In 2010, when Santa Clara voters approved creating a city-run stadium authority to build an NFL stadium to attract the San Francisco 49ers, politicians patted themselves on the back for getting things done and luring a storied franchise 45 miles south to Silicon Valley. The relocation took place

The contrast with Oakland and its inability to come up with a stadium proposal that would keep the Raiders from eyeing other metro areas was clear. Leaders in the cash-strapped city were unable to prevent the Raiders from committing in 2017 to moving to Las Vegas and working with the Nevada state government on a financing plan that should yield a 65,000-seat stadium for the team to begin using in the 2020 season.

But now the narrative has taken a dramatic shift, and it’s Santa Clara leaders who are facing grief in their community over the 49ers’ arrival in town and the impact of the $1.27 billion Levi’s Stadium (pictured), named after the San Francisco company which paid for marketing rights.

What was billed as a win-win situation by team and local officials now looks far more complex. The initial honeymoon has long since given away to a fractious relationship.

The biggest annual strain is over how much the team must pay per season. A complex agreement set the 49ers’ rent and operating fees at $24.5 million for the 2017 season. The 2018 assessment was fought over for months before an arbitrator recently said the amount should be set at $24.762 million for the coming season, an increase of just over 1 percent.

The ruling contradicted the team’s analysis of baseline rent, stadium operating expenses, debt service and capital reserves. The 49ers argued their total payment should be as little as $16.775 million – a 32 percent cut. The city asked for as much as $25.862 million – a 6 percent increase.

“We want to work with 49ers, not against them,” Mayor Lisa M. Gillmor said in a statement released after the arbitration decision. “Hopefully the team understands that Santa Clara will always put community interests first.”

There have also been squabbles over the city’s 10 p.m. weeknight curfew for events at the stadium, which has the potential to cause headaches for the team, given the regular season games the NFL holds each week on Monday and Thursday nights, as well as the preseason games that are regularly scheduled on weeknights. Some residents respond by citing quality-of-life issues created by team-related traffic.

Personal-seat license fees needed for revenue model

Both the city and the team share concerns over attendance. While the 68,500-seat stadium regularly sells out on paper, Pro Football Talk and other popular NFL websites took to mocking the 49ers last fall after an October game in which the stadium seemed less than half full, pushing ancillary revenues down. An unexpected problem has been the intense heat seen at Levi’s Stadium for several preseason and regular season games.

A five-game winning streak to end the 2017 season raised hopes that attendance will improve going forward. But as Pro Football Talk pointed out, the team and city have reason to be deeply worried about renewals for personal seat licenses, the expensive way that fans can guarantee themselves top seats at games.

The license fees are crucial to the revenue model being used to pay off construction and related debt. Many once-successful teams have struggled to sell PSLs after their fortunes took a turn for the worse.

Meanwhile, the long-shot hope that the Raiders would continue to have a presence in Northern California after their 2020 move to Las Vegas has been dashed. Nevada media outlets recently reported that the team is likely to move its preseason training camp from its longtime base in Napa to Reno that summer.

After months of relative certainty that the National Football League wanted the Rams in Los Angeles and the Chargers in San Diego, expectations have been gradually upset, turning the other former L.A. team’s relocation back to the City of Angels all but a done deal.

The proximate cause of the shift, always a factor in the team’s fate, was the failure of a new stadium deal to pass muster with San Diego voters in November. In the ensuing weeks, the team has acted swiftly to put an executable plan in place for a timely move to L.A. The first step in making the scheme a reality was locking down a place to play, and “[t]he agreement with the Chargers to lease the as-yet-to-be-built Inglewood stadium has been executed and sources say, soon to be signed,” according to NBC Los Angeles. That deal itself was only possible because the groundwork had been laid back when the first pro team’s return to L.A. was finalized. “The Rams signed an agreement with the NFL before moving to Los Angeles agreeing to lease space to another team,” the network added. 

A need for fans

Still, potential obstacles to an expeditious relocation have captivated the sports press, especially online, where frustration with the Chargers’ recent poor play has been aired as a factor that could complicate the League’s calculus around an L.A. move. “Once again this past week, speculative media reports surfaced outside of San Diego expressing near-certainty that Dean Spanos will move the team to greater Los Angeles in 2017,” U-T San Diego observed.

“Once again, no one was identified as the source of the speculation. (Chargers spokesman Mark Fabiani again said Spanos hasn’t made up his mind.) The League may be overplaying its hand here. L.A. doesn’t want the Bolts.”

Anecdotal evidence of a sour mood among Angelenos has not been overwhelming, but it has been put under a spotlight. Steve Reed, sports writer for the Associated Press, recently quoted one L.A. fan on Twitter who implored the Chargers to “please stay in San Diego. One bad football team in L.A. is enough.”

A cloudy future

Even the risk of over-saturating L.A.’s market could provoke the League to grow more cautious, impose delays or otherwise allow the potential deal to drift. NFL ratings have tanked over the course of 2016, with potential culprits including the politicization of the game by players, the league’s punishment of on-field celebrations, the presidential campaign season and the health risks now more closely associated with players’ concussions. 

Evidence does suggest that the Clinton-Trump matchup put a real damper on fans’ enthusiasm. “Since the election, national NFL games across broadcast and cable are averaging an audience of 18 million viewers,” Fox Business reported, citing Nielsen data. “That’s a nearly 17 percent increase from the period from the start of the season up until the election, when national NFL games drew an average of 15.4 million viewers.”

In an internal memo this October, the network noted, executives Brian Rolapp and Howard Katz downplayed concern that the League faced a fundamentally changed business landscape. “Prime-time windows have clearly been affected the most, while declines during the Sunday afternoon window are more modest. While our partners, like us, would have liked to see higher ratings, they remain confident in the NFL and unconcerned about a long-term issue.”

Nevertheless, the League would suffer a potentially costly and high-profile embarrassment were the Chargers not to connect with L.A. and Orange County fans, who have a broad range of non-football pro teams to support and lack the recent traditions of stalwart support that many other cities with struggling NFL franchises and fewer sports options have nurtured for generations. 

Even though there’s a clear interest and ample money behind a new stadium, the NFL’s complex business politics could well delay a deal for so long the logistical stars will come out of alignment.

The drama currently revolves around a huge plot of land scooped up by Stan Kroenke, the storied and reclusive owner of the St. Louis Rams, who played in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1979, and in Anaheim from 1980 to 1994. Despite competing schemes from other potential owners for an L.A. stadium complex downtown and in the city of Carson, Kroenke bought a parcel from Wal-Mart. The 60 acre deal cost him over $100 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Wal-Mart never constructed a store on the enormous lot because the retail giant was shut down by locals who didn’t want it in town. But the company kept the property until Kroenke came calling.

As it happens, Ann Walton Kroenke, the daughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton, is Kroenke’s wife. Stan Kroenke sat on Wal-Mart’s board until 2011, developing sites for new locations along the way.

So when Kroenke began meeting with Terry Fancher, executive managing director of Stockbridge Capital, the logic of a new NFL stadium was already in place. Fancher and Kroenke hammered away “on a deal to transform the proposed mixed-use project in Inglewood into a hub of sports, retail, offices and entertainment,” the Times reports. “In late spring, Kroenke engaged HKS Inc., the firm that drew up plans for the billion-dollar AT&T Stadium that houses the Cowboys, to design the stadium.”

Maneuvers and regulations

That’s where the National Football League comes in. Despite signaling a strong desire to see pro football in Los Angeles soon, the NFL hasn’t been able to remain consistent.

Art Rooney II, the league’s stadium committee chairman, finally went on the record about Kroenke’s apparent plan. And he doesn’t seem to like it. “There are still cards to be played,” he told the Times. “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.”

Meanwhile, reports Deadspin, “The NFL won’t move a franchise to L.A. until a permanent site for the team is established.” What’s that mean? “The three most likely NFL teams to move to Los Angeles — the Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers and St. Louis Rams — will be staying where they are next season,” even though each team has “expiring leases with their current stadiums.”

Wary players

The uncertainty bred by the league is amplifying longstanding suspicion and wariness among the other players involved in a move to Los Angeles. Teams want a favorable deal.

While the Rams, for instance, have been threatening St. Louis with a move if the city won’t refurbish the stadium it used to lure the team 20 years ago, no potential L.A. team wants to be paired up with a partner that won’t swiftly and securely attract fans.

At the same time, L.A. city officials don’t want to cough up fresh spending to seal the deal, or impose new taxes to accomplish the same.

And neither Kroenke nor his competitors want to be ensnared in a morass of city regulations. Anschutz Entertainment Group, the most prominent concern offering an alternative to Kroenke’s site, wrung a six-month deadline extension from the L.A. City Council last October for closing a deal with an NFL team.

As early as 2011, Reuters reports, AEG had managed to secure a whopping $700 million agreement for the naming rights to a hypothetical L.A. stadium downtown. But even AEG’s “seemingly endless stream of money” couldn’t “get the job done,” as Daniel Durbin, Director of the USC Annenberg Institute for Sports, Media and Society, told Reuters.

With only a few more plays to run as the clock ticks down, pro football may offer L.A. fans no more than another run at the goal line that ends in futility.

A school district in New York has banned footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls or any dangerous instrument that might hurt someone on school grounds.

“Port Washington schools Superintendent Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries,” CBS New York reported. “Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

So the school officials deferred to the lawyers, who apparently advocate keeping children safely indoors all day where they can’t get hurt. Blunt-nose scissors and jars of edible paste are not going to hurt anyone.

During recess at Port Washington schools, “[F]ootball is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.”

In Sacramento where I live, the Sacramento City Unified School District's motto is: “Putting children first.” On the district website, not one elementary school had pictures of playground equipment or mention of athletic activities.

One school mentioned its “fitness program,” which  included doing “short stretches every morning and one activity per day,”  the school website reported. How very civilized.

The school taught jazzercise, had a healthy snack preparation demonstration, “a visit by Sacramento United Soccer League representatives to teach students about fitness and agility, and a visit by local firefighters who talked to students about the importance of physical and mental fitness.”

Presentations, talks, demonstrations … and jazzercise. How fun. But that's putting teachers first.

Rough and tumble playground

I was a total rough and tumble kid. Soccer wasn’t exciting enough, so my friends and I played tackle soccer. We climbed trees and shot beebee guns at each other. We strapped firecrackers to Barbie dolls, and well, you know.  Today, I’d be arrested and so would my parents.

On the playground at school, we played dodge ball, where you actually were supposed to hit someone with a ball to tag them “out.” Dodge ball is gone. We played crack-the-whip, where kids form a human chain and whip the kid on the end around until she goes careening off and falls. And we did cartwheels. I still have the scars on my always-scabbed knees to remind me what fun recess time was.

We ran races, where someone won and someone lost. Losing is no longer acceptable at government schools. Yet learning how to lose is as important as learning how to win.

And I got in fights but wasn't suspended.

The playground is a place where children establish social order.

The school playground back in the  1950s, 1960s and 1970s was chaos, where kids were allowed to run and play like wild animals. But it was controlled chaos, managed by the social order, and loosely overseen by the adults, who stepped in only when it got too rough.

Football is deadly

There has been a movement for two decades to ban school recess, along with school sports.

Journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has compared professional football to dog fighting. “In what way is dog fighting any different from football on a certain level, right?” Gladwell said in a Forbes magazine story. “I mean you take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right?”

“'Well, what's football?” Gladwell asked. “We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences. And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they’re participating in some grand American spectacle.”

And now four professional football players are suing the NFL over concussion injuries — as if they didn’t know football was a contact sport, and were paid millions of dollars to do it.

“What does this mean for football in America?” asked Brian E. Moore, MD, on kevinMD.com. “Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field. But, as a parent, you can do something. You can forbid your son from playing football.”

Humans are animals too

To use another dog analogy, the playground is like watching dogs play. Dogs run like a pack, bumping, jumping over each other, play-biting and dominating, or allowing other dogs to dominate. Kids do this too, when allowed. The playground was the place we once learned how to deal with confrontation, hurt, success, physical and emotional challenges, and to face our fears.

With today's emphasis on standardized testing and academic performance, recess and sports have been sacrificed in many schools. In 1998, Benjamin O. Canada, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, famously told the New York Times, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.”

A doctor disagrees with this dangerous trend. Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant professor and pediatrician, conducted the “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior” study in 2009, when the trend to cut recess and sports was growing. “We need to understand that kids need a break,’’ Barros said. “Our brains can concentrate and pay attention for 45 to 60 minutes, and in kids it’s even less. For them to be able to acquire all the academic skills we want them to learn, they need a break to go out and release the energy and play and be social.’’

The playground at school today is calm and organized, where everyone is a winner. And many of the kids are taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. But teachers are happy. And school district lawyers can rest easy.

Let the kids play virtual sports.

At a time when governments and citizens of California are bankrupt, the NFL could build at least one incredibly expensive stadium in the Bay Area: $735 million for the Oakland Raiders (formerly the L.A. Traitors). And $937 million for the San Francisco (gold-digging) 49ers.

The 49ers stadium would be paid with a lot of tax money. Tax dollars likely would be needed for an Oakland stadium, too. Even though Oakland still is paying off the debt on its existing stadium, the Coliseum!

Oh, and let’s remember that 20 years ago the Raiders ripped off the City of Irwindale for $10 million — just for considering moving to the city, which the team didn’t!

Here’s a better idea: Tell these teams to take a hike out of the state.

Southern California lost the Raiders and the Rams more than a decade ago. We don’t miss them. Who needs these tax-sucking parasites? If you want to watch the NFL, turn on the TV on Sunday and Monday.

Let the Raiders and 49ers go to another state. They’ve raided our tax dollars enough.