Four LA teams, if you count the Los Angeles Buccaneers (1926) who were apparently a road team only, operating out of Chicago but stocked with California players.
Exactly right- Jacksonville and Memphis wanted desperately to be seen as Big Time Cities. An NFL team wasn’t just another entertainment option to those towns- it was a status symbol, a sign that they’d arrived. Hence, they overspent to get NFL teams.
Los ANgeles doesn’t need to be seen as a Big Time City- it IS one, and the NFL needs their big market more than they need one more entertainment option.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Who knows may the Rams will return to Los Angeles. The Rams started 0-8, finished 3-13; the worst record ever for the franchise. Right now a lot of St Louisans would be glad to help load the moving vans.
This columnist in the St Louis Post-Dispatch paints of pretty dreadful picture of Rams football in the near future.
The originating fanbase doesn’t particularly accept it, but it’s a business reality sometimes here. A big part of the difference is that English towns aren’t as spread out as American cities are: there aren’t portions of your country with millions of people and hundreds of miles to the nearest team. When the Cardinals moved to Phoenix from St. Louis, their nearest competitors for the local fanbase was in Denver, over 800 miles away.
Perhaps the difference really just is that in the States, locals will support any team that’s halfway decent, no matter how new they are, just based on proximity. (Jacksonville being a noted anomaly)
A possible mildly interesting impact of a Bills or Jax move to LA is it will destroy the NFL’s fairly nice geographic division realignment unless the NFL bumps the Chiefs out of the AFC West, which I doubt it would do.
Go Cobras!!
Ummm. . . never mind.
How much outrage was there from Baltimore? They were averaging around 20,000 fans per game in the years previous to the move. The fans weren’t supporting the team, and the team moved because of that.
The situation was completely different in Cleveland - every game was sold out, no matter how the team was performing, and there was a decades-long waiting list on season tickets. The merchandise sales were always near the top. The owner was so incompetant in his business ventures that he couldn’t manage to stay afloat with one of the best situations you can possibly be in, and another city offered to bribe him and save him from his own incompetance.
When the move was announced, hundreds of thousands of Clevelanders marched in protest. It’s the only time in sports history that a city fought hard enough to retain ownership of a franchise’s name and history even when the business entity that was the franchise left.
Sorry, I know I have a stick up my ass about the issue, but I’m going to object any time fan support from Baltimore and Cleveland are put in the same sentence.
The passage from the column linked by5 Time Champ is a good illustration of why so many fans in North America are disgusted with professional sports.
Is the Edward Jones Dome even 10 years old? The way its being described you’d think it was a neglected 110-year old ruin with rotting bleachers and crumbling arches. I thought it was bad that the Seattle Supersonics were on the verge of departing for Oklahoma City because the Key Arena–which was renovated back in the distant past of the mid 1990s–was considered “obsolete”. Are we getting to the point where city, county, and state governments have to start building new publicly funded stadiums and arenas every decade in order to keep their NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL franchises? It seems as though the franchise owners are increasing both the frequency and amount of their blackmail demands.
A new stadium on taxpayers expense greatly increases the value of a franchise. They can sell for many more millions. They feel no need to share with those who paid for it. It belongs entirely to the owner. If another city will make it more profitable ,they leave. Loyalty is pretty much a one way street.
LA would have to pay a fortune to bring another team in. When the money is big enough another will come in.
The EJ Dome opened shortly after the beginning of the 1995 season. Meanwhile, Indianapolis is building a new stadium to replace the RCA Dome, Pontiac, Mich. is looking for someone to buy the Silverdome now that the Lions have moved back to downtown Detroit, and Kansas City was strongarmed into paying $375 million to renovate Arrowhead Stadium.
If Los Angeles is such a lousy sports town, why have the Dodgers been 3+ million fans year after year? The Lakers sell out just about every game. Even the Clippers draw very well.
I have seen baseball games in many major league baseball stadiums. Lots of fans arrive late and leave early and talk on cellphones during games. It happens in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Boston, and just about every other place.
The idea that there is not an NFL team in Los Angeles is because of the attitude of the fans is laughable.
There is not an NFL team in Los Angeles for many other reasons. It’s not because rich guys are afraid to cater to a grotesque stereotype of a fan.
[QUOTE=… NFL owners refuse to play in cities that won’t build them shiny new stadiums with acres of skyboxes.[/QUOTE]
Except for New England where Bob Kraft built a state of the art stadium with his own money.
Not that Kraft did so out of the goodness of his heart and his love of the people of New England.
Actually, he kinda did. He had Connecticut ready to build him a stadium, but he chose to build one himself it Mass. He was lifelong season ticket holder and fan. He couldn’t bring himself to take the team out of the Boston area.
NDP raised a good point. While the Colts and the Browns had relatively strong identification with Baltimore and Cleveland, neither the Rams nor the Raiders had that identification. I don’t care what it calls itself, a team that plays in Anaheim is not a Los Angeles team, and the Raiders couldn’t shake the Oakland off.
Another issue is that LA has UCLA and USC, both Division I teams that tend to have strong fan loyalty, probably stronger than any NFL team can muster. They’re also not likely to move anytime soon.
Robin
But a potential NFL owner doesn’t care all that much about fan loyalty, he/she/they care about whether or not they can make a gazillion dollars.
As fans, we like to think that fan loyalty is important, but it’s not as important as the huge amounts of money that can be made from stadiums, television deals, and all the other stuff that sports makes.
Right now, there is no place in L.A. to put a football team where an owner can turn it into a cash cow.
If there were an NFL team in L.A., there would be no shortage of fans to support the team.
But the Massachusetts Legislature did give Kraft subsidies to help build the new stadium. Ultimately, Foxborough was a better deal than Connecticut.
It does happen in England though, you just have to go back a while. Woolwich Arsenal have been impersonating a north London club for 90 plus years now 
.
If you guys in other NFL cities think your teams are bad about threatening to move to LA, you should try being 120 miles from LA. The finicky Chargers are running out of cities in San Diego County that will listen to their bullshit, and may well actually move north.
Sacramento and Shreveport? Are you fucking shitting me? The Canadian Football League has teams in states on the southern US border?
Well, our teams aren’t “clubs” except in the a vestigial sense. There’s nothing particularly tangible that ties a particular American sports team to a particular geographical location, unlike many/most European soccer teams which also serve as a community institution in a tangible sense.
American fans are more likely to give up on a shitty team, too. San Diego has been awash in Chargers Fever for three years or so, but for the seven years before that that I lived here, the majority of football fans rooted for Denver–over 1,000 miles away for you Brits, and that’s with an ignored NFL team in the same city and a handful of other closer teams. The Broncos won a Super Bowl in San Diego and then everyone was suddenly a Broncos fan, until the Chargers got good and everyone pretended they had been there all along. Qualcomm Stadium is packed for every game now, but I went to a game against Denver several years back where there had to be no more than 10,000 fans and most of them were rooting for the other team.