The world’s most lucrative sports league has retired one of their most valuable money-making tools. For 21 years the NFL wielded a giant golden hammer over America’s cities, using the threat their local football team might move to Los Angeles to extract billions for valuable new stadiums.



No league in the US uses leverage quite like the NFL. They didn’t get to $10bn in revenue by being nice. They have played their broadcast rights brilliantly in recently decades, leading terrified networks to spend outlandish amounts of money out of the fear they might lose their tiny platter of games guaranteed to be ratings winners. But the league’s best trick has been getting cities and counties and states to spend taxpayers’ money on stadiums to be used for just eight regular-season games.

An LA without football has always been worth more to the league than a LA with a team. As the nation’s second-largest city sat without a team, every billionaire owner yearning for a new stadium equipped with executive lounges the price of small homes merely had to breathe the words “Los Angeles” to make local politicians crumble.

LA was the gift that kept on giving to the owners who saw their own franchises jump in value every time another member of the club got their own downtown trophy. Since the Rams and Raiders left LA following the 1994 season, 22 of the league’s 32 teams have built new stadiums or completely overhauled the ones they had. The public contribution to these projects was more than $4.7bn in free money for some of the richest people in the country.

No way does this happen without a vacant Los Angeles. The city was the ballast against desperate politicians who vowed there would be no public funds for local football teams, only to cave when the thought of moving vans at the team’s headquarters seemed all too real. The threat of a move to LA lured citizens of other cities to voting booths where they confessed that four months of football Sundays were more important than putting new roofs on schools. They all closed their eyes, held their noses and endorsed checks to some of the wealthiest men in the world to take their taxes and build sports playpens.

How else did Paul Allen, No3 on Forbes richest in the US list in 1997, get Washington state voters to give him $300m that year to keep the Seahawks in Seattle? How did the Minnesota Vikings recently get $498m for a new home in downtown Minneapolis? As long as Los Angeles lingered, the threat of a move was real. San Antonio has yearned for an NFL team for longer than Los Angeles has been open, but aside from the Saints after Hurricane Katrina, no one has wanted San Antonio. Shaken fist vows to move to San Antonio brought laughter. LA was always the real threat. LA was the gem. As long as it was open the public money vat was spilling the cash.

No one knew if people in Los Angeles even wanted one team, let alone two – a project the NFL started selling. The city seemed to get along fine without football. LA has always been a fickle market – and has always been more of a college football town. But Los Angeles has always been more to NFL owners than whether they can get 60,000 in the stands on a Sunday afternoon. LA meant opportunity. LA meant money – higher suite prices, better marketing opportunities, more valuable real estate. The teams that eventually got LA could sell anything to a Hollywood hungry for the NFL machine.

And so the NFL carefully managed Los Angeles, refusing to give it away until the timing was right. Allen’s predecessor in Seattle, Ken Behring, actually moved the Seahawks there in 1996, only to be sent back home. Now, at last, the empty LA has served its purpose. There are no more new stadiums to build, no more money cities to shake down. The last three desperate teams lined up and made a mad run for the cash.

No, this was never about the fans in Los Angeles. At the press conference announcing the Rams move to Inglewood, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell kept referring to delivering the kind of stadium in LA that fans demand. Rams owner Stan Kroenke will build a palace at the old Hollywood Park racetrack. The phrase “NFL campus” was used. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones kept getting credit for making Los Angeles happen because of the way he pushed Kroenke’s deal through the other owners.

But there have been plenty of opportunities to build palaces and NFL campuses in Los Angeles. At any time in the last two decades any number of viable stadium options lingered. They were all beautiful. Any of them could have been the league’s finest stadium. But LA had a purpose without football. LA made a lot of rich men a whole lot of money. LA helped pump the NFL’s revenues to moon, and soon it can shoot them into another galaxy.

Now Los Angeles has one last task as the sledgehammer against the rest of America. In offering one-year options to the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders to join Kroenke in Inglewood, the league is threatening two last cities. The extortion is in the open. No need to hide it any more. San Diego has one last chance to give Chargers owner Dean Spanos $350m – or he’s gone. If he stays, Raiders owner Mark Davis gets to point the LA gun at Oakland.

Then, after every last dollar has been sucked from every possible city, Los Angeles can gracefully end its NFL retirement, and become a member in good standing of the billionaire football owners club.

Just don’t think this was ever about the fans in LA. For 21 years they were the decoys in a rich man’s cash grab.