There isn’t much more to say about the San Diego Chargers’ move to Los Angeles other than: “We told you so.”
For years, we’ve been documenting how cavalier the National Football League and its franchises can be when its member billionaires’ quest for public money trumps such family values as loyalty and tradition. We’ve shown that, when threats to relocate turn into reality, you can count on the billionaires to shed crocodile tears for the fans they’re leaving behind, while pledging eternal fealty to their new marks.
San Diego...will always be part of our identity.
— Chargers owner Dean Spanos, kissing off the team's home town
One would have thought that Rams owner Stan Kroenke (net worth: $7.4 billion, according to Forbes) set an unbeatable standard for this transparent flapdoodle a year ago, when he grew teary-eyed in front of reporters while discussing the wrenching emotional toll of moving his team halfway across the country from St. Louis to Los Angeles. He called himself a "victim" of circumstances, said "I never dreamed I'd be put in this position," and mooned over how bringing the team back to L.A. was the fulfillment of a dream — even though he himself had financed the original move to St. Louis in 1995.
But Kroenke has been easily matched in sanctimony by Chargers owner Dean Spanos (family net worth: $2.4 billion), who bid farewell to San Diego on Thursday with a letter assuring fans that their city, which has been the team’s home for 56 years, “will always be a part of our identity.” Yes, it will be remembered as the place where the team notched a dismal record of 416-427-11 and made it to the Super Bowl exactly once (a loss).
Spanos expressed “nothing but gratitude and appreciation for the support and passion our fans have shared with us over the years.” Then he acknowledged that in Los Angeles, where the Chargers will share quarters with the Rams in an Inglewood stadium, “we must get back to winning.”
The truth is that winning has nothing to do with success in the NFL in the only category that matters — revenue. The relocation of NFL teams is never related to the search for a winning strategy on the field. It’s unrelated to fan support in the stands or at the merchandise booths. It’s unrelated to providing the average fan with better access to the games or a better stadium-going experience. It’s about extracting more money from taxpayers and the wealthiest members of the community, including corporations, by improving their luxury-box accommodations. The biggest chunk of income for teams comes from the leagues’ multibillion-dollar TV contracts, which are shared. So they look for revenue they can keep, which means money from stadium deals.
The best recent example of this reality is unfolding in Santa Clara, the Bay Area city that acquired the San Francisco 49ers in 2014, when it opened Levis Stadium. The stadium had been approved by voters based on the promise that no public funds would be required. This was a bit of a head fake, since the financing included a hotel occupancy tax, which directly hits visitors but makes local hotel rooms more expensive and therefore less desirable, and liability for public safety costs if they exceeded a certain level.
Local fans? They were almost instantly shut out of stadium attendance. To obtain a seat required, first, a one-time fee of $2,000 to $80,000, which paid only for the right to buy a season pass. Those would cost as much as $3,750 each, about double the price at the 49ers’ former San Francisco home, the decrepit Candlestick Park. For the average fan there were a limited number of individual tickets, including standing-room-only places.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-chargers-20170112-story.html
