Really? I’ve heard maybe Bills, Chargers, or Saints to LA or maybe Bills to Toronto
The Bills have been rumoured to be going to Toronto forever. Realistically, it’s probably not going to happen; Ralph Wilson will ensure the team stays in Buffalo past his death.
With the NFL, it’s less important than any other sport that the teams be in the big cities. The NFL makes it cash from TV. If having a team in LA would help TV revenues, the NFL would be aching to find someone to get a deal done.
That’s my opinion on why there’s no NFL franchise in LA. What better way for a franchise owner to blackmail a city into publicly funding a big shiny new stadium with luxury boxes than to to point to the fact that Los Angeles–the second biggest market in the U.S.–is still without a professional football team. However, I think there’s also the perception that despite its large population, LA is a lousy sports town. Except for the times they are winning championships, fans in the LA basin are considered to be a rather blasé lot when it comes to their sports teams. (For example, there’s the stereotypical Dodger fan who arrives in the third inning, spends most most of his time gabbing on his cell phone rather than watching the game, and leaves in the seventh regardless of the score in order to beat the traffic.) When LA lost both the Rams and Raiders, the cries of outrage from local fans were nowhere near the volume reached by fans from Cleveland and Baltimore when they had their teams ripped from them.
Ralph has already said he’s not passing the team on to his heirs or selling before he dies: when he croaks, the Bills will be up for sale to the highest bidder.
Is the NFL-CFL noncompete agreement still in effect, or did the CFL’s expansion to Sacramento and Shreveport etc. a few years ago nullify it? IOW, would the NFL even be willing to allow the Bills to move to TO if it meant killing its post-college player development program?
As for the stadium thing, seriously- isn’t Oakland Coliseum as crappy or worse than the Coliseum or Rose Bowl? I was there last in 2000 and they didn’t even have a Jumbotron.
That’s probably a lot of it. We really just don’t care enough. The dodgers are a good example, ask 100 people around LA what they think of when you mention a Dodger game and 90 will probably say Dodger dogs.
Since they built Mount Al, yes. But the A’s are building their own new park in Fremont. The Raiders are stuck there.
:Bemused Brit:
How can you you countenance major sports teams just flitting from city to city? There is no way on Earth that a big English team, Newcastle United say, could or would suddenly become Brighton United or Frankfurt United, merely because those were more lucrative markets. The very idea is ridiculous. It would take many years for their new locals to start supporting them, for one thing, and the old supporters would be so disgusted that they’d probably switch to supporting Sunderland (which is saying something, indeed).
The way you blithely accept major sports teams moving across the country merely because it makes business sense… it baffles us.
That goes to the differing origins of our sports teams. Yours generally developed as community sports clubs, with their identities defined by the communities. Your leagues were formed ad hoc by the existing clubs, and the clubs could exist without them and form new leagues if they want, or change their levels or even sports.
American pro teams are, almost without exception, business franchies created by their leagues as business ventures, and with their identity defined by the leagues. They can’t exist separately, or secede and form new leagues, and never have. Any emotional cnnection teams have with their communities is the product of marketing on the part of the franchise owners, although it is no less sincere for that. But it’s always understood that the team belongs to and is controlled by the league, not the community, and the league can take its business to a more promising market if it is unable to develop sufficient support where it is. A move from a community that has given the team its support is condemned as callous and shortsighted but inarguably within its management’s rights - *they * own the team, *not * the community.
That structure, combined with business management in a market, and that in turn requiring the most attractive opponents to sell tickets, make soccer-style relegation/promotion systems unthinkable in American sports. A bad team isn’t going to make the necessary revenue that way - the Tampa Bay Rays *need * to have the Boston Red Sox come to town so they can sell tickets; they wouldn’t last long with those same dates against the Syracuse SkyChiefs. Nor would the players unions countenance players making major-league money stuck in the obscurity of the minor leagues.
We accept that state of affairs because it’s the way it’s always been for us, and because regular examples remind us. You reject it because for you it’s never been that way.
Does this hold as well for the Green Bay Packers, which ARE community-owned?
I said “*almost * without exception”, did you notice? :dubious:
I did but apparently didn’t give it as much weight as I should have. 
But the NFL basically gift-wrapped the opportunity for Los Angeles to have a new franchise a few years ago, only to see it awarded to Houston because no one in L.A. could get it together. I think I’d be more afraid of a growing mid-sized city that sees nabbing a pro football team as a way to show off its newfound importance and is willing to do ANYTHING to make it happen. I look at L.A. and see a city that doesn’t appear to particularly care if it has a team.
That’s an interesting idea. Maybe they will move the Bills from Buffalo to Sacramento. Then, they can change the team logo to this.
Actually, LA has lost three NFL teams. The Chargers started out life as the Los Angeles Chargers at a time when the Rams were a strong, well-supported and well-established team. The Chargers moved to San Diego after one or two years in LA.
Bingo!
To be fair, the DodgerDogs have a better record. 
The CFL, contrary to what the Toronto media would have you believe, would probably do fine without Toronto. It’s strongest, by far, in Western Canada, and could maintain at least a six-team league with those teams and the shockingly successful Alouettes.
Hamilton might be killed, but oh well.
And a USFL team, a WFL team, an XFL team, and an AAFC team, if you count any of those as majors.
The NFL most definitely DOES want a team in Los Angeles. It wants a team there very badly. Problem is, while the league wants and needs a team there, no individual owner sees Los Angeles as a desirable place to relocate to.
That’s because Los Angelenos like football, but they don’t like it enough to subsidize it the way so many other cities do. Other cities will build big new stadiums with scores of luxury boxes and let teams play there for free. Los Angeles won’t do that. When teams inquire about moving to L.A., they’re told- “We’ll be glad to have you! Hope you like the Coliseum!” And that’s pretty much the end of that.
St. Louis is a much smaller market than L.A., but the subsidies they gave to Georgia Frontiere made it a much more attractive home than L.A.