team they want to approve moving to L.A., now they can justify it on the grounds that its current city’s stadium offer was inadequate. Also, now all three cities are on notice that the NFL wants more money, dammit. This is Commissionership 101, and means absolutely squat in terms of who’s going to be approved to move to L.A. or not.

Meanwhile, in news that could be of far greater import:

• Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones submitted a formal resolution to the NFL that the San Diego Chargers be approved to share a stadium in Inglewood with the St. Louis Rams. Jones is an ally of Rams owner Stan Kroenke, so this is just a formalization of Kroenke’s gambit to offer to share his L.A. digs with the Chargers, something that Chargers owner Dean Spanos has so far rejected. It’s an official proposal now, though, for whatever that’s worth.
• Rams officials have told the NFL that an Inglewood stadium could now cost as much as $2.66 billion. Let me type that again: $2.66 billion. Add in $550 million in relocation fees, and Kroenke would seemingly be insane to take on these kinds of costs just to move to a bigger market (which doesn’t matter nearly as much in the NFL thanks to the lack of local cable rights). Of course, the Inglewood project includes a whole lot more than a football stadium, so it’s always possible he’s throwing in non-stadium costs in a gambit to get the league to reduce its relocation fee demands, or to force the Chargers to give up more in rent and/or stadium revenue as part of any shared lease, or something like that. (It’s also counting “financing costs,” so there’s a chance he’s doing something like adding up all future interest payments as if they were present value, though more likely he just means the cost of hiring bond lawyers.)
• The NFL plans to levy a 20% “flip back tax” on any sale of a portion of teams moving to Los Angeles. That could be pricey for the Chargers or Raiders if Disney CEO Robert Iger takes advantage of a clause in his deal to lend his name to those teams’ relocation efforts that lets him buy a share of one of those teams if he likes.
• San Diego is considering turning its current stadium site into a university campus if the Chargers leave, which, sure, all the kids are doing it.

The upshot of all this is not much, and I’d still put my money on no decision being reached during the NFL meetings that take place tomorrow and Wednesday. Though one possible course of action has occurred to me: The league could approve, say, the Rams and Chargers to move to L.A. provisionally, on the condition that they negotiate a shared stadium deal that’s to both of their liking. That way the owners get to say they decided something, put pressure on Spanos and Kroenke to get a deal done, and keep the pressure on St. Louis and San Diego to up the ante in hopes of heading off losing their teams. It’s certainly what I’d do if I were a self-interested football billionaire, but whether 24 out of 32 people will think that way is anybody’s guess.

The latest developments in the ongoing NFL-to-L.A. trainwreck:

• Inglewood Mayor James Butts told a local newspaper that Stan Kroenke was going to build a stadium in his city whether or not he got permission to move the St. Louis Rams there, figuring he could use it for Super Bowls and World Cup soccer matches.
• Butts backtracked, and said he never actually said that.
• The Rams released their relocation application, in which they, in the inimitable words of Deadspin, “shit all over the city of St. Louis.” Example: “Compared to all other U.S. cities, St. Louis is struggling.” (All! Great news, Detroit!) Also: “Any NFL Club that signs on to this [St. Louis stadium] proposal will be well on the road to financial ruin.”
• Vice Sports posted my bettor’s guide to which teams will move to Los Angeles late yesterday afternoon, in case you missed it.

Let’s focus in on that Rams relocation application, which has been garnering lots of headlines, albeit not many with quite as memorable an image as Deadspin’s. This, it’s important to remember, is the equivalent of a lawyer’s closing statement: You want to throw every argument you can at the jury to make your case, even if you know the reality isn’t so black and white. So it’s entirely possible that Stan Kroenke doesn’t hate St. Louis quite that strongly in real life, but if he admitted that it’s anything less than a hellhole, he’s risking leaving some other NFL owners with reasonable doubt about his need to move to Inglewood.

But! There is one other factor here, which is that Kroenke chose to release this to the public, rather than just submitting it in secrecy to the league like the owners of the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders did. This seems a pretty clear example of public bridge-burning, and the most concrete evidence we have yet that Kroenke wants to go to L.A. by any means necessary, and at any cost.

If so, the whole L.A. chase starts to fall into a bit clearer focus: Kroenke, for whatever reasons lie deep in his billionaire lizard brain, desperately wants to be the owner of the Los Angeles Rams rather than the St. Louis Rams, even if it means putting down around $1.5 billion for a stadium. (Discounting his infrastructure tax rebates and NFL G-4 money here.) Chargers owner Dean Spanos, not wanting to have to play second fiddle in SoCal for all eternity, jumps in with his own offer. Raiders owner Mark Davis, getting nowhere at anything, happily agrees to jump on board Spanos’s bandwagon. The other NFL owners, sensing an opportunity, decide to demand a crazy-high relocation fee, because you don’t get if you don’t ask, right? At which point it becomes like one of those Cutthroat Kitchen bidding wars where nobody wants to back down for fear of being the one left out in cold, and suddenly you find you’ve just spent $15,000 on a cup of soy sauce.

That’s my leading theory right now, anyway. As to who’ll end up the “winner” and who’ll end up having to build a new stadium in their existing city while wearing a suit of armor, your guess is as good as mine.

The owners of the San Diego Chargers, St. Louis Rams, and Oakland Raiders all formally applied to relocate to Los Angeles yesterday, something that got reported on by pretty much every news outlet on the planet. Of course, this is just a formality — even if they get approval, it doesn’t mean they have to move — and something we’ve known for more than two months they were going to do, so calm down, people, okay?

Way more interesting is the report — by “NFL Media Insider” Ian Rapoport on the NFL’s own NFL Network, which is as close to an official leak as you’re likely to get — that the NFL has set its relocation fee at $550 million per team that moves to L.A. That’s in line with what was reported a couple of months ago too, but it was crazy-high even then, considering that this would come on top of having to spend close to $2 billion on stadium construction before selling your first ticket.

I can currently think of at least seven possible reasons why the NFL picked this price point:

• Los Angeles is such an incredible cash cow for anybody who plays there, despite the NFL not offering the change to cash in on local cable deals and L.A. not being a real hotbed for high-ticket PSL buyers or anything, that the other owners figure this is a reasonable price.
• None of the competing owners see what’s in it for them if any of these other guys get to move to L.A. — national TV ratings probably won’t budge much if people in L.A. are watching local teams instead of the best national games — so they’re figuring, “Hell, if we’re going to go through all the trouble of figuring out who gets to move, at least we can make sure we get paid.”
• Nobody really wants anybody to move to L.A., so they’ve set a price so ridiculously high that no one will bite.
• Somebody realized that the easiest way to determine a winner when three people are fighting for two spots is to see who’s willing to pay the most to bribe the judges.
• They need extra money to pay off whoever doesn’t get to move to shut him up.
• They need extra money to help fund a stadium for whoever doesn’t get to move.
• It won’t really be $550 million, once they invent some special revenue-sharing credit for teams that play within 50 miles of a major tar pit or something.

There are probably more, but I’ll leave those as an exercise for readers. Meantime, I just finished a longer writeup of all the possible outcomes of next week’s NFL owners meetings (including the rapidly rising dark horse candidate “nothing”) for Vice Sports — point your browser there and keep refreshing for the next few hours if you want to hear more from me on this.

[UPDATE: You can quit refreshing now, the article is up here.]