Buffalo got their AFL team when its ranking among US metropolitan areas was much higher, even though its population wasn’t that much larger than it is now. Remember, Buffalo had pro basketball (Buffalo Braves, now the LA Clippers) in the 1970s, and it came very close to having major league baseball in the late 1960s and mid-1980s.
Also, the market area for the Buffalo Bills includes Rochester and much of Southern Ontario.
It wasn’t so much that the Buffalo metro area shrank a little bit, but rather that the population (and this the market) of other once small metro areas grew to vastly exceed that of Buffalo in the past 40 years.
I’m sure 633squadron was just making a snarky comment about the quality of the Cleveland (and Detroit) teams.
As far as LA having a pro team, they certainly do. It’s just that they play in the Pac-10 rather than the NFL. I expect that in most years they could probably beat the Detroit Lions…
Getting around the snark, and elaborating on the one good answer,
There were football teams in Los Angeles (I know you know that), but they moved because of two main reasons: lack of a decent stadium in which to play and perceived lack of a strong fan base.
There really is no decent place to play NFL football in Los Angeles. Neither of the large football bowl stadiums will work any more; the Coliseum simply isn’t up to date enough, and as mentioned, is in a lousy area of the city; the Rose Bowl isn’t much better, though it’s in a better area. I was at the Rose Bowl two years ago for a DCI World Finals and it’s like a slice out of the wayback times, which simply won’t work to support the ticketing structure of a modern NFL team (at least, any such team not named the Packers).
So far, no one in LA has figured out how to build an NFL ready stadium. The voters aren’t interested in picking up the tab, and no owner is invested enough in the idea of having a team in LA to do it himself.
The reasons for this are up for debate. As you have seen from the answers you’ve gotten from participants here. It certainly is true that the perception of most people is that the city’s fan base for an NFL team is weak; common “wisdom” is that people in LA are offered too many alternative activities to become strong fans of any one professional sports team. None of which keeps the Dodgers or the Lakers from being quite successful in terms of attendance.
The field where the Redskins play is only a couple of miles from the D.C. line. It’s arguable that it’s better for all concerned to put Redskins games there rather than in a field in the middle of D.C.
The Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis is one mile from city hall (via Mapquest, using one-way streets). It’s actually about 3 blocks from the heart of downtown.
Browns Stadium in Cleveland is on the Lakefront, also about 3 blocks away from Public Square.
Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinatti is on the Riverfront, separated from downtown by I-71.
Heinz Field in Pittsburgh is on the Alleghany River, about 1,000 feet away from the Triangle.
In addition to what DSYoung mentioned, there’s also not as strong an incentive in the NFL for a team to be based in a large market like LA as there is in other major sports. In every other sport, there will be a large number of games that will be broadcast on a local station; in LA, the rights to those broadcasts are quite valuable. However, as all of an NFL team’s TV money comes from the national contract, this incentive to locate in a large media market is missing. And so teams can hold out for a sweetheart stadium deal before they consider moving to LA.
True, although part of the L.A. argument is that the good weather there in the fall and winter (compared to many more northerly NFL cities) means that, relatively speaking, there are more options in L.A. during football season than there may be in other cities. I’m not sure that I buy that, but that’s what’s argued.
Another example for “weak fans” that often gets trotted out in these discussions is the phenomenon of fans leaving Dodger games in the 7th inning, in order to beat traffic. Again, I’m not sure if this is indicative of much (or even if it’s true).
As dtilque noted, the strength of the USC football program (and, in some years, UCLA, as well) might diminish the appeal of an NFL team, especially if it’s not very good.
Clearly you haven’t sent much time around AT&T Park. Or even Pacific Bell Park, as redevelopment in that area was well underway back then.
I had time to kill at Burbank Airport last time I left LA and got to talking with one of the bartenders. He said that there are tons of Raiders fan streaming through the airport every weekend the Raiders play in Oakland, flying up, taking a 10 minute shuttle to the Oakland Coliseum, and then heading back to LA. Interesting, but it actually works out pretty well considering where Oakland’s airport & stadium are. You don;t even need to pack.
It’s funny- when the 49ers started talking about moving to the suburbs, one of the first things San Franciscans thought was “they better not even think about keeping the ‘San Francisco’ name!” But when the A’s were going to move, A’s fans were really hoping they’d keep the Oakland name. As a cartography geek, I can’t stand it when teams (or people) say they’re from somewhere they’re not.
This seems to be the crux of it. Most cities which built a stadium to attract a team were able to sell their voters on doing so because having an NFL team was a point of civic pride, and that it would create perceptions that the city was “big” or “up-and-coming”. Los Angeles doesn’t need that.
Yep. And in any other sport, there would be a team willing to at least help raise the money for a stadium in order to get access to the LA media market, but the NFL offers no such incentive.
I also think leaving LA empty helps NFL teams trying to blackmail their cities into giving them buckets of taxpayer money by giving them credibility: “You think we won’t leave you without a team? Go look at LA.”
There have been lots of studies saying that building a sports stadium adds nothing in overall revenue to an area. Example. The money is just shifted from other leisure activities. If that’s the case - and I don’t know of any good research that says otherwise - then municipal funding of stadiums isn’t a good investment. You can argue that it builds civic identity or rewards fans or whatever, but it’s really corporate welfare on a large scale.
That argument has been around for years but has normally been defeated by boosterism, cronyism, and political deals that would make your eyes water. The new baseball stadium in Washington, D.C. will cost a failing city $700 million. Which naturally led to a proposal for the city to build a soccer stadium at public expense.
More recently, cities have been standing up to team owners and calling their bluffs. That doesn’t always work, as in L.A., and some cities cave immediately, as in New York. But my guess is that the long term trend - especially with a recession pounding municipal finances - will be for private interests to build stadiums.
What about LA? That City of Industry stadium seems to be a mixture of public bonds for the land and private money for the stadium itself.
If Roski can raise the money, then there will be a stadium and a team will move to LA. If the recession puts a crimp on his pocket money, then there won’t. Buffalo will move to Toronto first.
After so many years and so many such bluffs, I wonder if that tactic doesn’t backfire by now. A city like New Orleans or Jacksonville can reply “Sure you can, just look at the great stadium LA built for the last 5 teams that made that threat. And the other one’s got bells on it.”
The Bills aren’t moving to Toronto. First off, the Toronto games have largely been a huge failure.
Despite the team’s poor performance in recent years, they still sell out games at Ralph Wilson Stadium. It’s a cash cow. A large part of the appeal of the Bills is the region’s deeply entrenched blue-collar culture (similar to the fan base of Green Bay), and the best tailgating scene in the country. In a way, the game is almost secondary to the activity in the parking lot the previous eight hours. You can’t tailgate in Toronto (downtown stadium with no surface parking), Toronto fans are far more reserved, and they’re not very blue-collar.
Torontonians see themselves as being “above” Buffalonians; there’s no shortage of stories about how poorly Torontonians treat Buffalo natives when they visit for cross-border shopping, how they’ll openly mock Buffalonians when they visit Toronto, and so on. They’ll never accept the team as their own, especially with the presence of the Argos. Meanwhile, they’ll lose the Buffalo fan base, much like Clevelanders now despise the Baltimore Ravens. Buffalonians will likely become Browns fans, as they were before the AFL arrived.