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.

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.

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.

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.

Some see a plan in which San Diego does much better than the cities which have hosted other NFL teams seeking new stadiums. In a commentary by David E. Watson, a San Diegan involved in the effort to build Petco Park, the Padres’ downtown baseball stadium, he says it’s unusual for “a professional sports team and league to pay for more than 60 percent of a new modern sports facility.”

Some see a plan that is vaguer and much costlier than it lets on. This is from Voice of San Diego:

Taxpayers could end up investing nearly $1 billion in the new Chargers stadium under the plan released this week by the mayor’s stadium task force, a Voice of San Diego analysis of the plan shows.

 

The analysis includes all the public money the task force said would need to go toward the stadium, plus the money to prepare the Mission Valley site for development and some costs the task force neglected. Most notably, the task force did not factor in the price tag to operate and maintain the facility every year – something that costs the city about $11 million a year at the current site.

Some see the proposal as a clever ploy to undercut the claims the Chargers will make to other NFL teams to win their support — 24 of the 32 teams must give their blessing if a franchise wants to relocate, and they don’t want the bad blood seen when the Colts fled Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1983. This is from Union-Tribune columnist Nick Canepa:

… if the franchise turns this down, it simply will mean it doesn’t want to stay here. Because there is enough for them to remain — maybe not L.A. money, but enough. After all, haven’t they always said their objective is to remain “competitive” with the rest of the teams in the NFL, not to make billions?

More of the same from San Diego political insider Peter Q. Davis:

Remember, the NFL and Chargers have claimed that their preference is for the team to remain in San Diego, provided our city puts forward a plan that meets or exceeds the competitive city.

The plan proposed this week does this, overwhelmingly.

But one way or the other, one thing is clear: Whatever the problems with its plan, San Diego has a serious proposal. In Oakland, there’s a $500 million gap in financing a stadium that officials can’t seem to finesse.  San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier and Ross say they hear the Raiders’ plan is “gurgling blood.” Really.

Meanwhile, San Diegans who want to keep their team have an unlikely supporter: one of the most famous dropouts of the London School of Economics. Yes, it’s Mick Jagger. “We are having such a great time in San Diego. It’s so beautiful here. Why would anyone want to leave? Especially the Chargers,” Jagger said at a Sunday night Rolling Stones concert at Petco.

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.

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.

In a surprise move, AEG published a study slamming St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s proposed Inglewood stadium and mixed-use development. Even more surprising, the study, commissioned by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, warned Kroenke’s plan offered terrorists a tempting target conveniently close to LAX.

The remarkable attempt to undermine Kroenke reflected a new degree of urgency for AEG, which found itself in danger of being sidelined by the recent developments at competitor sites. Although analysts immediately decried the Ridge report’s threat of a “terrorist event ‘twofer'” with the airport, AEG stuck to its guns.

The Los Angeles Times, which obtained a copy of the 14-page report, noted the NFL — which includes teams with stadiums on both coasts close to major airports — declined to comment directly on the claims. “In contrast to Ridge’s warnings, city officials as well as aviation experts have said a stadium at the Hollywood Park site is not a safety concern,” The Times reported. “The Federal Aviation Administration, in environmental impact reports, has twice given its blessing to proposed stadiums in Inglewood.”

But the NFL’s efforts to stay above the sports-field fracas could hurt AEG more than help it. The Ridge report hit a wall of criticism in sports media that will send a sure signal to the NFL, which has a strong interest in giving its blessing to whatever outcome commands the strongest public support.

As Kevin Draper wrote at Deadspin, AEG’s study signaled a degree of desperation that put Kroenke’s own dealings in a relatively milder light:

“Campaigns for multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects are always waged with a certain amount of unscrupulous activity — Rams owner Stan Kroenke has just so happened to have donated thousands of dollars to the political campaigns of Inglewood officials — but this is a particularly shameful attempt by AEG.”

Above the fray

For the NFL, nationwide judgments about who’s the better developer carry important business weight. As CalWatchdog.com previously reported, the NFL’s desire has been to avoid two particular kinds of chaos as events unfold in L.A.

In the first nightmare scenario, Kroenke would embarrass the NFL by relocating the Rams despite St. Louis offering millions upon millions in incentives to stay.

In the second, the new San Diego Chargers/Los Angeles Raiders agreement to share a stadium would force the NFL to reshuffle the complex assignments and play schedules of the NFL’s two conferences, the AFC and NFC.

The dream scenario, by contrast, would see the NFL shepherd through an outcome that satisfied three major interests: Los Angeles, sports analysts and America’s football fans.

For that reason, the NFL ultimately could allow all three potential deals to fall through. “The chance that three teams are moving to Los Angeles is exactly zero,” wrote Matt Bonesteel at The Washington Post. “One team, almost certainly. Two teams, maybe. But three? Nope. There’s no chance the NFL wants to dilute one market with so much product, and there’s no chance an NFL owner would want to take that risk.”

Because of the tangle of interests and conditions surrounding the prospective relocations, however, the NFL could end up without a single team to support. If the NFL winds up obligated to support a go-for-broke bid by St. Louis to keep the Rams, both Kroenke’s Inglewood deal and AEG’s downtown effort would be eclipsed by the messy Chargers/Raiders plan to share a stadium at a third location in Carson, north of Long Beach.

The NFL’s unwillingness to reshuffle its conference lineups would leave it open to relocating either the Chargers or the Raiders, but not both. But granting favor to just one team would pull the NFL into a fresh controversy with bad implications for business.

Staying power

For reasons like that, AEG’s eyebrow-raising report made a certain amount of sense. The big firm has used its advantage in money and support to get all the way to the goal line on its downtown location.

The only thing missing has been a team willing to sign on the dotted line. Although its L.A.-imposed deadline to lock in a team has been set to expire in April, AEG has benefited from any difficulties faced by its competitors.

Although the Ridge report went after Kroenke’s proposed stadium, the Rams have no chance of relocating to AEG’s downtown location.

Ironically, AEG’s bout of bad publicity could actually help NFL operators and observers to reconsider the complexity and inconvenience of the Chargers/Raiders plan — opening up the possibility of sending one of those teams downtown.

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

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

Live sports are gold for TV networks

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

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

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

Cable TV bills swell due to sports fees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maneuvers and regulations

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

Art Rooney II, the league’s stadium committee chairman, finally went on the record about Kroenke’s apparent plan. And he doesn’t seem to like it. “There are still cards to be played,” he told the Times. “There’s still a process that has to work its way out, and we don’t know what the outcome’s going to be yet. That’s why we have league committees and approval processes.”

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

Wary players

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

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

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

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

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

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