Los Angeles looks like a dry market
By Jeff Reynolds (jreynolds@pfwmedia.com)
July 11, 2005





Two teams — the Rams and Raiders — were too much for the No. 2 television market in the United States to support. Different scenarios led both out of Los Angeles following the 1994 NFL season, and there hasn’t been a professional football team in the city on a full-time basis since.

But if commissioner Paul Tagliabue and the other 32 owners get their way, that’s all about to change. The NFL’s goal is to return a team to La-La Land by 2008.

Which, of course, leads to the biggest question: Why?

We all know the bottom-line, simple answer is money. Market size equals earnings potential equals profit for a league rolling in the dough and eager for ways to establish itself further as our country’s top sport. What has been ignored during the league’s push to get in the red zone with a potential stadium site in L.A. is that, although the league has missed Los Angeles, the city hasn’t missed the NFL.

Sure, there are diehard football fans in and around the city, over to Orange County and in spots recognized as Raiders, Chargers or 49ers country. But the simple fact is that the California populace doesn’t seem to want or need the NFL as dearly as Tagliabue and his owners appear to need a fourth team in the state.

In 2004, Tagliabue began an all-out push to let Los Angeles know it was wanted by the NFL and hardly forgotten. He said professional football returning there by 2008 was his goal. Since then, Tagliabue and the owners have been more realistic. They aren’t stuck on 2008 and don’t consider it so much a deadline as an optimistic target that would be nice to hit.

With the wheels toward expansion turning, potential owners have popped up. One is Larry Ellison, co-founder of computer software company Oracle. Ellison could match blank checks with Mark Cuban, but being based in San Francisco, Ellison has never put the full-court press on the league about bringing a team to L.A. Instead, Ellison is one of several ownership groups with some level of interest.

Part of the reason no one is ready to throw green at the prospects of bringing an NFL team back to the area is that the league hasn’t staked out a piece of real estate for any future club to call home. A few proposed sites, such as Carson and Pasadena, have taken themselves out of the running. Carson residents instead decided they really wanted a multimillion-dollar mall project more than they wanted pro football. Pasadena recently decided to spend more than $125,000 to research non-NFL alternatives for its Rose Bowl site.

These moves may have been more a concession to the favored heavyweight sites — the Los Angeles Coliseum, which the Raiders once called home, and Anaheim. The Rams played in Anaheim Stadium, which has been dramatically redesigned and refurbished for use as strictly a baseball stadium by the Angels of Major League Baseball. But with a wealthy Orange County fan base, plus its proximity to Los Angeles, many believe this to be the NFL’s preferred site. Such a move, however, could be contingent on that area building a new football-only facility, and, given the area’s love-hate relationship with the sport and its teams, that appears to be a significant hurdle.

Which brings us back to the original question: Why football in L.A.? Bean counters in the NFL’s home office in New York understand that they have a product peaking in popularity and want to extend the brand in all ways possible. Football, American style, goes to Tokyo and Mexico City once a year and will branch further by 2006 or 2007. For it to reach L.A. by 2008, a lot has to change.

As the Los Angeles Times reported in early June, football isn’t for everyone. The Times reported that Pasadena Councilman Steve Haderlein was met with deafening applause that disrupted a four-hour city council meeting with this statement: “My view of the NFL deal as it currently stands is that it’s not a good one for Pasadena.�

Something tells me Tagliabue wasn’t listening.