San Diego Chargers’ fans woke up Wednesday morning to hear the most encouraging news yet that the team wouldn’t be returning to Los Angeles after 55 years in San Diego: a report that the Chargers had asked, and the NFL had granted, a request for a

Six weeks earlier, an ESPN report had depicted the Chargers’ departure as a sure thing. But the ugly end to the Rams’ first season back in Los Angeles had shaken up conventional wisdom. As the team’s losses mounted in what ended up a 4-12 season, the fan enthusiasm that helped the team sell out all its season tickets after moving from St. Louis evaporated. If the Los Angeles market wasn’t thrilled about one team unless it was successful, why would it like a second team with a recent history of exasperating fans?

But Wednesday evening brought the news that fans and San Diego leaders had dreaded: ESPN’s NFL insider Adam Schefter reported, seemingly definitively, that the Chargers would be leaving:

Almost one year to the day that the Rams moved to Los Angeles, the Chargers now likely intend to do the same.

The Chargers plan to announce as early as Thursday that they are moving to Los Angeles, league sources said, ending a 55-year stint with San Diego and returning to their birthplace.

The Chargers played their inaugural season in Los Angeles in 1960 before moving to San Diego in 1961.

The Chargers have notified NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and other league owners of their intent to move to Los Angeles for the 2017 season, sources said.

As CalWatchdog reported earlier this week, all signs suggest the Oakland Raiders will relocate to Las Vegas, so this appears likely to be the most turbulent year for California and professional sports since 1994, when the Los Angeles Rams headed to St. Louis and the Los Angeles Raiders moved back to Oakland.

San Diego has better chance than Oakland for new team

So is this the end for professional football in two of California’s iconic cities? Maybe in Oakland, maybe not in San Diego.

The San Francisco 49ers’ recent attendance woes at new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara seem likely to depress enthusiasm for the idea that Oakland should partially subsidize a stadium for the Raiders, as the team and the NFL want.

But San Diego, the 17th largest metropolitan area in the U.S. and a global leader in biotechnology and life sciences industries, is in better shape. Its leaders appear ready to support a public stadium subsidy of up to $400 million.

A Yahoo News analysis from 2016 predicated on the idea that the Chargers would move to Los Angeles concluded that San Diego was the clear favorite to be home to the NFL’s next relocated team.

The fate of two of California’s four NFL teams should become much clearer this week. The Chargers

If the Chargers decide to stay put, then as of Jan. 16, the Raiders will have the option to move in with the Rams.

The early 2016 conventional wisdom — bolstered by a seemingly definitive early December leak by Chargers officials to ESPN and by fan anger over the team’s latest bad season — was that the Chargers were sure to move without big taxpayer subsidies for a new stadium. The assumption also was that the Raiders would jump at the chance to go to Los Angeles if the Chargers passed on the opportunity.

The new conventional wisdom, however, suggests there is a fairly good chance the Chargers will remain in San Diego using an aging Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley that they despise. It also holds that the Raiders will bolt for Las Vegas, possibly after getting extensions to keep using the Oakland Coliseum for two more years while their Nevada stadium is built.

Fans turned on Rams in first year back in L.A.

The financial appeal of being a second team relocating to Los Angeles lost much of its allure when the Los Angeles Rams’ first season back in town went badly. Fans and sports talk-radio turned on the team as an awful 4-12 season unfolded, leading to tens of thousands of sold but unfilled seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum. Suddenly, the NFL was reminded of the apathy on display when the Rams and Raiders left for St. Louis and Oakland, respectively, in 1994. Unless NFL teams are winners, Los Angeles residents have not been heavily supportive. “Their hearts are with the Dodgers and the Lakers — period,” the late L.A. sportscaster Joe McDonnell liked to say.

There are other financial factors as well. If they moved to Los Angeles, the Chargers would have to pay relocation fees to the other 31 teams totaling either $550 million or $650 million, depending on whether it was a flat payment or a 10-year payment plan. Once there, Rams owner Stan Kroenke would either expect them to pay millions of dollars in annual rent or to contribute heavily to the cost of building the stadium; he might also ask for some of both.

But in San Diego, as a Sunday Union-Tribune analysis noted, the Chargers pay “negative rent.” “From 2006 to 2015, San Diego paid the Chargers $3.2 million for the privilege of playing there, as $25.9 million in rent credits offset $22.7 million in rent,” the analysis noted. The lease is up in 2020, but few expect City Hall to strike a hard bargain if the team remains.

Los Angeles losing its appeal isn’t the problem for Raiders owner Mark Davis that it is for Chargers owner Dean Spanos. Davis has been eyeing a move to Las Vegas for nearly a year and has already trademarked the “Las Vegas Raiders.” The Nevada Legislature has committed to providing $750 million toward a stadium, meaning that if the NFL and the Raiders commit $400 million to $500 million, the funding is firming up for a modern, suite-laden NFL stadium in a booming metropolitan area eager for its first team in the big three of North American pro sports leagues.

Oakland officials have been more strongly opposed to taxpayer stadium subsidies than San Diego officials.

As San Jose Mercury-News columnist Tim Kawakami joked after the Raiders ended a strong 12-4 season with a loss in the first round of the playoffs, the team’s future is bright — but it very well might be in Las Vegas.