Obiter Dicta Issue 9 - January 18, 2016 | Page 15

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