The Only Blemish on the NFL: No Team in L.A.

Since the 1960's, the NFL has walked on water. It has been the most successful league in North America, if not the world. But there has been one blemish on its record that it has not yet been able to eradicate: The absence of a team in Los Angeles, America's second largest market.

It hardly seems possible that a city that once had two football franchises—one of which won the Super Bowl and the other that reached it—should be bereft of professional football for 15 years, the most a former NFL city has gone without a franchise returning. 

The loss of both franchises is a story of elitism and greed that is increasingly becoming a part of professional sports.

In 1994, both the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Raiders left town. The Rams had been a last place team for half a decade and fans began to desert the team. The owner, Georgia Frontiere, found a scapegoat in the stadium.

The Rams had already moved from downtown Los Angeles and the gigantic Memorial Coliseum, which rarely sold out, to the home of the Califonia Angels in Anaheim. 23,000 seats were added to the made-for-baseball stadium to accommodate them. For most of the 1980's, they did well, even if they did not win a championship.

But two factors were to play key roles in the departure of both the Rams and the Raiders: The NFL television blackout rule, which forbade games that were not sellouts to be broadcast locally, and the building of stadiums which catered to elites instead of the average fan.

With bad teams in the early 1990's, few Rams' games were sold out and broadcast locally, a fact that further eroding the fan base.

Meanwhile, starting in Dallas, sports franchises became increasingly financed by rich people instead of the average fan. This was symbolized by the increasing numbers of luxury boxes being built into new stadiums, and other elitist perks offered by teams.

Anaheim stadium, built for baseball in the 1960's, offered few such elitist amenities.

Meanwhile the same problems occurred for the Raiders.

As soon as the Rams moved out of the Memorial Coliseum, Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, eyeing Memorial Coliseum's huge 90,000+ seating capacity and the huge population difference between the San Francisco-Oakland area and the Los-Angeles-Southern California market, moved the Raiders in despite official NFL disapproval.

Banking on a successful team to produce larger gate revenues than in Oakland , Davis became increasingly disillusioned with Los Angeles.

However, the large stadium led to several problems. It produced few sellouts, meaning that home games, except playoff appearances, were not broadcast locally. The Coliseum also had no luxury boxes because it was an older stadium. 

The taxpayers of Los Angeles and their representatives stood up to both Davis and Frontiere and refused to advance money to renovate the existing stadiums or build new ones that would carry elitist features. There would be no free rides for rich people in the Los Angeles market.

So the Rams and Raiders left town ignominiously, the Rams to St. Louis, which had built a new stadium with all the elitist features, and the Raiders back to Oakland. To add insult to injury, the extra seats in Anaheim were torn down, and the stadium went back to being a baseball stadium only.

The NFL now faced the bewildering humiliation of leaving the second biggest market in the country without a team.

What really hurt was not the loss of the two franchises, but the way they left.

When NFL teams in Oakland, St. Louis, Houston, Cleveland, and Baltimore left, there were alarms, protests and threats of legislation and retaliation unless the NFL came back quickly. In Los Angeles, there were yawns.

The NFL desperately wants to get back into Los Angeles, but the main stumbling block is that there is no NFL-style stadium in the area. And the taxpayers' continue to refuse to subsidize rich billionaires who would like to operate a franchise there by granting them the perks to build one.

When it came time to grant a 32nd franchise, Houston got it instead of Los Angeles because it was building a luxury box stadium. If such a facility were to be built in Los Angeles, the NFL would come calling over night and start its path to becoming a 40 team league.

It is now15 years since Los Angeles had a football team, and there is no end in sight to the drought. Even Toronto now has a better chance of getting an NFL team (the relocated Buffalo Bills), a concept that would have been laughable a decade ago.

The MLB, the NBA, even the "lowly" NHL can operate two franchises in the Los Angeles area. The NFL cannot get even one.  It has still not recovered from the most stinging slap in the face ever given to it.

And the warning is clear for all sports leagues: If it happened to the NFL, it could happen to anyone.