Of all the professional sports leagues in North America, the NFL is probably the most arrogant.
Play one game a year in Toronto and charge outrageous ticket prices.
When the lowly Phoenix Coyotes attempted to seek a much more profitable ice rink in Hamilton, Ontario, the NHL fought tooth and nail to keep them in the NHL’s worst market.
In contrast when Baltimore, Oakland, and Houston lost their teams and the hand wringing and wailing began, the NFL merely yawned and told the cities, “That’s your problem. Make it worth our while to come back.”
Only the departure of the Cleveland Browns with their rich history caused any shockwaves in the NFL’s conscience and forced them to restore a team as quickly as possible.
When it comes to expansion, the league has the same attitude. Come crawling on your knees before us and maybe we will consider you.
But one city has refused to come crawling and has delivered to the NFL the biggest slap in the face since its meteoric rise in the 1960s.
The NFL Los Angeles Obsession
When both the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles for the 1995 season, the NFL was confident that within a year or two, Los Angeles would be on its hands and knees begging for a new franchise.
But it is now nearly 20 years since NFL football was played in Los Angeles and unlike the NHL which recently said that expansion was a possibility in the near future to accommodate Quebec and its new arena (and with other new arenas possibly to be constructed in Toronto, Seattle, and Las Vegas, plus an unused one in Kansas City), there is no announcement for either NFL expansion or concrete plans to get a team back in Los Angeles.
Normally the NFL would not care like they have previously, but Los Angeles is a particularly galling situation because it is the second largest market in the United States.
Every other major professional sports league in North America including soccer can have two teams in Los Angeles while the NFL has been unable for a long period of time to have one. Not even the NFL can cover up that embarrassment.
The main stumbling block is that Los Angeles will not build a modern football stadium (actually two of them) with 75,000+ seating capacity to accommodate an NFL team. And so like two estranged lovers, neither will budge from a locked position.
Economic reasons obviously have played a key role for the inactivity of building an acceptable stadium in Los Angeles, but so does a social one, something the NFL has never understood or accepted.
In Los Angeles, the movie star, not the sports athlete is the monarch. People are more interested in who is the biggest star, who is going to get the next key role, who is having love affairs with whom, instead of the local sports hero. The NFL is not used to being in second place.
The last time the NFL expanded was for the 1995 season with Jacksonville and Carolina – coincidently the year that the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles for St. Louis and Oakland.
There has been no expansion since; it seems that the NFL has been fixated on Los Angeles in order to get a foothold there again, preferably two teams, though they probably have been humbled enough to settle for a single franchise at this point.
But Los Angeles has refused to capitulate by building that new stadium and it seems that the NFL has become deaf, dumb, and blind to other expansion suitors who have been clamoring for an expansion team of their own.
Portland, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Toronto, Montreal, Birmingham, a second Chicago team, Memphis, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Sacramento, even Mexico City and London, UK are all possible NFL expansion sites, and probably all of them would do just as well as the current members of the NFL.
In fact the above list shows that there are easily enough cities for the NFL to expand to the next symmetrical number of 40 – 5 teams in each division instead of the current 4 – without any team in Los Angeles.
But the NFL cannot forget the insult that Los Angeles has delivered, that a city can live quite happily without its NFL team. The “wrong” must be rectified and until that has occurred, all other expansion cities have to wait in vain.
It is a pity. People in all these other cities could enjoy NFL football. Even the thought of billions of dollars to be made in expansion fees, ticket sales, and merchandising has no effect.
It seems that the pride and arrogance of two parties are the only things that matter.
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