The St. Louis Rams are headed to Los Angeles and the San Diego Chargers have an option to join them after NFL owners voted on Tuesday to end the league’s 21-year absence in the United States’ second-largest TV market.
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While it’s a shame that the football fans of St. Louis will have to deal with their team moving halfway across the country, it will be awesome to get to experience the Rams’ new stadium and be involved in the team’s first season back after being away for a long time.
They have a year to think about it, and if they decide not to come, the option goes to the Raiders, who will then have a year to figure out if they want to play in Los Angeles.
The Chargers can continue to negotiate with San Diego for a new stadium deal, while keeping the option of joining the Rams and owner Stan Kroenke at the $1.8 billion complex he is building. The Rams are expected to return to the Los Angeles Coliseum as a temporary home until the new stadium is complete. Owners voted 30-2 in favor of the Inglewood stadium project over a joint bid between the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers to build a $1.7 billion stadium in Carson. The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders each filed paperwork earlier this month in the hopes of relocating to Los Angeles, and had even forged an uneasy alliance centered on sharing a stadium in Carson, California. “As much as we talk about our television and our content and our viewers, this was so important that we do it the rightest way we could in Los Angeles”.
The Inglewood City Council unanimously approved the Rams’ plan in February 2015.
“I will be working over the next several weeks to explore the options that we have now created for ourselves to determine the best path forward for the Chargers”, he said. “I am proud of our effort and what St. Louis was able to accomplish in an extraordinarily short period of time”.
Given the soundings from the franchise up to this point, it seems very unlikely they won’t make the move. In the video player above, Amy Powell shows us LA Rams fans celebrating.
Reports suggest the Chargers must decide whether to move or remain in San Diego by January 2017.
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The last National Football League franchise to move was the Houston Oilers, who headed to Tennessee in 1997, where they officially became the Titans in 1999. The Rams previously played in the LA area for 48 years themselves before moving to St. Louis ahead of the 1995 season. Leading up to the vote, the NFL’s Los Angeles Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities recommended the Carson stadium over what was painted as a more ambitious Inglewood stadium. It has been home for Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics since 1968. Spanos has wanted a replacement for aging Qualcomm Stadium for around 15 years, a quest stymied thus far by the city of San Diego’s fiscal problems of a decade ago, the recession and difficulty in finding a suitable site.
