The Spanos family, owner of the Chargers, has until January 2017 to decide whether to serve as a tenant in a to-be-built mega-stadium in Inglewood owned by Stan Kroenke and the officially relocated Los Angeles Rams. If the Chargers don’t take the option, Raiders owner Mark Davis will then have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

In the days after the Jan. 12 announcement that the NFL had given its blessing to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Inglewood, there was considerable cynicism in San Diego and the sports world in general about the Chargers’ one-year option. The assumption was the team was gone.

But in the past 10 days, there have been glimmers of hope that the Chargers may yet be able to work with the city and county of San Diego to build an NFL-worthy stadium with $350 million of public subsidies. The main reason is the emergence of Fred Maas — a high-profile developer and former leader of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversaw highly successful redevelopment efforts in downtown San Diego — as a special advisor to the Chargers helping get a stadium built. The Union-Tribune has more:

“(Maas) has been around San Diego a long time,” Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said on a video posted to the team’s web site. “… He’s very familiar with all the political aspects of what goes on in the city, how all that works. His knowledge of San Diego as a whole will help us.” …

 

Maas was the stadium point man for former Mayor Jerry Sanders, as well as the former director of the Centre City Development Corp.

 

The Chargers suggested to Faulconer that he consider Maas to head the city’s side of stadium negotiations in 2014.

 

After meetings with Faulconer, Maas withdrew from consideration, citing concerns about the commitment he would have to make considering all that the new mayor was working through. … It was around that time in late 2014 that many people close to Spanos began to indicate he had essentially given up on getting a stadium deal in San Diego.

The San Diego Reader offered this tart description of Maas: “a specialist in steering public money into private real estate ventures.”

Raiders owner blasts A’s over long lease

Meanwhile, in Oakland, no Maas-type figure has emerged to help owner Mark Davis deal with local governments. While the Raiders renewed their lease for another year at O.co Coliseum, Davis is sounding increasingly downbeat about the lack of progress toward a new stadium — especially because of the actions of the Oakland A’s, the other primary tenant at the Coliseum.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s,” Davis told CSNBayArea.com … . “They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back. Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”

That’s from coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Leaders of Nevada’s largest city are wooing Davis. Their strongest argument is the prospect of the Raiders not having to pay much or anything toward construction of a new stadium that an NFL team could share with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ football team. Last month, the Review-Journal reported, Davis went to Vegas and …

… met with casino giants Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta, UNLV president Len Jessup and former school president Donald Snyder. Adelson’s Sands Corp. has proposed building a $1.2 billion domed stadium … .

Long-standing NFL concerns about having a team in America’s sports betting mecca remain intact, if not as prominent. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft have come under fire for their early investments in DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports betting site that has exploded in popularity since 2014, and they may be forced to sell their shares.

A series of unflattering media reports have depicted Raiders owner Mark Davis as clueless and outmatched by his responsibilities, with relatively few financial resources. Even if Davis had the best press in the world, however, he would have huge obstacles to overcome. Unlike the owners of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams — the other teams in the L.A. triangle — he has no leverage with his home-town officials. Between their own budget headaches and a long history of scraping with Mark Davis’ late father, previous owner Al Davis, Oakland officials have no interest in offering a subsidy of any kind to the team and appear indifferent to the team departing.

Meanwhile, the Raiders’ and Chargers’ announcement earlier this year that they wanted to build a shared $1.7 billion stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County is far less advanced than Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s planned $1.8 billion Inglewood stadium project. Kroenke has all has necessary environmental OKs to begin construction, and as the league’s second-wealthiest owner, the multibillionaire has no need to hunt for public subsidies or partner with other teams.

If Kroenke is willing to flout league rules and move a team without permission from three-quarters of team owners — as Al Davis did when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982 — he has clear sailing ahead. But if the league puts up enough obstacles to a unilateral move — say, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell trying to withhold TV contract money or threatening some other highly punitive action — Kroenke would be forced to reconsider. As the past three years have shown, Goodell is the most unpredictable commissioner of a major U.S. sport in memory.

No team has enough owner support to relocate — yet

Pro Football Talk, generally the best connected of any media covering the NFL, looks at a possible — perhaps likely — scenario. It appears to be what Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan was talking about last week after owner meetings in New  York City when he referred to a “Plan C.”

With Chargers owner Dean Spanos definitely having the nine votes needed to keep Rams owner Stan Kroenke out of L.A. and Kroenke likely having the nine votes needed to keep Spanos out of L.A., the future of the NFL in Los Angeles could hinge on the ability of Spanos and Kroenke to work something out. …

 

Some owners actively oppose Kroenke’s desire to move the Rams, believing that Spanos has tried long enough to get a new stadium in San Diego, and that St. Louis is on the verge of crafting a viable stadium proposal to keep the Rams. But if at least nine owners feel strongly enough about Kroenke getting the L.A. market to vote against the Chargers, the situation will remain at impasse, with both teams in limbo.

 

A brokered deal would hinge, as many such arrangements do, on money and/or other considerations. With each owner able to block the other from moving, one owner needs to persuade the other owner to drop his opposition. In addition, then, to the relocation fee that would be paid to the league generally, the owner who moves to L.A. may have to make a large, separate payment to the one who doesn’t.

 

Likewise, the arrangement could include other terms. For example, if Spanos accepts that the Chargers will stay in San Diego and the Rams will move to L.A., the league could agree that only one team would be in L.A. …

 

It’s becoming more and more clear that something will happen, sooner than later.

Owners eager to set up team in L.A.

Meanwhile, the eagerness of the other owners to get a team in Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. Last week, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Jr. and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay all told reporters in multiple interviews that it was quite possible the NFL would have a team playing in the nation’s second-largest market in 11 months.

It seems unlikely that the league would allow two teams to play in temporary quarters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or at the Rose Bowl in the same season. So NFL insiders offer this scenario as increasingly plausible: Kroenke gets the necessary support in a January vote to allow him to bring the Rams back to Los Angeles — after he makes a big enough payoff to Chargers owner Dean Spanos to drop his interest in Los Agneles.

The NFL has long liked the idea of teams sharing new stadiums, as the New York Giants and Jets do in the Meadowlands facility in northern New Jersey. So perhaps “Plan C” is for the Chargers to sign on as a secondary tenant in Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium. But that’s an awfully complex negotiation to finish by the January vote at which NFL owners want to take decisive action.

In their coverage, both the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Voice of San Diego don’t appear to think much of the city’s chances. In the U-T’s opinion pages, former Sports Illustrated and USA Today writer Jill Lieber Steeg — a San Diego resident who is married to former NFL executive Jim Steeg, who still has good sources within the league — offered this brutal assessment:

Here is the cold, hard truth, San Diego: You are not the Chargers’ first choice. The Chargers want Los Angeles in the worst way. What can San Diego officials say or do on Monday to keep the team here? NOTHING. …

‘Planning to sneak out of town’

Steeg endorses the theory that the Chargers have not acted in good faith:

When the mayor tried to engage the team in stadium discussions, Mark Fabiani, special counsel to Spanos, told Faulconer to sit tight, that there was no sense of urgency. It is clear now why the Chargers were so quiet: They were planning to sneak out of town and move to Carson. They had hoped to demonstrate to the NFL that there was no interest in retaining them in San Diego.

 

But the mayor threw a monkey wrench into their plans. He announced in his State of the City address Jan. 14 that he was forming a task force of civic leaders to help develop the first “real plan” to build a new stadium and keep the team in San Diego.

 

 

From that moment on, Fabiani, who presumably conveys the thoughts, values and ethics of team ownership, has adopted a scorched earth strategy to get the team out of town. He has tried to manipulate the media and bloggers, unleashing texts and emails written in legalese with incredible ferocity and in great abundance, seemingly around the clock. He has leaked documents prior to important meetings with the Citizens’ Stadium Advisory Group (CSAG) and Eric Grubman, the NFL’s executive vice-president and Los Angeles-point person. And he has ridiculed, attacked and abused some of San Diego’s icons and civic-minded citizens, including Convention Center Chair Steve Cushman, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, the mayor, CSAG and the Padres, insinuating through a media channel the baseball team was a roadblock in the Chargers getting a downtown stadium. The thought may be it would impact Petco Park for parking and compete for revenue-generating events.

‘The Chargers will not be on board’

The Voice of San Diego is also skeptical the city has a chance of keeping the team, for several reasons. Here is one:

[For the city’s] plan to work — for a public vote to be possible in January, in time to inform the NFL before it decides which team gets to move to Los Angeles — the San Diego City Council would need to begin talking about it in mid-September. And the mayor has said he won’t go forward with that unless the Chargers are on board. Thus, the Chargers would have to be on board by then.

 

The team would have to be fully invested in the effort. A successful campaign in that short of a time frame would require the team’s money as well.

 

The Chargers will not be on board by then, though. The moment the team signals that it is 100 percent committed to getting the mayor’s plan done and passed through voters, Carson leaders will likely drop their push. What’s more, NFL staff is not allowed to work with a city like Carson if a team isn’t leading.

 

The team would essentially have to give up its push for Los Angeles in about a month. All based on the promise … that a majority of San Diegans is willing to support the mayor’s plan.

Selling tickets for a team to be named later

There remain observers who think the Chargers will be stuck in San Diego, whatever their hopes for Los Angeles. The owner of the St. Louis Rams, billionaire Stan Groenke, has a much clearer and easier path to building a privately funded stadium for his team in Inglewood than the Chargers and the Raiders do for building a jointly used stadium in Carson, where financing details remain murky.

But one thing is playing: The NFL is eager to get started in Los Angeles. Fox Sports reported on Friday that team owners were to discuss the possibility of selling season tickets for the 2016 regular season for a Los Angeles team — without even knowing which team or teams will have relocated.

Attention, Rams, Raiders and Chargers fans: You might soon be able to get in line for tickets for your team’s home games next year in Los Angeles.

Even before it’s decided whether your team will actually move there. Sources have told FOX Sports that, at next Tuesday’s special meeting in Illinois, NFL owners will discuss implementing a program to allow fans to make deposits to get on a waiting list for tickets at a temporary stadium in L.A. before the end of the calendar year.

The goal would be to start building a season-ticket base for the 2016 season now, rather than waiting until it’s clear which, and how many, teams will be making the move.

This suggests the San Diego argument that allowing the team to relocate would make the league look bad isn’t likely to have much impact — and that the NFL, as Steeg says of the Spanos family, “wants Los Angeles in the worst way.”

But an unforseen twist involving a powerful San Diego-based tech juggernaut has given new ammunition to foes of a government-led effort to provide the NFL and the billionaire Spanos family with a fancy new stadium. Voice of San Diego has the details:

On March 4, as they were preparing their vision for a new Mission Valley football stadium, San Diego City Councilman Scott Sherman, real estate analyst Gary London, developer Perry Dealy and City Attorney Jan Goldsmith visited Qualcomm, the company.

They met with Ed Capozzoli, the vice president in charge of all of Qualcomm’s facilities and real estate needs … .

Sherman and the team wanted to pitch Qualcomm on an idea. Their vision for the Mission Valley stadium site included nearly 3 million square feet of office space. You can’t really fill that much piece by piece. …

Qualcomm would be perfect, they thought. After all, it was planning a 1.2 million square foot expansion. …

But when the group sat down … Capozzoli lit into them for the way he felt the company was treated by the city. Particularly frustrating, he said, was the traffic situation around Qualcomm’s Sorrento Valley office. London said Capozzoli told the group the city was dragging its feet and not letting Qualcomm modernize nearby traffic lights. …

Even as it expands elsewhere, Capozzoli said Qualcomm would never build anything in San Diego again. Capozzoli, participants in the meeting confirmed, said that order came from the top of Qualcomm’s leadership. That planned 1.2 million square foot expansion has not gone forward.

Company more important than Chargers

This gives those hoping city and county officials let the Chargers address their stadium problems on their own — or move to Los Angeles — two new frames for their anti-stadium arguments.

The first is that Sherman’s plan looks much better from the city’s perspective than from the private sector’s. San Diego’s civic finances are much healthier than a decade ago. But it still has massive pension debt, needs billions in infrastructure repairs and can no longer use redevelopment to encourage private companies to assist its development plans. A large corporation is likely to see the city as a problematic development partner.

But the second and more potent argument is this: Why are city leaders focusing so much on a pro football team while neglecting the city’s biggest private-sector employer, a company that’s been crucial to San Diego’s emergence as a global tech center? More from Voice of San Diego:

If it is true that Qualcomm is done building anything in San Diego, it could be a new low in relations between the city and its largest company. It also highlights a troubling backdrop to the stadium saga: that as the community and politicians rally to subsidize and keep one company, the Chargers, in town, another much larger one — with roughly 13,000 more employees — sits displeased.

A 2013 study by the San Diego Workforce Partnership and Regional Economic Development Corp. found that Qualcomm ‘s presence supports more than 27,000 jobs in the region, including its own — adding to a $4.53 billion annual economic impact. Qualcomm employees represent nearly 2 percent of all workers in the city.

Stadium hunt was already messy

This complicates an already-messy stadium picture. Most city leaders believe the Chargers are in the middle of a dubious good-cop bad-cop routine.

The Spanos family insists it wants to stay in San Diego and wants to work with local politicians and the business community to come up with an acceptable stadium. Meanwhile, it actively works with the Oakland Raiders on a plan to build a shared stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County. As that plays out, former Clinton White House aide Mark Fabiani, an attorney who has been the team’s point man on stadium issues, has been undercutting the stadium task force with declarations that the Mission Valley site will never work.

Fabiani’s real constituency is probably the NFL owners who will have to approve the Chargers’ move to the Los Angeles area, as the consultant working with the stadium task force points out.

The NFL has suffered from years of bad publicity over past decisions allowing teams with loyal fan bases to leave Baltimore, St. Louis, Houston and Cleveland. The blowback was much less when the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles in 1994 because attendance had been mediocre for years.

San Diego fans’ relatively strong relationship with the Chargers will make any team move more likely to trigger the local and national anger seen when the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis, the Cardinals left St. Louis for Phoenix, the Oilers left Houston for Nashville and the Browns left Cleveland for Baltimore.

Raiders moved without league approval

But will that matter to enough NFL owners to prevent the Spanoses from gathering the necessary three-quarters support for a team relocation? Perhaps.

Pro Football Talk reported in January that Rams owner Stan Kroenke was having trouble building three-quarters support for his desire to move from St. Louis to Los Angeles County at an Inglewood stadium he has taken several steps toward constructing.

But the football insiders’ website noted that Kroenke didn’t believe the other owners’ approval was ultimately necessary.

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.

Faulconer’s remarks came Wednesday in his first State of the City address. The Republican city councilman became mayor in February 2014 after a special election triggered by the September 2013 resignation of Democrat Bob Filner following a scandal- and peccadillo-filled eight months as mayor.

Beneath the blandness of Faulconer’s stadium remarks appeared to be a cold political calculation, local observers believe. There is no larger U.S. city with a GOP mayor than San Diego, and Faulconer wants to maintain that distinction after the November 2016 general election.

Filner defeated Republican Councilman Carl DeMaio 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent in 2012 despite an awful reputation for his personal behavior, a reputation he proceeded to amply confirm when the 20-year congressman moved from the relative anonymity of the House to the spotlight of being mayor of California’s second-largest city.

Because of widely reported early returns that showed Faulconer with a 9 percent edge in his special election mayor’s race against unseasoned 33-year-old Democratic challenger David Alvarez, there is a state and national perception that he won easily in the eighth-largest U.S. city. But final results showed Faulconer’s edge to only be 52.9 percent to 47.1 percent in an election dominated by older, whiter and wealthier voters.

Alvarez might well have won in an election with general election demographics. A Democratic candidate with a longer track record would have been a clear favorite over Faulconer in a race with no incumbents and the turnout seen in November 2012 and expected in November 2016.

This leaves Faulconer with political dynamics which compel him to seek the center ground. The idea of public subsidies for a stadium have been politically poisonous in San Diego since its pension debacle triggered a city fiscal crisis in 2004 and 2005. The idea of providing indirect subsidies, such as giving city-owned properties to the Chargers to develop, has not emerged as an alternative that an elected official or major political leader is ready to champion. (Disclosure: My newspaper’s editorial page has advocated this option.)

And so the mayor is likely to keep saying he wants to keep the Chargers from leaving without ever offering the sort of stadium subsidies that are common in U.S. professional sports.

The irony is that more than a few city insiders believe that the Chargers have been playing the same PR-optics game for years. A marginally successful NFL franchise based in Los Angeles would be immensely more valuable than a moderately successful NFL team in San Diego.

The patriarch of the family that owns the Chargers, 91-year-old developer Alex Spanos, has been in poor health for years. Many insiders think his passing would lead to a much quicker exit for the team.

The owners have a year-to-year option to pay to get out of the lease at Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley. They announced well before the Feb. 1 deadline that they will be back at the half-century-old stadium this fall.

A dozen years ago, the Spanos family backed a proposal to renovate Qualcomm and redevelop adjacent areas. That possibility was scuttled by the collapse of the real-estate bubble after 2005 and by the 2004 election of a city attorney, Mike Aguirre, who saw the Chargers as unworthy partners of taxpayers.

In recent years, the team has pushed for a team in the downtown area of San Diego, near the popular and well-regarded Petco Park, home of San Diego’s major-league baseball team.

Petco opened in 2004. It was partly paid for by taxpayer subsidies approved after the Padres’ 1998 World Series appearance.

The Chargers have no such goodwill dividend to draw upon. While their team has had an average to good record for most of this century, fans and the media alike have perceived them as underperformers based on their talent.