No sooner did the Chargers announce they were leaving town than talk turned to replacing them with another NFL team.
While devoted football fans and civic leaders take heart from other jilted cities who eventually remarried following an NFL divorce, a changing sports landscape and soaring costs of lavish new stadiums make that prospect much more unlikely today.
Team owners aren’t in the mood right now to expand their 32-member league, and there is just one team — the Oakland Raiders — actively pursuing a new home.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a pipe dream but it’s a dream,” said Jim Steeg, a former NFL and Chargers executive who also sat on Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s 2015 stadium advisory committee. “There aren’t a lot of teams sitting out there who need a new stadium right now.
“As far as an NFL expansion team, never say never, but right now you’ll hear them saying never. Whatever fee they would get from an expansion team, they’d have to give up a share of their television revenue and that goes on in perpetuity.”
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No doubt, the grief is still fresh over Chargers owner Dean Spanos’ decision to forsake San Diego for a shared $1.9 billion stadium that the Rams are building in Inglewood. But San Diego City Councilman Scott Sherman says he’s eager to start making calls and possibly book flights in pursuit of a new San Diego-branded pro football team.
“I’ll talk to the mayor about doing this jointly but I feel strongly that we’re a world-class city and to be a world-class city an NFL team is necessary,” said Sherman, whose district includes the Qualcomm Stadium site. “I want the NFL to know it may not have worked out with the Chargers but don’t count us out as an NFL destination based on that.”
County Supervisor Ron Roberts, who worked with Faulconer for the last two years to secure a stadium deal with the Chargers, said he’s also not willing to give up on the idea of once again becoming an NFL destination.
His first step, he said, would be to reach out to the New York attorney who advised the city and county on stadium negotiations to see whether there is even any team worth courting.
“First, we want people to recover from what happened, myself included, but if there is potential to have another NFL team, I’d like to see it happen,” said Roberts, who choked up during Faulconer’s Thursday morning news conference to address the Chargers’ departure. “If you found out there was no interest from any team in the next several years, you could then confidently do the planning work for the Mission Valley Qualcomm site.”
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Faulconer has said his priority for now is helping San Diego State University establish a new campus and Aztec stadium at the 166-acre Qualcomm site, plus create what could become a 40- to 60-acre park along the San Diego River.
“The opportunity for an NFL team may or may not happen,” he said. “Our opportunity now is how do we plan this site for future generations.”
While it’s true that the six cities that lost NFL teams in the modern era eventually got a replacement, the cost of building stadiums has exploded in recent years.
A new facility, replete with luxury suites and grand public spaces, costs well above a billion dollars, roughly double the inflation-adjusted price tag of a decade ago.
The wait for the NFL to return can also be a long one. Cleveland fans went just three seasons without a team. For Los Angeles, it took 21 years before the Rams returned last year.
The Oakland Raiders probably aren’t a likely contender for a San Diego replacement team because they’re already far down the road to moving to Las Vegas, lured by a $750 million taxpayer incentive from Nevada.
And while Jacksonville has been rumored off and on to be looking to move, a recent $90 million investment in stadium improvements has tamped down speculation about any relocation of the Jaguars. There had been talk of the Jaguars moving to London, England, to fulfill the NFL’s dream to expand to Europe and beyond.
Complicating prospects is that San Diego taxpayers have shown very little appetite to help foot the bill for a stadium in the event a new team comes calling. Less than 45 percent of city voters backed a hotel room tax increase in November to pay for a combined downtown stadium and convention center annex that was estimated to cost $1.8 billion.
In each of the six cities that ultimately secured replacement, teams, they had to build new stadiums that cost much more than the price they would have paid to retain their old teams.
“The demands from a new rambling, footloose NFL club will be greater than those of the Bolts,” said sports economist John Vrooman of Vanderbilt University. “Of course, San Diego still has major appeal as a professional sports market. But after the messy breakup with the Bolts, be careful what you wish for in San Diego because you might get it at an even higher price.”
Before the Chargers made their move, the NFL repeatedly said it liked San Diego as a football town and offered extraordinary financial incentives to make a new stadium feasible. The league offered $300 million, matched by $350 million from the Chargers, for a proposed downtown facility.
It remains to be seen what assistance the league might offer if a new team comes knocking.
Despite what seem like long odds, fan Sean Farrell, who started the Facebook page, “You Know You’re a Chargers Fan When,” says he will advocate for bringing a new team to San Diego.
“I think it’s a really tall order,” Farrell said. “Los Angeles took over 20 years and L.A. is a huge sports market. But I could see it happening within the next 10 years. I hope an owner recognizes that there’s a hunger in San Diego for a championship team.”
San Diego is quite a different place in 2017 than it was in 1961 when civic leaders rapidly came together to welcome the Chargers after their one-year stint in Los Angeles.
There were no professional sports teams here, the county population was a third of what it is today and the economy was focused on aerospace manufacturing, not biomedical research and convention-driven tourism.
The dividends for hosting the team, as civic boosters still argue today, would be national exposure via televised football games.
“That’s the sort of advertising the Convention and Tourist Bureau could never buy, even if it had a license to print money,” wrote Jack Murphy, The San Diego Union’s sports editor at the time. He later campaigned in his columns for a new stadium, which was later named in his honor before it was expanded and renamed due to contributions from Qualcomm.
While San Diego and many other NFL-hungry cities ponder the prospects, professional football remains clouded by well-publicized concerns. It’s still the most popular spectator sport in America and television ratings have rebounded since the presidential election, but player scandals, mounting injuries and long-term health concerns still dog the league.
“I would still think of it as a civic asset,” said Miro Copic, an SDSU marketing professor. “It’s better to have the Chargers than not, on the whole.”
Some would argue that the city is better off without a professional football team, given the escalating cost of attending NFL games that has put them out of reach for most families.The city only has one other major league professional team, but prospects are growing that a major league soccer team might move here or be created through league expansion.
For couch potato fans, the experience of watching a televised game is obviously less costly and more convenient.
And with the advent of fantasy football, many millennials pay closer attention to individual players than to the actual teams they’re on.
“It’s such an extraordinary juggernaut in American culture,” said Chicago-based sports consultant Marc Ganis. “It’s still the largest audience gatherer we have and it’s likely to be so in the future.”
For anyone holding out hope that the Chargers might eventually feel a twinge of buyer’s remorse and consider returning to San Diego, Ganis said that’s a long shot.
“I would bet against that with my home.”
roger.showley@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-1286; Twitter: @rogershowley
