SAN DIEGO -- The San Diego Chargers have one foot out the door headed to Los Angeles.

However, Chargers chairman Dean Spanos is still listening to stadium pitches from San Diego city leaders in a last-ditch effort to keep the team here.

The Chargers have until Jan. 15 to exercise the team’s option to move to Los Angeles, joining Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s $2.6 billion stadium project in Inglewood, which is scheduled to open in 2019.

“The building that is going to be built in L.A. is going to be spectacular, which will attract a lot of fans and a lot of money,” said sports business consultant Marc Ganis, who works closely with the NFL on relocation issues. “The building that would be built in San Diego would be more of a basic, open-air football stadium -- a lot better than the Q [Qualcomm Stadium], but still a basic, open-air football stadium. That means the team has to be the total draw, not the building, where in Inglewood the building will be more of a draw.”

Can San Diego figure out a way to rally and keep the Chargers, or is the financing burden too much? Photo by Tom Walko/Icon Sportswire

With the deadline landing on a Sunday, the Chargers will likely announce the team’s intentions early next week.

First reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune, the NFL’s stadium and finance committees will meet in New York on Wednesday to discuss stadium issues around the league, which could include updates on the stadium situations in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and Las Vegas.

The latest proposal in San Diego

San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, San Diego county supervisor Ron Roberts and representatives from San Diego State University recently met with Chargers officials, proposing a $375 public contribution for a new stadium at Mission Valley projected to cost $1.2 billion.

The city would contribute $200 million, with the county’s portion cut in half from the $150 million proposed last year to $75 million now. San Diego State would commit to raise $100 million toward the proposal.

With the NFL and the Chargers combining to contribute $650 million, that still leaves a $175 million gap in funding for a stadium in San Diego.

Complicating matters, the city and county’s portion of public funding requires a countywide public vote of a simple majority to unlock funding. According to the Chargers, the earliest a successful public vote could be held would be November 2018.

And with public funds being allocated from the general fund, the Chargers have reservations that such a vote would pass. Based on past polling the team conducted, a public vote that includes money from the general fund would receive 30 to 35 percent support from the public.

The Chargers received just 43 percent support in November on the team’s $1.8 billion downtown stadium and convention center annex that proposed raising the city’s hotel tax to help fund the project.

The team also still has concerns with environmental and legal entanglements with the Mission Valley site, and it is leery about the possibility of San Diego State raising $100 million toward the construction of a new stadium.

“What Dean was comfortable doing in San Diego is if he could build a more spectacular building, he would take on more risk and take on more cost,” Ganis said. “He also was open to doing a new stadium in Mission Valley, but that would had to have been years ago.”

Why Los Angeles remains the Chargers’ preferred choice

Certainty and long-term financial stability -- those are the two big reasons the Chargers are leaning toward relocating to Los Angeles.

The team consummated a lease agreement for a temporary practice facility in Orange County's Costa Mesa last month.

Kroenke’s stadium project has been approved for construction and already broken ground.

Financing for the project is locked in, and as a tenant, the Chargers are only on the hook to contribute the team’s portion of $200 million in G4 stadium money and any sales generated by personal seat licenses (PSLs) toward the construction of the project, estimated at $700 million to $800 million for the L.A. market.

The Rams cannot start selling PSLs, naming rights or suites until a second team joins them on Feb. 15.

It’s the reason the Chargers are willing to pay a $650 million relocation fee. The Chargers received a debt waiver for the fee, meaning they have to pay the first half over the next 10 years, and the second half of debt can be spread out over time starting in year 11 of their time in Los Angeles.

The Chargers believe moving to Los Angeles provides more certainty in the return on their investment in a more lucrative market than taking on more risk building a football-specific stadium in San Diego with no certainty the project will receive the public contribution earmarked for the facility, along with the real possibility of legal and environmental entanglements at the Mission Valley site.

The team’s franchise valuation likely would increase by a billion, although the Spanos family has no intentions to sell anytime soon.

The stadium in Inglewood also will have a “wow” factor that will help generate higher ticket prices, sell more premium products and keep fans coming back, even when the teams are not playing well, according to Ganis.

“In L.A., they don’t have to pay debt service, operating expenses and capital expenses -- they don’t have to pay any of that,” Ganis said. “They get to be tenants in a building. They’ll pay some rent, and they’ll share some of the revenues. So the expenses in San Diego will be higher, even with the relocation fee. The costs to play in San Diego will be higher, so the operative question is -- what happens on the revenue side?

“If the revenues in San Diego would reasonably be meaningfully more than the revenues in L.A. that the Chargers can generate, then the answer to that question would be stay in San Diego. But that’s not the expectation for a few reasons. Among those reasons are L.A. is a much larger and economically more vibrant market. As great as the fans are, the San Diego market has been and is economically limited.”

NFL and Stan Kroenke to the rescue?

Some NFL observers speculate the league will intervene in San Diego because of concerns about the saturation of the L.A. market with a second team, particularly with the mixed results the Rams have received in their first season in Los Angeles.

That could mean owners voting to extend the Chargers' deadline to exercise the team’s option to move to Los Angeles or possibly contributing more funding to close the gap for a stadium in San Diego. Kroenke could also essentially pay the Chargers and Raiders to stay in their home markets so the Rams have Los Angeles to themselves.

However, during the NFL owners meeting in December, a handful of owners indicated they had no appetite for contributing more than the $100 million given to the Chargers to jump-start a stadium effort last year.

The Chargers want a long-term solution to their stadium trouble now and do not want to wait in limbo for another season because of the negative effects it had on their business in 2016.

“I suspect that there is less confidence based on the results of the first year that L.A. is a strong, two-team market,” Ganis said. “But everybody also knows that it’s only a one-year result and it could turn around, especially with a team being successful and even more especially when the new stadium is open.”