What we know about Chargers' move to Los Angeles
SAN DIEGO – The owner of the Chargers once came to a startling conclusion about the future of his franchise in Los Angeles.
After one season in L.A. in 1960, he realized his team couldn’t draw crowds and couldn’t make money in the same market as the Rams.
So he left – for San Diego, in 1961. “We can’t compete in the same market with the Rams,” team owner Barron Hilton said then, according to the book The Way We Were in San Diego.
MORE CHARGERS COVERAGE:
Congrats, San Diego, you win by losing Chargers
All things Chargers: Latest Los Angeles Chargers news, schedule, roster, stats, injury updates and more.
Chargers plan to play in smallest 'NFL stadium' for next two seasons
Roger Goodell: Chargers 'did everything they could' to stay in San Diego
But now one of his successors has reached the opposite conclusion.
Chargers owner Dean Spanos announced Thursday his team was moving back to L.A. because it couldn’t compete with the rest of the league financially at his old stadium in San Diego.
Instead, he’s betting that he will not only compete with the Rams in L.A, but he’ll also be better off sharing a stadium with them in nearby Inglewood, scheduled to open in 2019.
“The Chargers are determined to fight for L.A. and we are excited to get started,” Spanos said in a statement.
Where will they play?
Until the Inglewood stadium is ready, the team will play in the StubHub Center in nearby Carson, which will be by far the smallest stadium in the league at 30,000 seats. The Chargers need to be “cool” in L.A., where they will be challenged to stand out in the crowd of many pro and college sports teams.
By playing in such an intimate, novel NFL setting, they hope to be a hot ticket.
“The experience for our fans at StubHub Center will be fun and entertaining, and every seat will feel close to the action,” said a statement from A.G. Spanos, Spanos’ son and a team executive.
By contrast, the Rams are temporarily playing in the much older and spacious L.A. Coliseum.
Will the team change its name?
Not likely. They’ve always been the Chargers even when they were in L.A. 57 years ago. But they already have changed their logo to something that looks like an italicized version of the classic L.A. Dodgers logo. Either that, or it’s the offspring of a marriage between the Dodgers’ logo and the logo of the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Lightning joked about it on Twitter, saying that “for the record, us & the @dodgers are just friends.”
How is San Diego reacting?
Predictably, with anger and sadness. The team leaves behind 56 years of memories here, with many great players, including Dan Fouts and Junior Seau. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said at a news conference Thursday that Spanos “made a bad decision, and he will regret it.”
“San Diego didn’t lose the Chargers,” he said. “The Chargers just lost San Diego.”
San Diego County Supervisor Ron Roberts ripped the Chargers on Twitter and compared them to former Los Angeles Clipper owner Donald Sterling, who moved the team from San Diego in 1984. Before that, San Diego lost another NBA team, the Rockets, who moved to Houston in 1971.
“The Chargers will stand next to Donald Sterling in the Hall of Shame,” Roberts wrote on Twitter. “It hurts, but we will move on.”
Fans showed up at Chargers headquarters in San Diego to discard their jerseys and other Chargers’ gear. One started to burn a team flag before it was snuffed out by security.
How does L.A. feel about this?
Does it even know the Rams moved back last year? It’s hard to stand out in the entertainment capital of the world. And the Chargers have no history there, unless you count their invisible year there in 1960, when they sometimes drew 10,000 in a Coliseum that seated about 100,000, according to the aforementioned book by Richard Crawford.
The last time the L.A. market had two teams, in 1994, the Raiders and Rams ranked 24th and 28th out of 28 NFL teams in home attendance with 42,000 and 51,000 per game, according to STATS, LLC.
The bet is the market is so big now that two well-marketed, well-managed teams can take advantage of it. They’ll both probably need to improve. The Rams finished 4-12 this year and fired their coach. The Chargers finished 5-11, fired their coach and moved.
Knowing they’ve got work to do, the Chargers unveiled a new website Thursday called fightforla.com.
“This isn’t any city,” the team’s website said. “This is Los Angeles. L.A. is people and places and passion and pride. Any respect given, must be earned.”
How and why is this happening?
Spanos exercised an option given to him exactly one year ago by the NFL at the same time the league approved the relocation of the Rams from St. Louis. The Chargers could move in with the Rams or stay indefinitely in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium, one of the oldest and worst stadiums in the NFL.
He had been trying for 15 years to get a new stadium in San Diego but never could reach a deal with the city or county to help pay for it. He wanted taxpayer funding to pay for a big portion. He didn’t get it. In November, 56% of voters rejected a plan to raise hotel taxes to help fund a new $1.8 billion stadium and convention center downtown.
“As difficult as the news is for Charger fans, I know Dean Spanos and his family did everything they could to try to find a viable solution in San Diego,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
To break their lease in San Diego, the Chargers are required to pay $12.6 million to the city of San Diego. They also will pay a $650 million NFL relocation fee if it’s paid over 10 years. Because of the new stadium and the much bigger market size, the franchise can make more money and become more valuable in the long run in L.A. according to estimates by Vanderbilt sports economist John Vrooman.
Why didn’t the Chargers use that $650 million to pay for a new stadium in San Diego?
The team reached the conclusion that San Diego’s much smaller market size didn’t support that level of additional investment. L.A. is a much bigger and wealthier market where it expects greater returns and where the team will share construction costs with the Rams for their new $2.6 billion stadium. The Chargers and NFL had been willing to contribute $650 million toward a stadium in San Diego. Part of that will go toward the Inglewood stadium construction instead, in addition to the NFL relocation fee.
