In a press conference on Tuesday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf officially put Raiders‘ owner Mark Davis on notice.
Oakland Completes Stadium Deal in Effort to Keep Raiders
If Davis moves his team now, he will no longer be able to say that the city of Oakland made no attempts to keep the team. Schaaf revealed that principal agreements have been made between the city and a group of investors toward a new stadium for the Raiders.
Schaaf went as far as to say that some of the previous demands that Davis, who is seeking permission from the NFL to relocate his franchise from Oakland to Las Vegas, made in seeking a new stadium in Oakland have been met as part of the deal.
The group of private investors is led by former Raider Ronnie Lott. Schaaf did not express any specific details about the deal, but did give some items to speculate in her announcement.
Reading Between the Lines of Schaaf’s Comments
Schaaf stated, “what I can tell you is the Lott group has the ability and the willingness, more than that, the passion to actually put the private money into this deal that I believe it would take to actually build a stadium under the conditions that Mark Davis has always said he needs. It’s a team-centered approach but one that protects the public dollar.”
While any concrete conclusions drawn from her comments have to be labeled as speculative, Schaaf seems to imply that the Lott group has secured funding on its own that will cover at least part of the stadium cost.
At the same time, Schaaf’s comment did not completely rule out public funding. Her use of the term “team-centered approach” could have many meanings. One of the possibilities is that the funding would be a mixture of private and public funds, with an emphasis placed on minimizing the use of public funds to the greatest extent possible.
Oakland’s and Davis’ Next Steps
As Davis is not part of this deal, the next steps for both parties will be to come together and get a feel for the position of each other. Now that the fact that a deal has been reached has been publicly announced, expect the city and the Lott group to seek a meeting to make a preliminary pitch to Davis soon.
Given the perception of Davis’ ambitions to move his team to Las Vegas, mostly fueled by his own comments, the stadium deal would have to be very impressive to get Davis to drop his plans to seek permission to move the Raiders quickly. There’s no upside for Davis to cave immediately. He will probably push to see what other demands the city and the Lott group will be willing to meet before he would agree to anything binding.
Fans shouldn’t expect anything to change soon, and Davis will probably still seek permission to move his team. Getting permission to move the Raiders doesn’t lock him into doing so, and that would act as a valuable bargaining chip in getting what he wants out of a potential stadium deal in Oakland.
Today’s announcement was a big step toward potentially keeping the Raiders in Oakland, however. At the very least, the city will now be able to say that it made an effort to do so.
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