Skip to footer

Will Los Angeles get a second NFL team?

The Carson City Council cleared the way for a $1.7 billion stadium that could become the shared home to the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders. The aim is to lure the NFL back to the Los Angeles area after two decades without a team in the nation's second-largest media market.

|
(MANICA Architecture via AP, File)
This artist rendering provided by MANICA Architecture shows a design of a newly proposed NFL stadium in the city of Carson, Calif. The Los Angeles suburb of Carson approved a $1.7 billion NFL stadium Tuesday, April 21, 2015, in the wake of a similar vote in nearby Inglewood, even though many details haven’t been worked out and funding is uncertain.
  • By Robert Jablon and Andrew Dalton Associated Press

| Carson, Calif.

The ball now belongs to the Raiders, the Chargers, the Rams — and the NFL.

A second City Council has approved a second proposed pro football stadium in the Los Angeles area, putting local issues to rest in the NFL's return to the region and leaving the next move to the teams that would seek to relocate and the league that must give its approval.

The latest step was Tuesday's 3-0 vote from the Carson City Council, which cleared the path for a $1.7 billion stadium that could become the shared home to the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders.

It was intended to lure the NFL back to the Los Angeles area after two decades without a team in the nation's second-largest media market. In nearby Inglewood, St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke is part of a group planning to build an 80,000-seat stadium.

Under NFL rules, the next opportunity for a team to file to relocate to either stadium would be in January 2016. The move would have to clear a tangle of league hurdles, including getting support from at least 24 of the 32 teams.

Carson Mayor Albert Robles likened the absence of the NFL in greater Los Angeles to the state's deep drought.

"There are two things that are needed here in Southern California," Robles said after the vote. "One of them is rain ... the other is football. And today, hopefully, we took care of that, because football is coming to Carson."

The vote came with a loud cheer from a crowd dotted with Raiders jerseys and Chargers banners, and it faced virtually no opposition from the room.

Mike Haynes, who played for the then-LA Raiders in their 1984 Super Bowl title year and grew up in the area, spoke in favor of the stadium.

"It might not be too long 'til sometime another local kid will have an opportunity to play in a Super Bowl right down the street from here," Haynes said.

Council members could have opted to put the issue before Carson voters but chose to approve it outright as state law allows. The nearby Inglewood project already has been approved by that city's council.

The sudden rush to Los Angeles is tempered by a 20-year history of disappointment for fans. A string of stadium proposals have come and gone since the Rams and the Raiders fled Southern California after the 1994 season.

Last month, the Anschutz Entertainment Group spiked plans for a field in downtown Los Angeles, although Mayor Eric Garcetti has suggested that it could be revived.

The Inglewood blueprint envisions a $1.86 billion stadium rising on the site of a former horse track as part of a nearly 300-acre development of homes, parks and office space. The 168-acre Carson site, edged by a freeway, is a former landfill.

The Chargers' talks with San Diego City Hall to replace the nearly 50-year-old Qualcomm Stadium have grown increasingly strained. The Raiders' even-older Oakland Coliseum has had sewage and electrical problems and is now the only stadium in the U.S. used for both an NFL team and Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics.

___

Dalton reported from Los Angeles.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Will Los Angeles get a second NFL team?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0422/Will-Los-Angeles-get-a-second-NFL-team
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe