… With the Chargers later, maybe. The Raiders are staying put.
Sorry, St. Louis.
As a Charger fan, I’m a little frustrated with the result, only in that we’ve been waiting for these meetings for a conclusion- and now we just get to wait longer.
There is some positive in that it opens the door to further negotiation with the city (with the bonus of an extra $100 million towards a stadium)
But, the drama of will they/won’t they gets to continue as there is a full year to hash out a deal with Kroenke.
My guess: Spanos has said all along he has no interest in Inglewood… but that was also probably a lot of political bluster to sell his own Carson proposal. If the Chargers decline and stay in SD, that opens the door for Oakland to partner with the Rams- and I can’t imagine Deano wanting 3 teams in SoCal. So, my guess is the Chargers are still good as gone, in the end. But we may get one more season out of it.
The avarice of the NFL is truly astonishing; all of this, ultimately, revolves around the fact that the NFL not only wants new stadia, but actually enforces a rule that the teams aren’t allowed to pay for most of them, but MUST extort the money from the taxpayer.
I sympathize with Rams fans but ultimately St. Louis will be just as lovely a city without blowing hundreds of millions of dollars paying a billionaire to continue being a billionaire.
Countdown to first team threatening to move to STL unless they get a sweet stadium deal starts now.
As a former Baltimore Colts season ticket holder, my money’s on Jimmy Irsay.
I think you made a mistake there. Shouldn’t your post have ended this way?
“Sorry, Los Angeles”
I hope the NFL is a bust again in SoCal. I know if I lived in SoCal I could something better to do with my Sunday afternoons than attending a Rams game.
The Rams I get because they’re near the bottom of attendance year after year. And the Raiders are at the absolute bottom in attendance almost every year, which probably has as much to do with the Coliseum being a dump in a dumpy part of town. But the Chargers are not in the bottom 5 and usually not in the bottom 10.
And for gosh sakes, the amnesia about failed NFL teams in Los Angeles is astonishing. Hell, USC doesn’t usually come close to filling the coliseum and they’re usually good. A bad NFL team in LA will not draw people.
The dome in St Louis isn’t that old, is it? What becomes of it?
Built in 1995. OMG, it’s 20 years old!! :dubious:
Apparently that’s the new life span of stadiums. The Braves are ditching Turner Field after almost exactly 20 years as well. They are moving to a majority taxpayer funded stadium in another Atlanta metro county. And actually the Atlanta taxpayers are on the hook for a new football stadium for the Falcons as well, opening in 2016.
In all cases, millions of dollars of tax money being wasted to lure a sports team to play somewhere, when the current stadium was perfectly fine.
Yep. I hope the NFL gets shut down by every city. Zero tax dollars to be spent on a stadium. If a team wants a state-of-the-art place to play, let them build it.
Amusingly, the reaction from my St. Louis friends has mostly ranged from indifference to outright celebration. I imagine my FIL is annoyed, but most people here really had no use for the Rams. Good riddance.
Maybe they can send the Raiders to St. Louis. Why does Oakland have an NFL team again? Weren’t they basically the surrogate Los Angeles team?
No thanks. We’re good.
Adding to this … hopefully San Diego will lose the Chargers for good. Why a team expects a city to foot their stadium bill but is willing to part with half a billion to “relocate” is beyond me.
Oh, and Spanos, from what I hear, not very many ex-Charger fans are willing to drive the 2 hours to Inglewood to see your last place team play. Me, I’m now an Indy fan.
The Rams were at or near capacity for a number of years when they were great, good, and bad. What the Rams did to go to abysmal attendance was be record-setting bad over a long period…with Ownership who would not engage the fanbase, all the while with his eyes on moving. He never once actually engaged the community leadership the entire time he was the sole owner. Instead all of his evidence of engagement was with the CVC, which is not a financial body.
Full disclosure I’m a resident of St. Louis, but not a Rams fan (go Niners).
That’s because we’ve seen the Stan Kroenke style of negotiating for several years now. St. Louis has already been through shock, denial, guilt, bargaining (oh SO much bargaining!) and anger, so we’re ready to move on to acceptance.
The city will actually make more revenue from the Dome (it is a large convention center) with the Rams gone. There was basically 13 weeks ( 10 home games with the possibility of playoffs) where they couldn’t schedule conventions.
The ironic thing is that the Inglewood Stadium is being built with absolutely no public money whatsoever (of course there may be various tax breaks and whatnot, but the building is all private).
Busch stadium parking lot?