Why doesn’t America’s second-most populous metro area have an NFL football team? Quite a distance to San Deigo, San Francisco, or Oakland.
They had the Rams and the Raiders. The owners decided to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
Because the voters refused to build a billion dollar stadium.
Voters in LA aren’t as dumb as other cities. For example- Santa Clara, those eeediiiotes. :rolleyes: And San Jose politcos want the A’s, so we’re no smarter.
Pro sports bring in pollution, traffic and crime. The give back a handful of temp/PT peanut thrower jobs. :rolleyes:
I don’t think there’s a factual answer, only opinions. Why doesn’t Detroit have a NFL team? Why doesn’t Cleveland? Why does NY claim to have 2, when they both in fact play in New Jersey? Why do Buffalo and Green Bay, neither of which is a thriving metropolis, both have NFL teams? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…
Green Bay owns their team.
I agree with most of this. Let Santa Clara City Citizens pay if they want. If a team wants to move so be it. but let the team build the new structures.
I am against Santa Clara county or San Jose city paying anything to bring a team here.
City of Industry to the rescue!
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/Industry-Council-Approves-Pro-Football-Stadium.html
They will build a stadium that will seat multiples of their residents or registered voters.
“Build it and they will cum.”
San Jose has already paid millions. Redev bought mucho land over by the Sharktank, in hopes of a A’s stadium. The values have … tanked.
Huh? Cleveland has a team. They suck, but they have a team.
(Of course, the way the Steelers are playing this season, I shouldn’t talk. :()
Moving to The Game Room from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Marketing and an accident of geography. There are several NFL teams that are as far from the city that bears their name (e.g., the Dallas Cowboys), but the geography of New York City means that the teams are across the border.
Because we hoped all the gang members would follow the Raiders to Oakland!
Well, techncially, 112,120 people own the Packers, by virtue of owning one or more shares of stock in the team. Many of them live in Green Bay, or Wisconsin, but there are stockholders in every state (I’m a stockholder, and I live in Illinois).
(It’s a common misperception that the Packers are owned by the city, or by every resident of the city.)
Green Bay still has a team because:
a) the nature of the stock ownership rules prevents any one person from controlling more than a tiny fraction of the team’s outstanding shares
b) if someone wants to sell their shares in the Packers, the team gets the right to purchase them first
c) most importantly, the NFL’s revenue sharing, primarily on the TV contract, have allowed the team to have a competitive income, despite being in such a small market.
Well, until this year, the Dallas Cowboys used to play in Dallas County at least.
So, why no team in Los Angeles?
As others have noted, both the Rams and the Raiders left in ‘95, due to more attractive stadium deals elsewhere. (In the Raiders’ case, they were lured back to Oakland, their original market, which they’d left for L.A. in '82, again in pursuit of a better stadium deal.)
(And, let’s not forget that the Chargers played their first season in Los Angeles.)
The Raiders played in the Coliseum, which is old, lacked the luxury boxes and other amenites which other NFL teams enjoyed in their stadiums, and is in a lousy neighborhood. The Rams had moved from the Coliseum to Anaheim around 1980, but again, that stadium was in need of renovation. Anaheim Stadium has since been renovated, but, as I understand it, it’s been modified into a baseball-only stadium now for the Angels, and it may no longer be suitable for football.
As has been alluded to, there have been a large number of proposals to build a new NFL stadium in the L.A. area. Al Davis pursued a number of them before leaving for Oakland. The NFL definitely wants a team back in Los Angeles, as the #2 media market, but it’s extremely unlikely that a team will relocate there without a new stadium…and, in this economy, that may not be happening any time soon.
Note that relocation is likely the only option for an L.A. team right now; I don’t believe that the NFL is considering further expansion right now.
The Vikings may be the most likely suspect to head to L.A., since they still haven’t been able to get a deal done for a new stadium in the Twin Cities. I’ve also heard the Jaguars mentioned, as well as the Rams, with that team currently up for sale.
I’ve also frequently read that L.A. lacks a strong fan base…that there’s so many other things that you can do in L.A. on a Sunday afternoon. No idea if that’s really accurate or not.
Thanks, Kenobi.
The Redskins don’t play in DC, the Bills don’t play in Buffalo, the Cowboys don’t play in Dallas, and the Jets/Giants don’t play in NYC. Of all those teams, the Jets/Giants are far and away the closest to their actual city, a mere 6.9 miles away from Times Square. This probably makes Giants stadium one of the closest stadiums to the heart of downtown in the entire league.
Ok, but you know what I mean. “The Owner” can’t just up and move his team to whatever city offers to build him the nicest stadium.
I wonder what the closest is. Depending on what you classify as the “heart of downtown,” the Chicgao Bears play 1.8 miles from Madison and State (from where the N/S and E/W coordinates of Chicago are defined.) That’s a reasonable definition of heart of downtown for Chicago. Any others closer?