Brent Schrotenboer

USA TODAY Sports

HOUSTON — Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti chatted by phone Wednesday with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

There were big topics to discuss. On Tuesday, NFL owners approved the relocation of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, ending a 21-year absence of NFL football in the nation’s second-largest media market.

A day afterward, it didn’t take long for the subject of Super Bowls to come up.

“He gave me a timeline,” Garcetti told USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday. “He said, `You guys should be getting together a good bid because we want to see that from L.A.”

Los Angeles could submit a bid soon for the 2021 Super Bowl, the next game for which the city is eligible to bid. But Garcetti won’t stop there.

“I expect us to land a disproportionate amount of Super Bowls,” Garcetti said. “We want to bring the draft here. We really want to announce we’re back as part of the NFL family in an aggressive way.”

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A stadium needs to be open for at least two years before it can host a Super Bowl, according to the NFL. A team, such as the Rams, needs to express interest, and then the Super Bowl advisory committee establishes which teams are eligible to bid for a particular game.

The city is now back on the map for it, with a new stadium set to open in Inglewood in 2019, near Los Angeles International Airport. The last Super Bowl played in the Los Angeles market was in 1993 at the Rose Bowl, which hosted the game five times.

“We felt that we needed to have the kind of stadium and kind of project that had the vision and had the facilities that would really bring a new kind of fan experience to the NFL and to Los Angeles,” Goodell said Tuesday night.

Besides the new Super Bowl potential, Garcetti, 44, had another reason to toot the horn of the L.A. market. The new stadium construction isn’t getting public funding and instead is to be privately financed at a cost that could exceed $2 billion. The wealth of the Los Angeles market, and the Rams owner, Stan Kroenke, helps make that possible.

The Rams’ relocation application notes that Kroenke will “invest over $800 million in equity in the project and has the ability to service the debt on the facility.”

“It’s nice that our strategy … prevailed of not subsidizing the construction of a stadium with hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Garcetti, who took office as mayor in 2013. “This is a very wealthy league in professional sports. And Americans embrace these sports leagues but also want to make sure our streets are paved and cops are funded. It’s good to see at least here a way to do that where the value added will be in increased economic activity, and we won’t be handling some long-term debt.”

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The increased economic activity might not stop with the Rams and the Super Bowl, either. The San Diego Chargers have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood. If they don’t exercise that option, the Oakland Raiders would have the chance. As a lifelong Rams fan, Garcetti says he’s happy with what he’s got and would consider a second team to be “gravy on top,” though he said hopes San Diego or Oakland get a “genuine shot” at retaining those teams first.

While the new stadium is being constructed, the Rams are expected to play at the Los Angeles Coliseum for three years, the site of the first Super Bowl in 1967. As mayor, Garcetti said he hopes the team incorporates in Los Angeles. Though the stadium won’t officially be in his city, he said he supported the mayor of Inglewood, James T. Butts, as that city tried to bring in the Rams. Garcetti says it will benefit the entire market and dismissed any talk that the market is fickle about sports and only supports big winners

Before leaving Los Angeles in 1995, the Rams and Raiders finished among the league's bottom 10 teams in attendance during each of their final three seasons in L.A, according to STATS, LLC. Both played in substandard stadiums — the Raiders at the Coliseum and the Rams at Anaheim Stadium.

“This is a football town, contrary to what you hear, ” Garcetti said. “I don’t buy that argument that nobody is going to show up, that L.A. only support winners, that we’re fickle and all that. Most people in L.A. aren’t from L.A., so what you’ve got is a lot of people who are huge fans. … Our population is made up of folks who brought a love of sports and football from where they came from.”

The Rams have a special legacy in the L.A. market, having played there from 1946-1994 before leaving for St. Louis. The departure of the Rams and Raiders from Los Angeles in 1995 led to a 21-year void in which the NFL risked “letting a generation of fans slip away,” Garcetti said. Many Angelenos still love football, but they didn’t have the same experience Garcetti said he had when he was young, cheering on the Rams.

“A lot of them that came up after me never got to see what I did as a kid,” he said. “They didn’t get to experience what it feels like to root for a home team.”

Now they can. “We’re going to be an extremely supportive city,” Garcetti said.