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 St. Louis Rams may have once again become the Los Angeles Rams, capping off the biggest suspense story in the National Football League, but the controversy over the city’s final lineup of teams has flared up yet again.

Chargers ’16

In San Diego, where the Chargers have gone down to the wire with city officials on a possible move that once looked like a done deal, the next twist depends on voters. Although analysts and fans have cautioned that one NFL team may be plenty for Los Angeles, especially so soon on the heels of the Rams’ return, the stadium deal holding the Chargers’ future in the balance has failed to rally popular support. According to a YouGov poll conducted late last month, only “a quarter of San Diego adults strongly or somewhat support the proposal for a new, taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion stadium and convention center downtown,” as USA Today recalled. “The poll showed more than half — 52 percent — strongly or somewhat opposed the measure, with the other 23 percent not stating a preference.” 

“To win the vote, the team needs two-thirds of voters to approve the project because it’s a tax hike for a special purpose in California. If the vote fails, the Chargers have until Jan. 15 to decide whether to move to Los Angeles, where they have an optional deal to share a lucrative new stadium with the Los Angeles Rams.”

If the push to use the ballot to keep the Chargers in San Diego has been a slog, however, city officials’ backup plan has emerged as a potentially dramatic Hail Mary pass — to the judiciary. City Attorney Jan Goldsmith told radio host Darren Smith “he would ask the state’s high court to ‘take jurisdiction’ over the city’s November election as it pertains to two stadium-related ballot initiatives: the Chargers plan to raise the city’s hotel tax to build a stadium and convention center, and the Citizens’ Plan, which would increase the tax to help pay for tourism marketing and an off-the-waterfront convention center,” according to U-T San Diego. Although “no public money could go toward stadium construction,” the city’s inquiry “could come as early as next week, if county officials examining signatures declare that either or both initiatives have qualified for the ballot,” the paper added. 

Vegas or bust?

Oakland’s Raiders, the other California team caught up in the L.A. relocation game, have struggled to strike a deal with their own home town. According to NBC Sports, League Commissioner Roger Goodell appeared to discourage another move to L.A., suggesting “you never want to see a community lose their franchise once, much less twice,” making reference to the Raiders’ ping-ponging over the decades between L.A. and Oakland. “I think there’s a solution there, but it takes the community to help identify it,” he said. In the wake of the Rams deal, and unable to count on the Chargers to come through on the stadium-sharing deal that had briefly given the duo a bettor’s edge against the Rams, the Raiders have shifted their attentions from L.A. to Las Vegas.

“Of course, the NFL has allowed communities to lose franchises twice: St. Louis lost both the Cardinals and the Rams,” NBC Sports noted. “So it wouldn’t be unprecedented for the Raiders to vacate Oakland twice. But Goodell said the recent authorization of a new stadium in Las Vegas isn’t enough to bring the Raiders to town.”

Nevertheless, Las Vegas has thrown its considerable weight behind serious plans to lure the team in. The Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee recently cast a unanimous vote “to recommend $750 million in public funding for a $1.9 billion stadium,” ESPN reported, drawn from hotel taxes. That sum would be added to $500 million from owner Mark Davis, “which includes a loan from the NFL for a new stadium, to the project,” the network added. “The family of Sheldon Adelson — chairman of casino and resort outfit Las Vegas Sands Corporation — has pledged another $650 million for the proposed 65,000-seat, domed venue, which would be shared with the UNLV football team.”

“The game will be played at the soon-to-be built $2.6-billion Inglewood stadium, which is scheduled to open for the 2019 season,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

In a joint statement with Inglewood Mayor James Butts, L.A.’s Eric Garcetti praised the deal. “The Los Angeles region is built to host the Super Bowl. We helped forge this great American tradition at the Coliseum when it began in 1967; and we’re thrilled to bring it back where it belongs for Super Bowl LV.”

Sinking San Diego

Until very recently, speculation had swirled that Los Angeles might lose favor to San Diego, where delicate League plans to sustain football in the city could wind up in jeopardy. “San Diego previously has hosted three Super Bowls, the last being Super Bowl XXXVII when the Buccaneers beat the Raiders to cap the 2002 season,” the Sporting News recalled. But with the franchise’s future still uncertain, “the NFL does not want to lose the San Diego market. The league wants to keep the Chargers in San Diego to have two Southern California markets and two future Super Bowls in a region that has a population of some 23 million,” the site added. 

But thorny city politics would have had to be swiftly surmounted. At the NFL owners’ quarterly meeting in Charlotte, ESPN reported, NFL owners heard “a progress report on the stadium issue in San Diego, which will include a summary on whether a citizens’ initiative ballot measure in November will require a simple majority or a two-thirds vote,” as required by California state law. 

That situation was complicated further by a court decision, under appeal, that could change the League’s calculus. The nearly $2 billion stadium the city has planned to build, according to stadium advisor Fred Mass, “remains on target to collect 100,000 signatures by the first week of June, creating a buffer in order to have enough signatures certified,” noted ESPN. Nevertheless, “a recent court decision involving the city of Upland ruled a citizens’ initiative is not a measure by the local government, but by the citizens. And therefore since the tax is imposed by the citizens, that constitutional provision does not apply. The city of Upland is appealing the decision to the state Supreme Court.” 

Rewarding the Rams

Los Angeles, meanwhile, had long anticipated that the League could reward it for luring back the Rams by handing it hosting duties. “Almost from the moment the Rams were given the green light, the wheels were in motion to secure hosting rights to the Super Bowl,” the Los Angeles Daily News observed. “Upon approving the Rams return home, the NFL immediately added Los Angeles to the host ballots for Super Bowl LIV an LV, along with Atlanta, South Florida and Tampa Bay.”

“To put in perspective what a Super Bowl means financially to the hosting city and state, a study completed by the Seidman Research Institute, W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, determined that Super Bowl XLIX and related events two years ago in the Phoenix area produced a gross economic impact of $719.4 million for the entire state. L.A. wants a piece of that pie.”

Although L.A.’s success in landing the big event owed a great deal to the excitement and money surrounding Rams owner Stan Kronke’s huge Inglewood stadium development project, a rule tweak could have ultimately pushed the bid into the end zone. “The NFL appears to have changed a longstanding rule that requires stadiums to operate for two years before hosting a Super Bowl, with L.A.’s bid specifically in mind,” as Curbed Los Angeles reported. 

“The Rams’ home will ultimately be on the site of the old Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood in what will be the league’s biggest stadium by square feet, a low-slung, glass-roofed football palace with a projected opening in 2019 and a price tag that could approach $3 billion,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Unanswered questions

The Chargers effectively have months to decide their fate — enjoying “a yearlong option to join the Rams, followed by the Raiders if the San Diego franchise declines,” according to ESPN. But the Rams’ journey to Inglewood will begin immediately but take years to complete. “NFL owners in Houston voted 30-2 to ratify the Rams’ relocation application for an immediate move to L.A., where the team will eventually begin play at owner Stan Kroenke’s proposed stadium site in Inglewood in 2019,” NFL.com reported, calling the move “a seismic decision that returns the highest level of professional football to the country’s second-largest media market after a 21-year absence.”

“Per NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport, the Chargers will have up until the conclusion of owners meetings (March 20-23) to decide if they’re playing in L.A. or San Diego in 2016. The window creates the possibility — however slight — that the Chargers could remain in San Diego. The city is hosting a June vote for $350 million in public funding toward a new facility to replace Qualcomm Stadium. It is possible that the Chargers put off a final decision until that vote takes place.”

Uncertainty in Oakland

The deal left the Oakland Raiders, L.A.’s third suitor, the odd team out. They had gambled big on a joint-stadium deal in Carson with the Chargers, hoping to ace out the Rams by granting the league’s wish to neatly usher in two, but not three, teams. “Oakland is still in debt from a renovation 20 years ago, when the Raiders moved back from Los Angeles,” ESPN noted. “City officials have said they won’t seek help from taxpayers with a new stadium, and they asked the NFL for more time to develop a project in response to the Raiders’ relocation plan. The NFL acquiesced.”

Oakland’s fans have retained the strongest loyalty and the greatest capacity for forgiveness among the three cities in peril of losing their franchises. But the fallout from the L.A. deal was far from over, as Oakland’s dismal financial situation with regard to the Raiders raised the sudden prospect that the storied East Bay team could pick up stakes for Texas. The team had previously considered a switch to San Antonio. “In 2014, the Raiders met with San Antonio officials about a potential move,” as Business Insider reported. “While many shrugged that off at the time, there is now a feeling that such a move is possible. According to Jason Cole of Bleacher Report, the Raiders have already secured land in the Austin/San Antonio area for a potential stadium. With the Alamodome already in place, this strongly suggests that the Raiders could be playing in Texas as soon as next season.”

Wary L.A.

In Los Angeles itself, reaction to the upheaval has been moderate, if not muted. Despite the league’s fierce interest in shifting at least one team to the city, Angelenos and Californians more broadly have not agitated for a new franchise, and expectations for the Rams have already been set high by city locals. “So understand first that you’re here because you want to be here and because you think you can make money here, not because anybody was dying to see you again. Consider yourself lucky to be back on our turf,” Bill Plaschke wrote at the Times. “You must win. You must entertain. You must do both with the sort of decency and integrity that makes us feel comfortable enduring long lines of traffic, long lines at bathrooms, and mosh pits in parking lots for a chance to watch you play.”

The Chargers were given a one-year option to move — an option that seemed far more like an unserious public-relations ploy to suggest that they hadn’t made their minds up than a sign they actually might not leave. Team owner Dean Spanos and his stadium point man, Mark Fabiani, have an awful relationship with the San Diego establishment, starting with Mayor Kevin Faulconer. If the Chargers choose not to leave San Diego, the Oakland Raiders would then have a one-year option to move.

This followed a wild day at the NFL owners’ meeting in Houston. The NFL relocation committee initially voted 5-1 to support the Chargers’ and the Raiders’ plan to build a stadium in Carson, move their teams and lay claim to the Los Angeles market. That was followed by subsequent votes of all 32 owners in which 20 backed requiring the Chargers to abandon their partnership with the Raiders and share a stadium in Inglewood with the St. Louis Rams, and 12 backed the Carson plan.

As the day wore on, support emerged for a third option: clearing the Rams to move to Inglewood and build a stadium there, while allowing the Chargers to join the Rams in a year or two after reviving talks with San Diego officials on how to fund and build a billion-dollar-plus NFL stadium. That morphed into the decision to give the Chargers an option to stay in San Diego with a one-year window to join the Rams in Inglewood.

Here’s more from the Los Angeles Times:

Until the stadium is complete, the Rams are expected to play temporarily at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. If the Chargers join them, it’s unclear where they will play, though the NFL sees Angel Stadium, Dodger Stadium and even the Rose Bowl, which declined last year to bid on hosting a team, as potential options. …

 

The maneuvering between the projects included Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Iger joining the Carson project pending its approval. In the weeks leading up to the vote, he vigorously lobbied for Carson, making phone calls to NFL owners, as did Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who orchestrated Iger’s involvement. Iger presented Carson’s plan to owners Tuesday, along with Davis and Spanos.

Chargers assured they’ll share in Inglewood bonanza

According to many reports, the key to the NFL owners’ landslide vote was assuring the Chargers that they wouldn’t be in a completely subordinate position in sharing the Inglewood facilities with the Rams. Moving to Los Angeles would be much less of a bonanza for the Spanos family if it had to pay heavy rent and was shut out of many of the ancillary ways that stadiums and big mixed-use development projects make money. The Times put it this way:

In the last several days, fellow owners worked behind the scenes to bring Kroenke and Spanos together in an accord that allows them to be equitable partners in the Inglewood stadium. The only shared stadium in the NFL is in East Rutherford, N.J., which is home to the New York Giants and Jets.

So what’s next for the Raiders?

In an odd interview Tuesday night, owner Mark Davis suggested he might take his team to Great Britain or some other locale far from the western division of the American Football Conference; his team’s lease is up at what used to be known as the Oakland Coliseum.

But coverage in the Bay Area has focused on the likelihood of the NFL pressuring the Raiders to play in Santa Clara at the 49ers’ gleaming 2-year-old Levi’s Stadium — with the sort of subservient relationship to the 49ers that the Chargers hope to avoid in Inglewood.

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.

In San Diego, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has declared his strong support for keeping the Chargers in place and urged the NFL to not let the team leave for a proposed stadium in Carson that owner Dean Spanos hopes to jointly build and operate with Raiders owner Mark Davis. Even as Faulconer faces withering criticism from team stadium point man Mark Fabiani, the first-term Republican says he’s ready to ask voters if they support contributing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds toward a billion-dollar-plus stadium.

In St. Louis, both Mayor Francis Slay and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon have offered strong support for a new stadium, mostly paid for with taxpayer dollars, to either keep the Rams or to attract a new NFL team in case team owner Stan Kroenke succeeds with his bid to relocate the Rams to Inglewood.

But in Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf has not only strongly opposed the use of public funds for a stadium, she’s called the team stadium saga a “distraction.” Schaaf also hasn’t borrowed from the playbook of previous mayors who tried to keep their pro sports teams by using what might be called the guilt-trip approach — telling NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other team owners of what an assault on decency it would be to allow the Raiders to leave, given their ardent and devoted fan base. Unlike Missouri and San Diego officials, who have met repeatedly with Goodell and a handful of influential team owners, Oakland’s elected leaders have done almost no direct lobbying of key NFL players.

Touting team’s ‘die-hard regional fan base’

Next week, however, that’s going to change. This is from the Bay Area News Group’s report in the Contra-Costa Times:

OAKLAND — City officials working to keep the Raiders in Oakland will travel to New York next week to give a presentation to the NFL about their funding plan for a new stadium.

 

Officials from cities in St. Louis and San Diego, the other two cities with professional football franchises threatening to leave for Southern California, will also be making their pitch to the NFL.

 

Mayor Libby Schaaf confirmed she will attend Wednesday’s meeting with the NFL’s Los Angeles stadium and finance committee. …

 

“We’ll show how everything from Oakland’s growing economic momentum and urban vitality to the team’s die-hard regional fan base make it clear that there is no better time for a major league team to be located in, or associated with Oakland,” Schaaf said in a statement.

A serious effort or a PR ploy?

But given that Schaaf hasn’t budged on her stand against public financing and continues to call Oakland’s crime rate and weak economy far bigger issues, her trip to New York is seen by many Raiders fans as a public-relations gambit, not a serious bid to urge the NFL to remain a presence in Oakland.

This view was underscored by ESPN’s John Clayton, one of the best-connected NFL reporters, who wrote Tuesday that the league didn’t take Oakland seriously:

As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out.

 

“We’ve said one thing consistently to any of the markets that have been engaged in trying to put forth a proposal, and it really rests on a couple of pillars,” said Eric Grubman, who is coordinating the league’s Los Angeles project. “One of them is that a proposal has to be specific. The second is that it has to be attractive to a team. The third is it has to be actionable. And so what actionable means is it can’t just be an idea to the extent that there is enabling legislation or enabling financing activities or there are litigation threats or anything of that nature — anything that needs to be assembled in a time frame where a club can act on it.

 

“Thus far, those sorts of tests have not been made in Oakland, so as of yet, there is no proposal for the Raiders to consider.”

Commissioner Roger Goodell recognized how touchy things have become, as an unprecedented sequence of proposals and counterproposals has played out among the St. Louis Rams, San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders. “We’ve been 20 years not in the Los Angeles market,” Goodell said, according to ESPN, calling an L.A. team “a huge plus for fans. There are 20 million fans in that market that would love to have a franchise. But we’ve got to do this responsibly. There’s a process, and we’re going through that process.”

Its latest set of twists and turns has played out at hearings in the hometowns of teams contemplating a move. “The three-hour meetings, held on consecutive nights in downtown theaters, were more listening sessions for the NFL than back-and-forth exchanges with fans, who registered online for free passes to the events,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The league also streamed the hearings online.”

Fan fury

At times, fan frustration dominated. “It was loud. It was angry. It was sad. But no matter how much they pleaded for the Chargers to stay in San Diego, many wondered if it even mattered,” USA Today observed at the city’s downtown Spreckels Theater. The Chargers, according to the paper, “say they receive 25 percent of their local revenues from Los Angeles and Orange counties.” In St. Louis, the assembled booed every mention of Stan Kroenke, the Rams owner seemingly intent on shifting his team to a complex to be built on an Inglewood lot where a Walmart once might have been. Echoing a common sentiment, one fan told the Times “there was a feeling around St. Louis that the town hall meeting was merely a formality.”

Comments from the League seemed to reinforce that cynical judgment. In remarks reported by the Times, NFL executive vice president Eric Grubman called the hearings “very cathartic,” but denied that fans’ strongly-voiced opinions ultimately held any sway. “What I got from the crowd was the passion and emotion. There were a couple of ideas to think about,” he said. “But this is not the time to negotiate. We weren’t trying to negotiate with the crowd. What we were trying to do was give them a voice, and be able to carry that voice back, and that happened pretty effectively.”

Hail Mary in Oakland

But in Oakland, at least, fans found succor from their team’s owner, Mark Davis, who vowed to do all he could to stay out of Los Angeles. “We need help from the community as well to get something that our fans in Oakland can be proud of,” he said, according to NFL.com. “We don’t have that right now and we want it. It can be done in Oakland. We’ve talked to three mega developers to get this going. We have been trying for at least the past six years, every day, hundreds of hours, to try to get something done here in Oakland.”

Nevertheless, Davis’s dedication might not pay off. As NFL.com pointed out, the Oakland Coliseum, where the Raiders still play, “was built in 1966 and has been plagued by numerous plumbing and other problems over the past decade.” In Los Angeles, under a proposed joint deal, the Raiders and the Chargers would share a new $1.7 billion dollar stadium located in Carson.

Whatever the feelings involved, the league appeared to be set on a course for a relocation process that could begin — and end — in January. “Teams would pay a fee to apply to exit their current market, and NFL owners can vote to determine the order of preference for franchises herding themselves into the California queue,” UPI noted.

Mark Fabiani, the veteran Democratic political strategist and crisis-management specialist who has long been the point man for team owners on stadium questions, immediately denounced the plan, as ESPN reported:

Fabiani criticized the “hastily prepared” EIR, saying, “The Chargers have been clear from the start that the franchise will not be the city’s guinea pig for this inevitably ill-fated legal experiment.”

 

“Remember, these are the same politicians who told us, with disastrous results in court, that the convention center expansion could be financed by a vote of the hoteliers rather than a vote of the people,” Fabiani, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement.

Team, league expected to contribute $562.5 million

But Fabiani and the Spanos family, owners of the team since 1984, also couldn’t have been happy with the details of the financing proposal. An informal stadium task force that formed earlier this year with the mayor’s blessing issued a financing plan that was more generous than the plan touted by Faulconer and Roberts.

That plan called for the Chargers to pay $300 million and the NFL to foot $200 million of the bill for a new stadium. The official plan offered Monday by San Diego officials to their hometown media — and in a presentation to a committee of NFL owners in Chicago — calls for the Chargers to pay $362.5 million and the NFL to pay $200 million, and pegs direct taxpayer subsidies at $350 million — $200 million from the city and $150 million from the county.

The Voice of San Diego, while generally skeptical of the official proposal, also noted three ways the deal offers protections to taxpayers not recommended by the informal task foce:

Monday’s plan … says that the Chargers should be on the hook for:

 

• Operating and maintaining the stadium, which is a huge loss for city taxpayers now at Qualcomm.

 

• Any cost overruns on the construction of the new stadium.

 

• Any failure of $188 million in personal seat license sales pegged toward stadium construction to meet projections.

Let’s make a deal — eventually

This plan suggests that Faulconer, Roberts and the other officials and consultants who shaped it are not in panic mode because of a fear the Chargers are sure to leave. Instead, they are making a calculated gamble that the other 31 NFL team owners will choose the St. Louis Rams franchise as the league’s Los Angeles centerpiece and pass on the Chargers/Raiders plan, leaving the Chargers to come back to the negotiating table. This was judged to be the most likely of nine possible scenarios in an April analysis by Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times, who has provided several scoops in recent years in his coverage of the Los Angeles-Oakland-San Diego-St. Louis NFL quadrangle.

The Rams and Stan Kroenke, the NFL’s second-wealthiest owner, are well along the way toward breaking ground for a $1.8 billion stadium project next year in Inglewood, with environmental clearances already in place and strong support from city elected officials and local special interests.

And Kroenke has already signaled that he will move even if the Rams’ proposed relocation fails to win the league-mandated support of three-quarters of the 32 teams — using a strategy borrowed from the Raiders. This is from a January item by the well-connected Mike Florio on the Pro Football Talk website:

Kroenke has informed the mayor of Inglewood on multiple occasions that he’ll move the team with or without the approval of the other clubs.

That would be an aggressive, risky move.  If Kroenke moves without approval, he’d be entitled to no financial assistance from the league, and his stadium would be blocked from hosting Super Bowls. He also would avoid paying the relocation fee.

The matter could end up in court, as a sequel to the barrister’s brouhaha between the Raiders and the NFL in the 1980s, arising from the league’s efforts to keep the Raiders from moving to Los Angeles. The Raiders eventually won a $34.6-million judgment, which reportedly was settled for a payment of $18 million in 1989.

The NFL is likely to signal in coming days what it thought of San Diego’s official presentation to the team owners committee in Chicago. But as CalWatchdog noted Monday, the fact that the league is eager to begin selling 2016 season tickets for a Los Angeles team to be named later suggests that most owners are panting at a return to the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area after being gone since 1994.

charamelody / flickr

Although the race to land an NFL deal in Los Angeles have long been anyone’s game, some clarity on the potential outcome began to emerge this summer.

Dynamic duo

The competition originally pitted three teams against one another: the St. Louis Rams, the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers. With the Rams and Raiders both former L.A. teams, it seemed implausible that both might return, but league officials had signaled interest in at least two new arrivals. So when the Chargers and Raiders announced plans for a joint stadium development to rival Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s, all bets were suddenly off.

Now, however, a consensus has begun to emerge among insiders. “The likelihood of the NFL approving the Chargers and Raiders moving to Carson has increased,” the Orange County Register reported, “because of the rapidly dwindling chances of San Diego and Oakland to keep the teams, say league executives, sports consultants and the man whose job it is to sell the league on the relocation.”

At a key meeting next month, Raiders/Chargers pointman Carmen Policy — once an executive for the San Francisco 49ers and Cleveland Browns — will make the case to the league’s owners and executives. Policy told the Register “he sees a growing momentum within NFL ownership to give the Chargers and Raiders the green light to apply for relocation for the 2016 season as early as September or October. Policy said the league ‘without question’ will approve the moves to Carson, perhaps before the end of the 2015 regular season.”

San Diego showdown

The move represented a nightmare for the city of San Diego, which has put off Charger requests for a new stadium for roughly fifteen years. The Chargers did not pull the trigger on their plans for an L.A. stadium in the city of Carson until Kroekne announced his intention to build a stadium — presumably for the Rams — in Inglewood. Only at the last minute, “San Diego responded with a concept for a 65,000-seat facility that would be built next to the current Qualcomm Stadium,” as La Jolla Patch noted.

San Diego has scrambled to keep the Chargers — rushing along the would-be stadium’s environmental impact report, and mobilizing the support of Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego. “We want the Chargers to stay in San Diego if the right agreement can be reached,” she said, according to Patch. “As I have said before, if an agreement is reached, I am committed to making sure San Diego can benefit from state legislation that is consistent with what other cities have received for their sports facilities.”

Neither the Chargers nor the Raiders expect their respective cities to come through in the clutch with deals they’re willing and able to take; the Rams, meanwhile, have shown every indication of wanting to split St. Louis.

Calling audibles

As a result, the NFL itself has had to hustle. Whichever teams wind up in Los Angeles in 2016, they’ll all need to play somewhere. None of the current stadium plans would finish construction by then. In order to avoid being caught up short, the league has sought out “temporary venues for the 2016 season for one or two teams relocating to the Los Angeles area,” the Register reported. “USC officials have already said they want to host an NFL team at the Coliseum in 2016. The university’s lease, however, allows only one NFL team to play at the stadium.”

Even securing two temporary venues, however, would simply put off the real problem. “Three teams either want or need Los Angeles but there is only room for one stadium and two teams,” as the Los Angeles Daily News put it. Navigating the situation to a safe landing presents a unique challenge, as simple math suggests one team might be left out in the cold.”

Summing it all up, one league official told the Daily News the harsh truth: “It could get messy.”