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.

In a move that considerably increases their odds of leaving San Diego, the Chargers announced Wednesday a new leader for their Carson stadium project — Bob Iger, the chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company.

 

The deal matches the team with arguably the world’s most successful and powerful entertainment-industry executive. In addition, Iger received an option to become a minority owner of the Chargers or the Oakland Raiders, the team’s partner on the Carson project.  …

 

For fans who hoped the Chargers were just using Carson to bluff San Diego officials into making a better stadium offer, the deal represents a serious setback. For the NFL’s 32 owners, it offers a soothing tonic to those worried that Chargers CEO Dean Spanos and Raiders owner Mark Davis might bungle the league’s reentry into Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest market.

 

Without question, the deal “has a dramatic impact,” said Marc Ganis, a sports consultant based in Chicago who helped the Raiders and Rams leave Los Angeles two decades ago. “At the risk of mixing sports metaphors, it’s a grand slam home run.”

The Los Angeles Times framed the development in similar fashion:

Carmen Policy, a former NFL executive who now serves as executive director of Carson Holdings, the joint venture between the Chargers and Raiders, called the addition of Iger a “game-changer.”

 

“We now have the kind of leadership and expertise that should calm any concerns about any NFL teams going into L.A. and getting off on the right foot and pursuing the right course,” Policy said. “Who could we get to better guarantee fan experience than the man who runs ‘the happiest place on earth?’”

 

Iger would be chairman of Carson Holdings and would continue to serve as chairman and CEO of Disney under the terms of his contract.

‘Get ready for Raiders to leave. Again’

Bay Area News Group columnist Marcus Thompson noted the strong ties between Iger and the NFL and the fact that the league appears to want the Chargers and Raiders to add minority owners to beef up their finances before moving. He thinks the league is tipping its hand about its preference:

[The] connections and resources are there but the NFL and the Raiders prefer to use them for L.A. Not for Oakland. They’ll stay if they can make millions, even billions, off a new stadium if they only have to pay a portion of the cost. But if it’s all on them, they chose L.A.

 

That makes sense, too. That’s the new landscape of sports. That small-time model doesn’t return the profits required when you consider how much all of this costs. These figures are getting so astronomical, the league and teams must do all they can to ensure a profit. And the return on investment, theoretically, stands to be much bigger in Los Angeles than in Oakland.

 

That means, Raiders fans, start preparing for your Raiders to leave. Again.

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk has among the best NFL sources of any journalist. In league circles, he writes, the Iger announcement is also considered a big deal:

With the ownership vote on L.A. looming, this could be the Hail Mary play by the folks in Carson that gets their attention, and that in turn makes the Christmas Eve meeting between the Chargers and Raiders in Oakland even more memorable. Possibly for all the wrong reasons.

But the fact that the teams see no trouble in coming up with $850 million apiece seems likely to make San Diego and Oakland voters more opposed to subsidizing billionaire team owners than ever. So does the fact that Walton family member Stan Kroenke, who owns the eager-to-move St. Louis Rams, is preparing to build a $1 billion-plus stadium of his own in Inglewood without public dollars — and with the blessing of city officials who are putting the project on a fast track, bypassing environmental laws.

The deal accepted by Santa Clara County voters in 2010 limiting the subsidies for the 49ers’ new $1.2 billion Levi’s Stadium seemed a good deal at the time; the highest estimate of direct subsidies for the project CalWatchdog.com could find is $156 million. After what’s happened in recent years, that deal doesn’t look so good anymore.

Live sports are gold for TV networks

That’s because the economics of sports have changed since the 49ers’ deal was negotiated. Whether they move or not, the Chargers and Raiders have much less to back up their argument that they would face a “competitive disadvantage” by going without the subsidies that pro teams have traditionally demanded for new stadiums and arenas. They understand that franchise ownership is more beneficial than ever in an era in which live sports are the most consistent way to build a big real-time audience on TV and online.

For the 2014 season, TV networks paid more than $5.5 billion to the NFL. After some league and player pension expenses are paid, the rest of the TV money and other revenue is divvied up among the 32 teams. The $188 million each team got in 2014 was up at least 20 percent from 2013.  Teams are likely to get even more money in coming years. In October, when DirecTV renewed its contract with the NFL, it increased its annual payment from $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball are enjoying similar huge gains in TV rights payments. Teams in those sports benefit both from national TV fees and local deals with cable companies.

Cable TV bills swell due to sports fees

This double revenue stream explains why the Dodgers sold for a record $2.15 billion in 2012 and the Clippers sold for a record $2 billion in 2014.

Only franchises in the New York City metropolitan area are likely to do better than the 20-year, $3 billion deal the Lakers struck with Time Warner Cable in 2011 to build two regional cable TV networks around the team; and the 25-year, $8.5 billion deal the Dodgers signed with Time Warner in 2013 to set up a dedicated cable channel built on the team’s preseason and regular-season games.

These TV costs, of course, are passed along to consumers via sky-high cable TV bills — something Californians already complain about. When residents put two and two together and realize that pro sports are already hitting their pocketbooks in their cable bills, they may be even less enthusiastic about conveying money to billionaire team owners to help build stadiums.

For these reasons and more, Levi’s Stadium could be the last publicly subsidized pro sports stadium in California.

Jan. 3, 2013

By Chris Reed

A high-profile Los Angeles-based African-American sportswriter took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to compare Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution to the house slave character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Django Unchanged.” Sowell, 82, is a leading African-American libertarian-conservative intellectual who won the National Humanities Medal for his wide-ranging work, which blends economics, history, sociology and other scholarly fields in sophisticated fashion.

Jason Whitlock, the Fox Sports writer who made national headlines last month when NBC’s Bob Costas quoted his anti-gun views on Sunday Night Football, mocked the idea that Sowell was brilliant, saying he was admired because he told people what they wanted to hear, like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Whitlock has nearly 155,000 followers on Twitter.

The comparison struck those familiar with Sowell’s long academic career as odd. His views about welfare causing dependency and about the value of free markets were forged 50 years ago while getting a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. They weren’t conjured up in recent years in a bid to become a media star. Sowell is low-profile beyond his syndicated column.

The comparison is also odd given Whitlock’s own views. He was one of many who rebuked ESPN’s Rob Parker for questioning whether Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was authentically black. The link to Whitlock’s post on the Fox Sports site was headlined “ESPN and Parker not elevating conversation about race.”

Beyond that, Whitlock shares Sowell’s passionate disdain for the drug war. Whitlock wrote in the Huffington Post that “America’s war on drugs is a scam to lock up poor people, a prop to advance political careers and an easy way for corrupt police and politicians to funnel millions of untraceable dollars into their own pockets.” Sowell has been ripping the war on drugs since Whitlock, 45, was a child.

Whitlock did not respond to my Twitter remarks to him.