With so much of the revenue that an NFL team receives being an equal split among the 32 teams (predominantly the revenue from their TV contracts), the stadium is one of the few places where teams can have a competitive advantage on their income. Luxury boxes, seat licenses, attractions that bring fans to a stadium year-round are, in essence, extra money for a team’s balance sheet.
It becomes a never-ending arms race, as bigger stadiums, with more amenities (and sources of revenue) come into being, and teams which are in “older” stadiums (relatively speaking) find themselves increasingly at a competitive disadvantage, and the Chargers had found themselves in one of the poorest stadiums in the league, compared to other teams.
That said, I do not blame the residents of San Diego – at all – for being unwilling to help foot the bill for a new stadium for the Chargers. Local pride aside, every study I’ve seen indicates that paying for a shiny new stadium for a sports team (and NFL stadiums are the biggest of them all) is nearly always a losing proposition, financially, for a city. I feel very badly for Chargers fans (and I realize that, as a Packer fan, I’m spoiled by having an ownership structure that makes a move of the team virtually impossible), but seen this move by the Chargers is really predictable, and it’s been coming for years.
If you were to tell me 10 years ago that “until their stadium is built, a football team is playing in an MLS stadium”, I never would have believed you. It should be interesting to see the Chargers in Stubhub for a couple years - and creating a form of scarcity by 30,000 seats may end up paying off for the Chargers (who knows).
Interestingly, there is proposal for San Diego State University to expand to the area where Qualcomm Stadium is and to change it into a 40,000 seat stadium to be used for their football team and a potential MLS expansion team. And sometimes it turns out that spending money on a college to expand (including refitting a stadium) is far more politically popular than spending money for a professional franchise.
Is there any explanation for the move other than saying that Spanos is a greedy SOB and when he didn’t get his way he decided to pick up his ball and leave? I sympathize with Chargers fans who are losing their hometown team, but I have zero sympathy for the Spanos family, the Davis family, or any other NFL owners who try to extort the local population for their own profit.
Like everybody else, I feel sorry for San Diego fans, but they made the right decision in refusing to build a new stadium. Let the Chargers move. All it means is that there will be 2 teams going broke in LA. Angelenos love their football, but at the college level. The NFL can go pound sand as far as most of them are concerned.
So the Chargers didn’t like playing at Qualcomm Stadium, in response to which they agree to play two years in a 30,000 seat stadium that has essentially none of the amenities a professional football stadium should have. This makes oodles of sense.
While I’d say it might be a bit more nuanced than that, that isn’t an entirely unfair summary.
it’s not like this happened overnight, as it did, relatively speaking, with the Rams’ move – I have very little respect for Stan Kroenke, who clearly had no real desire in keeping the Rams in St. Louis. Spanos and the Chargers had been working with San Diego for over a decade, IIRC, trying to get to a new stadium deal (and, in the meantime, deferred maintenance on Qualcomm has been causing conditions there to deteriorate).
You can call Spanos greedy, you can view it as the team being at a competitive disadvantage, and both probably have some truth to them.
I also like the arrogance of Spanos in asserting that this move will be part of an effort to bring a Super Bowl Championship to LA. This from a team that in 57 prior seasons has managed one AFL Championship, one AFC Championship, and one failed Super Bowl appearance. :dubious:
At least the Rams have a Super Bowl to their name, albeit earned while in exile in St. Louis…
From their perspective, it was a choice between being stuck in that stadium with no chance at getting the new one they want, or putting up with a couple years at a tiny stadium but playing at a new, state of the art stadium after. Time will tell if they regret it.
Yup. AIUI, the NFL had given them exactly one year to decide if they were going to join the Rams in Los Angeles, and this week marked the end of that year. if they hadn’t chosen to move to Los Angeles now, they would have lost that option, with the Raiders then receiving the opportunity to make that move.
This is probably a dumb question since the answer is obvious, but here it goes. If having a brand new stadium with all the latest luxuries is such a good way to make money, why are all these NFL teams (Chargers, Rams, Raiders) unable to obtain private financing to build their new stadiums?
Because it’s a good way to make money by virtue of transferring money from the taxpayer into the coffers of the team. That’s what makes it so profitable.
I suppose a good response, which might be true further down the line, is that. The team owners will probably eventually reach a point where they are going to run out cities willing to foot the bill.
It also depends on the location. If people aren’t going to your stadium because you’re in a bad market for football then you won’t get a return on your investment. If you’re not filling a 50,000 seat stadium then your 100,000 seat stadium might just be emptier.
It’s not like they’re moving across the country. Something like a third of their season ticket holders will actually live closer or about the same distance to the new place.
I think a significant number of the season ticket holders probably won’t be purchasing next year. Given that it’s LA and not the Midwest or the South, Spanos is probably going to have trouble finding new buyers to replace the old ones as well.
