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The NFL’s ungainly effort to determine the fate of three potential Los Angeles teams will drag on into 2016. A mid-January meeting in Houston will give owners their next opportunity to opt for or against the competing relocation plans, which would shift the St. Louis Rams to Inglewood in the first instance and the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders to a shared Carson stadium in the second. 

The slow-motion scramble for L.A. has arisen because each of the three teams wants newer and better stadium facilities, which would increase team revenues. “According to Forbes 2015 NFL franchise valuations, the median team revenue is $322 million. However, the Chargers ($304 M), Rams ($290 M) and Raiders ($285 M) rank among the league’s bottom third, with the Rams and Raiders among the worst three revenue-earners in the league,” as Patrick Rishe observed at Forbes.

St. Louis reaches

So far, neither plan has mustered adequate support, reported the Los Angeles Times, which added that the city of St. Louis has banked on a counterproposal that depends on a loan package far in excess of what the NFL has been historically willing to provide. “The plan is predicated on the league providing a $300 million loan — $100 million more than has been approved by owners,” according to the Times. “In a recent letter to the task force, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the premise that $300 million will be available is ‘fundamentally inconsistent’ with the league’s program of stadium financing.”

According to Rishe, Rams owner Stan Kroenke has “indicated to the NFL’s relocation committee that he would be willing to take on an equity partner — a reluctant move made when Kroenke concluded he wouldn’t get the necessary 24 votes of support without it. 

Acrimony in San Diego

Wednesday marked the league deadline for the three teams’ current cities to submit proposals that would keep them local. San Diego’s offer, in excess of $1 billion, “outlined a previously released plan that calls for the city and county to contribute $350 million toward a new stadium, contingent on a public vote next year,” the Times reported separately. But the team itself reiterated their opposition to the deal. “The Chargers don’t believe voters will approve the plan based on polling the team conducted in August,” noted the Times. “They also believe an environmental-impact report for the potential stadium was rushed and leaves the concept vulnerable to litigation.”

That calculus was partly reinforced by remarks from League Commissioner Roger Goodell. As ABC News reported, Goodell “said earlier this month that the league wants certainty in proposals from San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis, which means no time for letting cities have voters decide the fate of stadium projects.”

Cash strapped Oakland

The huge sums flying back and forth in San Diego and St. Louis discussions have dwarfed what’s on the table for the Raiders, although the stakes for the NFL — and local fans — remained just as high. In contrast to the two cities’ schemes, “Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has no such lavish plan to keep the Raiders in town,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “but says she hasn’t given up trying to persuade the team to stay. Schaaf says Oakland needs more time to iron out a deal with the Raiders, negotiations that are made complicated by the Oakland A’s 10-year lease on the Coliseum.”

Although Schaaf’s Tuesday letter to the league offered “no plan for replacing the crumbling, 50-year-old Coliseum,” the Chronicle added, it promised “a new stadium through a lease agreement with the Raiders or from property tax revenue generated by future development around the site.” Ironically, cash-poor Oakland may prevail in its bid to keep the Raiders because the team is on a budget as well. “If the St. Louis Rams and the San Diego Chargers stay put, then Raiders owner Mark Davis could lose his chance to move to a $1.7 billion stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson,” the Chronicle added. “He has planned to share the space and the financing with the Chargers.”

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.

But when it comes to Oakland — home of the third team that’s been subject to years of intense speculation about a possible move — Mayor Libby Schaaf has handed negotiations with the Raiders and the NFL over a new stadium to an assistant city administrator, a low-level official more accustomed to helping neighborhoods get better trash collection or to settling disputes over zoning infractions.

Given that the Raiders have a loyal fan base, an international following and a rich history, how is it that local elected officials could be so blase about losing the team?

The most obvious reason is the city’s weak finances and how they relate to the most pressing local issue. Oakland has had persistent budget gaps and has not benefited from the tech boom remotely as much as San Francisco, Santa Clara or many smaller communities in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

Fighting crime the priority, not keeping Raiders

Meanwhile, crime has grown steadily in recent years, to the point where Forbes declared Oakland to be America’s third-most dangerous city. Public safety is Mayor Schaaf’s priority, as this April story about her proposed budget in the San Francisco Business Times story makes clear:

The $2.4 billion two-year budget would increase the Oakland Police Department from 722 to 762 officers in the next year and a half, with a long-term goal of 800 officers by 2018.

 

“Oakland will not grow unless people are confident it is getting safer,” Schaaf wrote in a letter earlier this month to the City Council.

That letter identified three priorities beyond public safety, but never mentioned the Raiders or the NFL and their desire for an upgrade from the battered Oakland-Alameda County Stadium.

From the national media perspective, this indifference is being interpreted as a sign the team’s departure for L.A. is inevitable. The NFL executive overseeing Los Angeles relocation issues this week said no “viable” plan had ever emerged from either the city or the team, and a league committee declined to even talk with a Bay Area real estate developer who wants to build a stadium as a centerpiece to a larger, $4.2 billion mixed-use development, believing the plan to be far-fetched.

“As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out,” ESPN’s John Clayton wrote on Tuesday.

But that presumes the Raiders’ and Chargers’ proposal to jointly build and then share a $1.75 billion stadium project in Carson — where they already have land and regulatory approvals —  is likely to get the league’s go-ahead.

St. Louis and San Antonio may be team’s future

San Diego officials don’t believe that’s close to inevitable. It’s why their stadium proposal announced this week is actually tougher in its financing terms than a proposal that a task force recommended this spring, as CalWatchdog reported Tuesday. The thinking appears to be that the NFL is far more likely to approve the Rams’ move back to Los Angeles, where its stadium plan is considerably closer to fruition than the Raiders/Chargers proposal. There is believed to be no NFL interest in having three teams in Los Angeles.

Oakland’s mayor and City Council may have a similar take. But unlike San Diego officials, they’re not offering a financing plan, one perceived as “tough” or otherwise, to the Raiders. They appear resigned to having the Raiders eventually leave for a city with a much more lucrative, modern NFL stadium with luxury boxes and more seats.

If the Rams leave town, St. Louis is an obvious option for Raiders owner Marc Davis. This week, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon expressed confidence that the St. Louis riverfront stadium project that’s now being planned would have an NFL team as a tenant even if the Rams departed for Inglewood.

And the most populous U.S. city to not have an NFL franchise — San Antonio, America’s seventh-largest city, with 1.5 million residents — is also likely to be in the mix. City officials are eager to get a team for football-crazy South Texas. And the Raiders have already had talks with city officials, dating back years.

San Antonio believed it had proven itself as an NFL-ready city in 2005 when the New Orleans Saints got a warm reception after temporarily relocating that season because Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Superdome. But so far it has been unable to attract a team.

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.”

Numerous competing and conflicting agendas have made life more difficult for the teams, owners, cities and league officials involved in the maneuvering. But the potential payoffs of a two-team solution remained high enough to make the effort worthwhile.

Unlike the potentially costly and burdensome deals that expansion teams must often rely on, the promise of a return to L.A. was fueled above all by the willingness of St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke to bankroll a so-called “two-team compliant” stadium complex on his own, without relying on public funding.

A new breakthrough

After a several-month stretch that surprised observers with its unpredictability, the many moving parts of up to three potential team relocations have begun to settle into place. Advancing the latest round of progress, Kroenke revealed he would present to the owners a stadium plan to accommodate two teams.

Presumably, those teams would be his Rams and one of either the San Diego Chargers or the Oakland Raiders.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, Kroenke’s willingness to deal another franchise into his own stadium created a way to break a complex logistical and political logjam:

“Kroenke doesn’t need to partner with another team to finance the stadium, but the NFL sees L.A. as a two-team market and wants venues to be capable of hosting both. The Inglewood plan is two-team compliant, which means it has two home locker rooms, identical sets of office space, and two owners’ suites. Whereas the Carson proposal is based on the Chargers and Raiders simultaneously relocating, it is widely believed Kroenke does not want to share the market with another NFL team right away, and, because he would be assuming the risk of the stadium by himself, would want to reap the benefits of getting his team up and running as L.A.’s sole franchise.”

Publicity

While Kroenke would benefit from the profit and publicity granted by a season or more as the only game in town, the NFL would benefit from a different kind of running room. In the run-up to the owners’ meetings, league officials reiterated their concern that the cities of San Diego, Oakland and especially St. Louis be given the opportunity to make their best good-faith efforts to appease their teams and broker deals to keep them from relocating to L.A. (or elsewhere).

As ESPN reported, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell explained the league’s “first objective will be to make sure that those markets have had the chance to get something done — that they can get a stadium built to secure the long-term future of their franchise.” He continued:

“San Diego has been working 14 years on a new stadium. Oakland is not in a new debate either, for the A’s or the Raiders. Same with St. Louis. … These are long debates about what is the right solution for the community and what is best for the team. We’re looking to see if we can create those solutions locally. If we can’t, we obviously have to look at long-term solutions for those teams.”

Last month, the Chargers and Raiders called an unexpected audible, introducing an independent joint plan to partner up for a stadium deal in Carson, north of Long Beach. That created a potentially powerful alternative to Kroenke’s plan in Inglewood.

But the Chargers/Raiders plan, unlike Kroenke’s, required the teams and the league to get bogged down in the ins and outs of the municipal budget — a big turnoff to an NFL hoping to reach a new status quo with a minimum of upset.

Musical chairs

Try as it might, however, the NFL has been unable to impose its own strong preferences on the situations surrounding L.A. football. The NFL’s owners themselves have proven far more enthusiastic about pushing ahead with L.A.

A handful of key owners, who recently formed a new Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities, have raised the prospect that the best way to move forward could touch off a chain reaction of moves that would surprise fans but satisfy most key interests.

As NFL media reporter Albert Breer noted:

“One of the 10 to 12 scenarios being looked at by the league is particularly intriguing: The Rams go to L.A., the Raiders replace them in St. Louis and the Chargers remain in San Diego. The Rams would get a head start as the first team in L.A. (a reward for Kroenke’s investment), the Raiders would get a fresh start in a new stadium and the Chargers would potentially be able to jump-start their efforts to build in San Diego, with the city knowing the team could join the Rams in Inglewood.”

Complex as it may be, the kind of multi-step play forged in Arizona could draw the shortest line yet to L.A. football.

Los Angeles is somewhat unique in that it’s one of the few markets where there is strong resistance to tax subsidies for stadiums. As the Feb. 23 Los Angeles Times reported, another reason the Southland doesn’t have an NFL team “is that while every other city talks about what it will do to either lure an NFL team or keep the one it has, L.A. talks about what it will not do — namely it will not help finance a venue with taxpayer money. The Hollywood Park and Carson plans call for privately financed stadiums.”

The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders are considering combining in a potential new stadium in Carson. The St. Louis Rams are looking at a new stadium in Hollywood Park.

However, the Los Angeles stadium shutout allows the NFL to manipulate other cities. The Times noted the NFL “depends on using the L.A. vacancy as leverage to get stadium deals done in other cities. Since 1995, 27 of the 32 teams have either gotten new stadiums or had at least $400 million in renovations on their existing ones.”

Stadium jobs

Stadium backers cite the jobs created, or retained, when a new stadium is built. For example, the New Minnesota Stadium — its working title until a corporate sponsor is signed up — was advertised as a big jobs creator. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal reported the pitch in 2009:

“The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission says a new Minnesota Vikings stadium would create approximately 13,400 jobs and an estimated economic impact of $1.35 billion.

“Of the 13,400 jobs created, about 8,000 would go to tradespeople during the building process, and $577 million — more than half of the roughly $1 billion in construction costs — would go toward wages and salaries for construction workers and others working on the project, according to the report.

“Once the stadium opens, it would generate annual direct spending of $145 million, including spending by fans, the Vikings organization, players, staff, visiting teams and the NFL in connection with games and operations.

“It also would generate more than $32 million per year in tax revenue. That compares to the roughly $18 million a year currently generate by the Vikings.”

That eased the way in 2012 for the $975 million stadium to receive large subsidies from the state and the city of Minneapolis. Forbes reported:

“Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton signed a bill last week approving the plan that would include a 30-year lease for the Vikings and have the state contribute $348 million, the city of Minneapolis $150 million upfront plus $6 million per year for operating costs, and $1.5 million per year to a capital reserve fund. …”

Economists

Yet economists who study the matter insist there isn’t much return for taxpayers. Roger Noll is perhaps the country’s top expert on stadium financing. He’s a professor of economics at Stanford University. He explained to EconTalk host Russ Roberts:

“Even in the best of circumstances what you’ve created is something that essentially sucks the blood out of a neighborhood. Because it’s so rarely used. And indeed, they create slumps. As opposed to being engines of growth. And cities who put in hundreds of millions of dollars into football stadiums inevitably find themselves with big losses. …

“So, the bottom line to it is: Cities should not subsidize baseball and football stadiums, if the goal is engine of economic growth or financial benefit. Now since I don’t have anything against San Francisco subsidizing the opera, I can’t say: Therefore it follows you shouldn’t pay the money at all. But the decision to pay the money should be based purely on having it in the community because you like it. As opposed to: It’s going to return some great financial bonanza.”

Shifting money

The reason why stadiums don’t generate higher long-term revenue is that they just shift money from other entertainment spending. Fans only have so much money. What they spend on tickets and food for a new sports team is taken away from what they might have spent, or spent in the past, on Disneyland, Universal Studios or a local movie theater. The money is not created, but shifted.

Noll also pointed out stadiums are built differently today than in the past. Stadiums such as Fenway Park in Boston and the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit were built in the middle of neighborhoods. After a game, fans would go to local bars and restaurants to celebrate a victory or rue a loss.

But new stadiums are built with their own shopping complexes and in the middle of vast parking lots. That keeps fans within the facility, spending money to the benefit of team owners and businesses within the complex, but not local businesses on the outside.

Foremost among them was a surprise deal between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders to build and share a stadium in Carson, an L.A. County municipality north of Long Beach.

But thanks to L.A.’s suddenly crowded market, and its thicket of regulations and competing interests, the biggest obstacle to forward progress could be too many players on the field.

The Chargers-Raiders deal came as a shock for several reasons. First, two competing plans for stadiums have already come close to fruition. As CalWatchdog.com noted, St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke had successfully converted an intended Walmart location in Inglewood into a promising stadium and mixed-use development zone.

What’s more, as Sports Illustrated reported, Inglewood’s City Council “could decide to adopt a new redevelopment plan without a public vote on the proposal. Such a plan could also forego talks about possible noise, traffic and air pollution in the area and start construction on the site in the immediate future.”

To be funded with private financing, Kroenke’s plan would make profitable use of one of L.A.’s largest undeveloped lots, without the risk of failing to land an NFL tenant.

That risk had hamstrung the other big stadium project near downtown L.A. Developer AEG’s effort to seal the deal on a downtown location had foundered on the goal line. “AEG’s land deal with the city of Los Angeles expires in April,” reported U-T San Diego’s Nick Canepa, “and isn’t likely to get an extension unless AEG gets a firm commitment from an NFL team to relocate.”

Canepa also noted, “If the Chargers were to take AEG boss Philip Anschutz up on it, they immediately would become lame duck and then relocate to the Rose Bowl or the L.A. Coliseum for the 2016 season while the new stadium is being built. AEG has everything it needs for the shovel — entitlements and lawsuits settled — except a team.”

By throwing in with the Raiders, the Chargers effectively forced a fourth down for AEG. Unable to woo either San Diego or Oakland, AEG faced the impossible task of wooing Kroenke’s Rams away from his would-be Inglewood stadium.

Fumble on the goal line?

Nevertheless, the Chargers-Raiders deal faced its own steep challenges. As ESPN reported, it appeared Kroenke could move the Rams even if the NFL opposed. (According to ESPN, the League was all but certain to side with St. Louis, which was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to retain the Rams.)

But the NFL has the power to scuttle the Chargers-Raiders deal because of the politics of league play. The NFL is divided into two conferences, the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference. Each conference has three divisions.

The New York Giants and New York Jets currently share MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. But they play in different conferences, the Giants in the NFC East and the Jets in the AFC East.

Under NFL “interconference” rules, teams in different conferences play the teams in the other conference only once every three years.

And teams in the same conference play one another twice a year. The Chargers and Raiders play in the same division, the AFC West. So if they shared a stadium, they would play each other, at “home,” twice a year.

That, Business Insider explained, would confer on each team an “extra” home game every year — “a huge advantage over the other teams in the division and a big advantage over the rest of the AFC when it often comes down to one game deciding the two wild-card spots.”

To undo that problem, each team reportedly is willing to switch out of the AFC and into the NFC. “However,” Business Insider continued, “there is no indication that the NFL would be willing to realign. In addition, there is no indication that any team, such as a team in the NFC West, is willing to swap places and any team being asked to move will almost certainly want to be compensated for the trouble.”

In sum, Kroenke has maintained an advantage in the race for L.A., since he controls both a stadium site and the team that would play there. His St. Louis Rams also play in the NFC West, and would play alone in their own stadium. So there would be no complication involving home games shared with another team.

Yet the NFL’s willingness to bring two teams to L.A., combined with its interest in keeping the Rams in St. Louis, has given the League a reason to make a Chargers-Raiders deal work.

It’s still anyone’s game.

After a slow decade, the Niners are back in contention. They barely lost the Super Bowl in 2013 to the Baltimore Ravens. And they finished a game from the Super Bowl this year.

Last year the team inked the third-largest naming deal in American sports. Levi’s secured team naming rights for $220 million over 11 years.

With that kind of cash coming in, no expense is being spared in the stadium’s construction. “At the old cost of $1.2 billion, Levi’s Stadium was almost tied with Cowboys Stadium as the second most expensive NFL stadium ever, behind the New York Jets’ and Giants’ $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. MetLife hosted the most recent Super Bowl in February.

But like a draw play in football — where a passing play is disguised as a running play — taxpayers were faked out. Reported the Mercury-News:

“After Santa Clara voters approved a $937 million plan in June 2010, the cost increased to $1.02 billion in 2011 and was set at $1.18 billion during the April 2012 groundbreaking. After adding another $96 million on Friday, the price tag is now $1.27 billion, or 36 percent more than the 2010 estimate.”

Super Bowl

As bait for taxpayers, the NFL holds out the promise of a new stadium hosting a Super Bowl. So Levi’s Stadium will host Super Bowl L (50) in 2017, with a good chance one of the teams will be the Niners.

Boasting its own jail and a hundred police officers, Levi’s Stadium will prohibit — and punish — conduct ranging from “boisterous” activity in the stands to noisemaking in the parking lot that’s audible from 50 feet.

Dealmakers expect revenues from naming rights, luxury boxes and “personal seat licenses” to speed the Stadium Authority’s $850 million loan payoff, according to the Mercury News. The PSLs, one-off fees imposed on season ticket buyers, are now a standard source of NFL cash. As Time detailed, most franchises use some form of PSLs, which will cost 49ers season ticket holders up to $80,000 each.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles is back on the field for a team. In 1995, the city lost the Rams to St. Louis on promises of a taxpayer-subsidized, top-tier stadium lasting two decades.

Now that 20 years is almost up and the Rams want St. Louis to spend $700 million on renovations to the Edward Jones Dome. But team owner Stan Kroenke purchased a stadium-sized lot in Inglewood — the better to pit L.A. and St. Louis against one another in a veritable bidding war for the team.

Also in 1995, the Raiders moved from Los Angeles back to Oakland. Just this week owner Mark Davis, reported the Los Angeles Times, “has acknowledged the possibility of moving the franchise back to Los Angeles if Oakland can’t get its act together on a new stadium.”

It’s an old NFL tactic: Get cities bidding against one another on taxpayer subsidies for stadiums.

Promises are made about the jobs and economic growth new stadiums will create. But as studies by Stanford economist Roger Noll and others have demonstrated, tax-funded stadiums really don’t create new wealth. Instead, consumers just shift spending to professional sports from other entertainment activities.

As Noll wrote in a study with Andrew Zimbalist for the Brookings Institution:

“But, in reality, sports has little effect on regional net exports.

“Sports facilities attract neither tourists nor new industry. …

“Sports teams do collect substantial revenues from national licensing and broadcasting, but these must be balanced against funds leaving the area. Most professional athletes do not live where they play, so their income is not spent locally. Moreover, players make inflated salaries for only a few years, so they have high savings, which they invest in national firms. Finally, though a new stadium increases attendance, ticket revenues are shared in both baseball and football, so that part of the revenue gain goes to other cities. On balance, these factors are largely offsetting, leaving little or no net local export gain to a community.” 

Non-profit

Despite scoring billions, the NFL actually is a non-profit organization, like a hospital or school. Congress enacted Public Law 89-800 in Nov. 1966, just before the NFL-AFL merger culminated in Super Bowl I on Jan. 16, 1967.

As Greg Easterbrook explained in the Atlantic, the law “saved the NFL uncounted millions in tax obligations, which means that ordinary people must pay higher taxes, public spending must decline, or the national debt must increase to make up for the shortfall.”

Finally, Harvard professor Judith Grant Long concluded in 2012 that, for all sports, taxpayers have been tackled for some $10 billion more than planned in stadium and arena funding for professional sports teams.