Keith Strudler: The Inglewood Rams

The wait for the good people of Los Angeles appears to now be over. That is, to the extent that many people were truly waiting. But if you’ve spent the past 21 years in the city of angels longing for the NFL to return, it looks like that day will soon be upon us. That’s because yesterday the league approved the currently St. Louis Rams to relocate to the LA suburb of Inglewood, where they’ll build a multi-billion dollar stadium and surrounding entertainment complex. This returns the Rams to their prior home, where they spent nearly 50 years before moving to St. Louis. They left then because, neither surprisingly nor at this point ironically, they couldn’t get a new stadium in LA, or Anaheim, which is where they played at the time. St. Louis rolled out the red carpet, and off they went, from the nation’s second largest TV market to a city that’s currently the 21^st. Of course, in the revenue sharing, made-for-television world of professional football, where anyone, anywhere can root for any team, where you play only matters so much as the amount of money you can make of your own stadium. Pretty much everything else is shared by all teams in the league. So, if you got a better stadium deal that gets you more money in Montana than midtown Manhattan, you might just take it. Assuming it’s got a dome, of course.

As is the case for many residents where housing costs are high, the Rams may have roommates. We’re not sure who yet, but so far, the San Diego Chargers have dibs – even though they’ve committed to San Diego for at least one more year. If a year from now, they turn down the chance to move up the coast, then the Oakland Raiders can take the spare room. Not coincidentally, those two teams also tried to move to LA as a package with a new stadium in Carson, another LA suburb, which the NFL owners voted down. Of course, both San Diego and Oakland will first blackmail their respective cities to help them build their own new facilities where they are, so they don’t have to move.

Unlike a lot of the other team relocations in the recent past, in all sports leagues, this one for the Rams comes with relatively minimal public subsidy, a hallmark of most California projects and a reason the Rams left in the first place. Where most cities will essentially fleece their public to build an amphitheater for the rich, California and its citizens have kept much tighter reigns on their purse strings. That’s also why outside the San Francisco 49’ers, California’s NFL teams play in some of the league’s most antiquated parks. And mind you, in the world of professional sports, 25 years is old. The main value, then, in moving to LA isn’t the free stadium or the celebrities. It’s the enhanced value of your franchise, since a major market can shoot your team’s net worth through the economic stratosphere. For example, in 2015, Forbes estimated the Rams worth at just under 1.5 billion, 28^th in the league. Teams in major markets with new facilities can be valued over double that, including the Dallas Cowboys at 4 billion. Rams owner Stan Kroenke also plans to build a virtual city around the stadium, complete with restaurants, office buildings, and probably everything short of an airport and ship terminal. It is past cliché to call the NFL a business, which it clearly is. But it’s also worth noting that the enterprise goes far beyond the field of play, as the football product is simply a vehicle to a far more expansive world of capital. To reference another California property, an NFL team is a little like Mickey Mouse. It’s just the symbol of a vast money making machine.

But where does that leave us, average football fans that just want to believe for a hot second that our teams are more than mercenaries for hire, but maybe actually part of our cities and collective social fabric? How do parents tell their kids that the thing that bonded them together for years is leaving for a better building and more sunshine? Maybe more to the point, how does St. Louis – at least the percentage of the city that likes sports – move on?

The answer is, unfortunately, with caution. We can pretend that things might someday change, and that if we stop watching football, the big bad rich owners will finally listen to us, finally treat us with respect. But that’s just never going to happen. Because sports don’t operate in a rational space, but rather an emotional one. So no matter how much we get hurt – like, when a team leaves and breaks our heart – we make the same mistakes later on with the next pretty team that comes along. Just ask Baltimore, or Houston, or Cleveland, or – wait for it – Los Angeles. Love and sports are funny things. It seems a lot of us either have them, or we want them. St. Louis has loved and lost. For LA, at last, it seems the wait is finally over.

 
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