SPORTS
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 15
Publically-Funded Toys:
The End of Cities Paying for New Stadiums?
-
michael silver
A National Football League (NFL) team currently
plays in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a city of just over ten
thousand people. No NFL football team currently
plays in Los Angeles, California, a city of almost four
million people (and a metro area of eighteen million people). This is likely to change imminently. The
Green Bay Packers are safe, but the same cannot be
said for the Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers,
and St. Louis Rams. It is likely that this year, two of
these three teams will relocate to Los Angeles. Given
that such a relocation is understood to be imminent,
now is a convenient time to discuss the strange series
of events that resulted in there being no team in Los
Angeles in the first place.
All three of the teams that are considered candidates to move to LA spent a portion of their history in
LA. The Rams were based in LA from 1946 until 1994.
The Raiders were based in LA from 1982 to 1994. Even
the Chargers were based in LA in 1960. The simplest
reason for why all of these teams left LA is stadiums. All three teams played in the LA Coliseum. The
Billionaire owners have
managed to exploit
emotional connection to
sports franchises…
Coliseum was built in 1921 and though the historic
stadium is considered iconic, it does not meet the
needs of current professional sports teams. Each time
that an NFL team has left LA, it has done so in order
to move to a city promising a better stadium arrangement and the possibility of public funds to pay for a
new stadium.
In the twenty-two years that LA has been without an NFL team, professional sports stadium construction has experienced an unprecedented boom.
For example, all but seven NFL stadiums currently in
use were built in the period since the 1994 relocation
away from LA. Another familiar example, the Rogers
Center in Toronto, is currently the 7th oldest stadium
in Major League Baseball — including historic landmarks which will never be abandoned — and which
have been renovated within the last decade — Fenway
Park and Wrigley Field. The majority of the recent
stadium construction has been publically financed
to at least some extent. Billionaire owners