relocation articles, 2/6- ?

What It’ll Take To Get LA Memorial Coliseum Ready For Rams

What It’ll Take To Get LA Memorial Coliseum Ready For Rams

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LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — From two Olympic Games to the first Super Bowl fifty years ago, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has a rich and storied history.

Now, the stadium may have to get prepared for a blast from the past as the Rams, who played here until 1981, prepare to take the field again.

In fact, the Rams will call the Coliseum home for three seasons until the Inglewood project is ready.

“The NFL has walked this grass. They’re happy with it. We should be just fine with this turf,” said Joe Furin, the coliseum’s general manager.

“There are things we don’t necessarily meet NFL standards. The question is going to be, ‘Will the Rams want them on short-term basis or be able to live with what we have?’ ” he said.

One such thing may be the stadium lights.

“There’s a range on how low or how bright they can be. We’re on the lower end right now. The NFL standards are a little higher than that,” he said.

And the Trojan-branded locker room.

Furin says real estate is tight and there’s not much room to build anything new.

“The challenges are going to be on Saturday and Sunday, changing out from a USC look and branding to whatever the Rams branding is,” he said.

But Furin says, just like the Staples Center flips the floor, they’ll flip the field.

USC plans to spend $270 million to upgrade everything down to the seats on the aging stadium. Hosting an NFL team like the Rams will certainly help with that cost.

Those renovations won’t start until 2019 after the Rams are set to move.

The NFL has used temporary collegiate stadiums before. Two years ago, the NFL and the Vikings spent nearly $10 million to upgrade TCF Bank Stadium at the University of Minnesota, so they’ll likely kick in for upgrades here.

“I talked with the head coach for the now Los Angeles Rams Jeff Fisher and he made it clear that the only thing that they need is good seats and green grass and they will do the rest,” said County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Ridley-Thomas is the president of the Coliseum Commission. He says hosting the Rams is a chance for Angelenos to root for the home team while watching history repeat itself.

“People will have that as an extra, added feature of what will make the next three seasons very special right here in Exposition Park,” he said.
Serene Branson

THE WOW FACTOR
Few could have guessed that the league’s return would become so bloody, bitter and, most of all, emblematic of how power in the NFL truly works.

BY SETH WICKERSHAM AND DON VAN NATTA JR.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/14752649/the-real-story-nfl-owners-battle-bring-football-back-los-angeles

On West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, an overgrown tree obscures a whitewashed, two-story building sandwiched between a radio station and a studio lot. Inside, it’s a time warp. The battered carpet is blue, and the rippled wallpaper is bubbling, peeling off. Behind glass is a showcase of dull trophies and yellowed photos from another era. Everything is labeled “Los Angeles Rams.” That team, of course, left LA, its home for nearly half a century, for St. Louis after the 1994 season. But on most days since, this nondescript office has remained open, staffed by two people: John Shaw, the former team president who engineered the franchise’s flight from Anaheim to St. Louis, and his secretary. They work in this nearly invisible team outpost, as if the Rams never left.

One NFL owner called the meeting a “s— show.” A “nightmare,” another said. Yet another described it as “the most contentious and polarizing” in decades. On Dec. 2 at the Four Seasons in Irving, Texas, the owners-only meeting had a single agenda item: Which team or teams should be allowed to relocate to Los Angeles?

The inability of America’s most popular sport to occupy the nation’s second-largest market since the Rams and Raiders left after the 1994 season had become a running joke. In the past two decades, at least 20 Los Angeles stadium proposals had been designed and junked. An expansion team had been awarded to LA in 1999 but then, mired in red tape, sent to Houston to become the Texans. Many clubs had used the threat of moving to Los Angeles as leverage to build new, publicly financed stadiums. But now, the idea of at least one franchise relocating to LA wasn’t just a fanciful notion. It was real.

One proposal was for Stan Kroenke, owner of the St. Louis Rams, to build the world’s most expensive stadium, a $2.7 billion, 80,000-seat roofed venue in Inglewood, just east of Los Angeles International Airport. The other proposal was for the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, owned by Dean Spanos and Mark Davis, to share a $1.8 billion, 65,000-seat open-air stadium in Carson, a city about 12 miles south of Los Angeles.

Most owners meetings are boring. Some members doze. Groupthink often prevails. Not this time. For hours, the owners argued and traded barbs. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson spoke in support of Kroenke four times, to the annoyance of others waiting to be heard just once. Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross joked that the league should hold an auction for the right to relocate, though some owners thought he was serious. Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson argued that Spanos, a beloved owner who for more than a decade had tried to build a new stadium in San Diego, deserved the market.

Others insisted that Kroenke had the land and the money not just to build a spectacular football venue rivaling Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, but to return to Los Angeles with a transcendent “football campus,” as an owner later put it, with a shopping mall, movie theater, office complex and luxury apartments. The project, to be mostly paid in full by Kroenke, had the “wow factor,” Jones liked to say.

The dueling proposals did not only represent the NFL’s most recent, best opportunity to return to Los Angeles. They had also become the centerpiece of a chaotic power struggle among the league’s 32 owners, between the so-called new-money group, with members who all supported Inglewood, and the old guard, most of whom favored Carson. Going into the meeting, most believed Carson had more votes. But one moment, many would later recall, seemed to halt its momentum. Michael Bidwill, president of the Cardinals and a Carson supporter, argued that the NFL doesn’t exist just to make rich owners richer. Owners needed to consider what would be best for the league, and …

Jones cut him off: “When you guys moved the team from St. Louis to Phoenix — it wasn’t about the money?”

As Bidwill tried to answer, Jones moved in for the kill: “You did it for the money.”

TWO YEARS EARLIER, on Aug. 27, 2013, Kroenke and Spanos met for a private dinner at Mastro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills. At a corner table, the two talked cordially — a quiet beginning to a 29-month saga that would end on Jan. 12 of this year in a Houston hotel. Back then, neither man could have guessed that the league’s return to Los Angeles would become so bloody, bitter and, most of all, emblematic of how power in the NFL truly works. In contentious closed-door meetings in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York and, finally, Houston, owners belittled, undercut — even bullied — each other in ways never before witnessed, according to interviews with more than two dozen owners, league officials, team executives, lawyers and staffers involved in the relocation efforts, many of whom requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations.

The split between owners had as much to do with personal loyalties as it did the appeal of the two stadium proposals. The ruthlessness of Kroenke was fixed in sharp relief against the abidance of Spanos. The savvy of Jones, who led the new-money Inglewood supporters, clashed with the brute force of Richardson, leader of the old-money Carson backers. Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company — which owns ESPN — was enlisted to run the Carson project, with the hope that his star power could offset Kroenke’s money. It wasn’t enough. In the end, no owner would feel more pain than Spanos, the league loyalist who did everything his peers asked of him — only to be forced to work out a face-saving partnership with the man who had beaten him to LA, a process that likely won’t be resolved until 2017.

If you want to do it right, you have to step up.”
– Jerry Jones, endorsing Stan Kroenke’s vision

Spanos and Kroenke had long targeted Los Angeles as the best, most attractive option for relocation of their respective teams. Their peers viewed them as being on opposite sides of the ownership spectrum. Now 68 years old, Kroenke — tall and thin with a thick mustache — was a largely quiet partner who rarely attended owners meetings and had little patience for the league’s glacial-paced relocation process. He has made much of his estimated net worth of $7.6 billion in real estate and bought several sports teams, including the Avalanche and the Nuggets. After his 2011 majority stake purchase of the English Premier League team Arsenal, Kroenke had pined for the larger international presence that other owners envisioned for the NFL’s global future.

With thinning brown hair and rimmed glasses, Spanos was deeply involved in league matters, “loyal to a fault,” in the words of a close friend. Now 65, he ran the team owned by his 92-year-old father, Alex Spanos. The NFL was his primary business, even if many owners wondered whether he possessed the sharp elbows of his father.

At Mastro’s, the two men met to determine whether they might have a shared vision for Los Angeles. Kroenke was enthusiastic about a 60-acre tract of land in Inglewood, nestled between the Forum and the soon-to-be-closed Hollywood Park racetrack. Earlier in the year, Kroenke had driven around the site at 5:30 a.m. and raved about its potential to Rams chief operating officer Kevin Demoff and to Jones. Spanos, though, was cool on the Inglewood location, citing concerns about parking and traffic.

Still, both men, and their associates, saw the convivial dinner as a promising first step toward a potential partnership. They agreed to be in touch.

But after the dinner, Spanos called Kroenke several times. Kroenke never returned any of the calls.

Despite Spanos’ reservations, the Inglewood land — owned at the time by Wal-Mart, the family business of Kroenke’s wife, Ann Walton Kroenke — still intrigued Kroenke. At the time, it was being sold in a blind auction. Without any warning to Spanos, a company set up by Kroenke, Pincay RE LLC, offered $90 million, outbidding everyone — including NFL executive Eric Grubman, who later would become the league’s point man on the relocation process. Nobody knew whether Grubman had bid on his own or on behalf of the league or some other buyer. But Kroenke’s purchase — and his later deal for an adjacent 238 acres — was a precursor of what would become the dominant theme of the NFL’s return to Los Angeles:

Stan Kroenke would not be stopped.

NOBODY KNEW IT at the time, but the league office had already lost control of the Los Angeles relocation process. Commissioner Roger Goodell’s mishandling of the Ray Rice domestic violence discipline in the summer and autumn of 2014 distracted him from executing the league’s longtime goal of returning to LA and severely weakened his standing in ownership circles. Meetings about LA that were scheduled for September were pushed to November. The distractions also created a power vacuum that Grubman — and other owners — eagerly filled.

Spanos reacted to Kroenke’s Inglewood purchase by proposing to buy a 168-acre landfill lot in Carson. He and his team had designed a creative development method, based on a landmark California Supreme Court decision a few months earlier, that would expedite the arduous process of entitling a stadium to a city council vote, overcoming legal hurdles that often take years to clear. At a meeting in Los Angeles in mid-November 2014, the Chargers leaders presented their plan to Grubman, who some owners and executives suspected favored Kroenke and Inglewood.

Both proposals were rolling forward. And then, all of a sudden, they weren’t. Later in November, several owners who would serve on the league’s LA committee told Kroenke no team would be moving for the 2015 season — owing, in part, to Goodell’s weakened leadership. In mid-December, on the eve of an important Carson City Council stadium meeting, Art Rooney II of the Steelers delivered the same message to Spanos, telling him to “stand down.” Spanos complied.

But Kroenke, who was well-versed in relocation politics after he had helped move the Rams to St. Louis as a minority owner after the 1994 season, told a few owners that he would play one more season in St. Louis but would exercise his right to relocate in 2015 — “when the window is open,” he told associates. Some took Kroenke’s declaration as a veiled threat to sue if anyone tried to block him; others understood that he had paid a fortune for the land and wanted to move forward. Jerry Jones, who once played himself on an episode of Entourage brokering the NFL’s return to LA, implored Kroenke to “just go” and not wait for the league’s sluggish bureaucracy.

And so on Jan. 5, 2015, Kroenke unveiled plans to build his Inglewood stadium, all but announcing a move to Los Angeles. Spanos and his associates not only were furious that Kroenke had beaten them out of the gate but were also deeply suspicious of Kroenke’s plan to fast-track the entitlement process. It was the exact process they’d presented to Grubman. The Chargers suspected that Grubman had alerted the Rams to it; the Rams insisted that their own California-based development company knew about it.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Carson was behind.

STAY IN THE GAME. If we’re not in the game, we get nothing. Stay in the game.

That’s what the Chargers executives kept telling each other. Kroenke had land, money and, most of all, the shrewdness required to relocate. He was willing to sacrifice his relationship with Rams fans and with the state in which he was raised — something that Spanos, for all of his fights with San Diego politicians, seemed reluctant to do. Spanos needed help. So Richardson suggested that he partner with Mark Davis on the Carson project. For years, the Chargers and Raiders, both of whom play in baseball venues built in the 1960s, had failed to persuade their communities to help offset the costs of new football-only stadiums. If two teams moved together, Richardson said, it would help solve the league’s “California dilemma,” as owners called it.

Most owners liked the eccentric Davis, now 60, even if they knew him only as the quiet guy with the bowl cut who had pushed his father Al’s wheelchair through hotel lobbies at league meetings. Still, many wondered whether Davis, who never had an official job with the Raiders until he assumed control of the team after his father’s death in 2011, was up to the challenge of shepherding a stadium project alone. He had turned down many offers to partner with the 49ers at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and for years, the Davis family had resisted offers to buy the team and move it south. During one such lunch meeting in 2010, two Los Angeles businessmen pitched a lowball offer to Al Davis, who started laughing. “F— you,” he told them. “Get the hell out of here.” And he went back to eating his lunch.

So on Feb. 19, 2015, six weeks after Kroenke’s Inglewood announcement, the Raiders and Chargers proposed their Carson project, a football-only venue, unlike the epicenter planned for Inglewood, and financed mostly by Goldman Sachs. Looking back now, some around the league wish that Goodell had locked the three owners in a room and forced them to cut a deal right then, avoiding the battles and hurt feelings that would unfold. Instead, Goodell allowed the NFL’s messy form of democracy to run its course, appearing strangely detached in meetings. He said almost nothing while Grubman, who, like Goodell, declined to comment for this story, appeared to be too close to Kroenke; some involved in the process said they had expected Grubman to be strictly neutral. The disjointed process was leading to discontent among owners, at a time when, with football’s long-term future a constant topic of debate, solidarity was needed.

The stage was now set for a showdown. On Aug. 11, 2015, the league’s owners convened at the Hyatt Regency, in a Chicago suburb, for a special LA meeting. For the first time, both sides presented their proposals.

When you guys moved the team from St. Louis to Phoenix — it wasn’t about the money?” As Bidwill tried to answer, Jones moved in for the kill: “You did it for the money.”

– Jerry Jones to Michael Bidwill, president of the Arizona Cardinals

The Carson team went first. During its presentation, Grubman paced in the back of the conference room, drinking coffee.

The Rams contingent went next. Grubman moved to the front of the room and took a seat at the commissioner’s table. The presenters showed off a model of their football oasis, and Mark Davis stared at it in awe.

Saints owner Tom Benson posed the first question about Inglewood, asking why owners should defray the costs of the extra real estate developments — up to $200 million in league loans available for new stadiums — that would benefit only Kroenke. But before Kroenke and Demoff could say a word, Grubman jumped in to answer the question, explaining that Benson misunderstood the amount of money the league would contribute.

The pro-Carson owners couldn’t believe that a league official appeared to be speaking on behalf of the Rams’ proposal. That moment, along with persistent rumors that Grubman wanted to work for Kroenke in Los Angeles, cemented in the minds of some owners that he was an agent for Inglewood.

Later in the meeting, Bears chairman George McCaskey asked whether Kroenke would be willing to share the stadium with a second team. Kroenke reminded the owners of a 2012 memo from Goodell that mandated that any LA stadium be built to house two teams. Kroenke said he could quickly draw up a lease if necessary.

Some of the owners on the NFL’s six-person Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities — Richardson, Rooney, John Mara of the Giants, Robert Kraft of the Patriots, Clark Hunt of the Chiefs and Bob McNair of the Texans, most of whom were considered the old guard and supported Carson — were offended. Spanos’ family had always put the league first, and now Kroenke had declared that if it were necessary to take on a second team, the Chargers would be relegated to a tenant, junior-partner status. Kroenke considered his invitation to be sincere. He had extended a hand as far as he could, given the agreement between Spanos and Davis for Carson.

Before the meeting ended, Jones, as would be his habit, took control. He delivered a rollicking, profanity-laced eight-minute endorsement of Kroenke’s monumental vision, saying in his Arkansas drawl that whichever owner returned to Los Angeles, he needed to have “big balls.”

It was awkward and hilarious. Everyone, including Kroenke, tried not to laugh. But it was also a welcomed sentiment for the new-money owners such as Dan Snyder of the Redskins and Jeffrey Lurie of the Eagles, who backed Inglewood. “If you want to do it right,” Jones continued, “you have to step up.”

With a final vote scheduled for Jan. 12, 2016, in Houston, only five months away, the Carson supporters knew they were in trouble. Making matters worse, Spanos and Davis had argued with each other about Carson earlier that day in front of other owners. Still, Jones sensed Spanos had enough support to prevent Kroenke from going to Los Angeles alone. After the meeting, Jones approached Spanos on the tarmac where a handful of owners had parked their planes.

“I want you in LA with Stan,” Jones told Spanos.

Spanos was noncommittal. He had no interest in partnering with Kroenke.

Meanwhile, a few old-guard owners had another idea to help their friend. If Carson was going to succeed, the project needed a star.

BY THE NUMBERS
INGLEWOOD
HKS Inc.
Boss Stan Kroenke, Rams owner, net worth $7.6 billion
Capacity 80,000
Planned Completion Date 2019
Cost $2.7 billion, privately financed
Total Area 298 acres
Focal Points and Perks Will be part of a mixed-use development complex, including a 6,000-seat performance venue, a 300-room hotel, 890,000 square feet of retail space, 2,500 residential units, 25 acres of parks and space for the NFL Network.

SHORTLY BEFORE THE Chicago meetings, Bob Iger received a call from Jerry Richardson. The Panthers’ owner wanted to meet the Disney CEO, but Richardson didn’t identify the topic — only that the sit-down should be conducted under strict secrecy. An Iger confidant suggested that Richardson was inquiring about his interest in perhaps replacing the wounded Goodell, but Iger suspected otherwise.

After all, a year earlier both Goodell and Kraft had asked Iger whether he’d be interested in getting involved in a team that could move to LA, tapping into his local expertise and gravitas. The topic came up again in April when Iger ran into Mark Davis at a Clippers game, a meeting that led to a few discussions about Iger buying a share of the Raiders. And so when Iger and Richardson met on Aug. 5 for two hours in Iger’s office in Burbank, Richardson asked Iger about the market. One team or two? Carson or Inglewood? They agreed to stay in touch.

Over the next few days, Iger researched the Carson site online, noting its proximity to a cross-section of freeways. Richardson and Iger met two more times, talked often on the phone and traded email. Iger liked the fact that Carson would be an open-air stadium, unlike the roofed one Kroenke wanted to build. He also preferred parking lots rather than the garages proposed at Inglewood that would limit tailgating and make game-day traffic a mess. “This is great,” Iger told Richardson. It was exactly what Richardson wanted to hear. So he asked whether Iger would be willing to talk with Spanos and Davis about it.

In early October, Iger met with Spanos at the Shutters hotel in Santa Monica. A month later, Disney’s board of directors approved Iger’s involvement. On Nov. 11, it was announced that Iger had become the nonexecutive chairman of Carson Holdings, the joint venture between the Chargers and Raiders, with an option to become a minority owner of one of the franchises after the stadium was completed.

Goodell, who privately preferred the Inglewood site but had pledged to remain neutral, told a friend that Iger’s involvement was a potential “game changer” for Carson. Having helped negotiate billions of dollars of rights contracts with the NFL, Iger and some of the owners were acquaintances. He knew how the league worked. Many owners who had considered Kroenke to be a Los Angeles lock worried that now he might lose.

BY THE NUMBERS
CARSON
Manica
Boss Alex Spanos, Dean Spanos and family, Chargers owners, net worth $1.689 billion, and Raiders owner Mark Davis, net worth $500 million. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger, who oversaw the project.
Capacity 65,000
Planned Completion Date 2019 (but won’t be built now)
Cost $1.8 billion, privately financed
Total Area 168 acres

Focal Points and Perks 850,000 square feet for commercial, entertainment and other uses, a farmers market and a 350-room hotel.

OWNERS AND EXECUTIVES say the following weeks were among the wildest they had seen. They called and texted each other daily with sales pitches, demands and gossip. Almost nothing was out of bounds. Some Carson supporters weighed ways to try to jam up Kroenke, such as forcing him to pay the entire $550 million relocation fee up front while giving Spanos and Davis a payment plan. Undecided owners considered the price of their vote, whether it was changing their division and conference alignment, horse-trading a vote for a promise of future support for an ownership succession plan or a new stadium of their own. Others were convinced that some owners didn’t even know where Carson and Inglewood were located. “Owners were all over the place,” one team executive says.

By most estimates, Carson had managed to cobble together 18 votes, shy of the 24 required for relocation. The Rams moving alone to Inglewood had only about seven votes. Many owners thought Kroenke was hell-bent on trying to reach nine, just enough to prevent the Carson project from reaching 24 votes and keeping him in the game. The silent majority preferred the Inglewood site but liked Spanos better than Kroenke. Most owners wanted to avoid a Raiders return to Los Angeles, owing to Al Davis’ burned bridges and the co-opting of the team apparel by gangs, concerns so deep that some wouldn’t even consider Carson. “It’s hard to get owners to move,” Iger says now. “Each one is a boss in his own right.”

And so the battle for Los Angeles became a battle between Richardson and Jones, two Jerrys with dueling powers of persuasion. Jones mostly worked the phones, trying to broker a partnership for the Rams and Chargers in Inglewood. On Nov. 27, Kroenke wrote a letter pledging to allow a partner, though it would not extend to the stadium’s design or the surrounding development. It was a major concession, encouraged by Jones after calculating that Kroenke likely wasn’t going to get 24 votes on his own. Spanos and Davis still refused to consider it, but Jones continued to push for support, convinced that the membership silently preferred it.

Richardson flew his private plane to visit several owners. Everyone around the league called it the Jerry Tour. He insisted that Carson was the better site and that the league not only would regret leaving St. Louis for a second time but would set an awful precedent by turning away the estimated $477 million in public funds for a new stadium that the state of Missouri was poised to offer. At times, Richardson’s hard-charging style, delivered with a threatening tone and citing favors he had done for them, offended some owners. “He bullied people,” a team executive says. “Some were turned off by his forcefulness.”

It was clear that the owners were playing by their own rules — and, as a league insider working with all three teams later said, “They make up the rules as they go.” A news report said that the league would pledge an extra $100 million to help St. Louis finance a new $1.1 billion riverfront stadium — a move that McNair, the Texans’ owner and a Carson supporter, predicted would prevent the Rams from meeting the league’s relocation guidelines. But days later, Goodell wrote a letter saying that the $100 million would not be available. And the night before St. Louis voted on the stadium package, Grubman called in to the show of local radio host Bernie Miklasz to describe St. Louis’ new stadium proposal as “suboptimal” and say that Kroenke was “going to keep his options open.” It seemed to validate what many had long suspected: He wanted the Rams to move.

It was chaos. The spectacle of NFL leaders undercutting St. Louis’ attempt to keep the Rams, and the uncertainty in San Diego and Oakland, was becoming another public-relations disaster. Goodell privately expressed frustration about all three owners — if they were elite, they wouldn’t be trying to relocate in the first place, he told a friend — but in the end, the commissioner supported their efforts to leave. A few days after all three teams filed for relocation, Goodell issued a 147-page report that called the efforts of all three markets to keep their respective teams “unsatisfactory and inadequate.” It was an official green light for all of them to move, knowing that at least one team would be forced to crawl back home.

Soon news broke that Kroenke would build a stadium in Inglewood no matter how the owners voted, a charge the mayor of Inglewood denied but some around the league believed to be true. Many Kroenke supporters were furious that he would risk alienating owners so close to a vote. “There it is,” said one executive of a pro-Inglewood team. “A big middle finger to the league.”

All three teams privately vowed to abide by the membership’s vote, and each of the three owners had to sign an agreement pledging not to sue if his relocation proposal was rejected. But by then the LA derby had become an open war, beyond anyone’s control. Before a late-season AFC game, two owners met in a luxury box and wondered how the LA vote would turn out in Houston. “I don’t know,” one owner told the other. “Stan is more interested in blocking Dean than he is in finding 24 votes.”

Grubman ‘insulted’ by Rams job rumor

Jim Thomas

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/professional/grubman-insulted-by-rams-job-rumor/article_8461ff54-e613-5e09-96c0-3d6489a65c35.html

On a January day full of rumors, it was one of the juiciest of the bunch. Namely, that NFL executive Eric Grubman, the league’s point man for relocation to Los Angeles, would end up with a high-ranking position with owner Stan Kroenke’s Rams on the West Coast.

For those who suspected Grubman had been pro-Kroenke and pro-LA all along, it fit the narrative. This all took place Jan. 12 in Houston, the day league owners approved the relocation of the Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles.

The Post-Dispatch caught up with Grubman in San Francisco following NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s state of the NFL news conference on Feb. 5. He strongly denied the Rams job rumor.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth,” Grubman said. “I was personally insulted by that. I don’t like that implication or insinuation. It could not be further from the truth.”

Grubman made those remarks standing in the same hotel ballroom where minutes earlier Goodell had answered questions for about 45 minutes. But only two of those questions dealt with St. Louis, a city once again on the outside looking in when it comes to the NFL. Perhaps Grubman could fill in some blanks.

Looking back on the failed task force effort to keep the Rams from leaving, Grubman was asked what went wrong in St. Louis.

“I think that St. Louis could have done a few things differently, which may not have been in their control,” Grubman said. “But I think when the county dropped out, the project that they envisioned at the beginning of the task force process really changed. And the county dropped out because as I understand — a public vote.”

Referring to the NFL, Grubman added: “We weren’t afraid of a public vote. And in some respects we think that could’ve validated what the people really thought, could’ve brought the county back in. So the project changed and they spent months trying to bring it back to that original vision, and they couldn’t.”

Last March, St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger told Gov. Jay Nixon that the county couldn’t provide support for a stadium without a vote. Nixon then let it be known that the project was moving forward without the county.

“The measurement standard in my mind was never any one owner, was never the commissioner, was never Eric Grubman, it was other owners,” Grubman continued.

“And the standard in the early going was less about how are the owners gonna vote. It was whether in their minds, could they see themselves playing in that stadium. And if they could, (St. Louis) had a really great chance. And if they couldn’t, (St, Louis) had a really bad chance.

“And that to me is what happened.”

Grubman also attempted to clear up the confusion of making $300 million in league funding available to owners Mark Davis in Oakland and Dean Spanos in San Diego. But telling task force co-chair Dave Peacock that giving the so-called extra $100 million in stadium funding for the St. Louis project — or $300 million total — was “fundamentally inconsistent” with league policy.

The $300 million, Grubman said, was available only “if offered to the owner to put together a proposal that the owner was in favor of. Not to a city to put in front of the owner. That’s one big difference.”

Kroenke, of course, was never in favor of the St. Louis stadium plan.

“The second is, and I think this is crucial, all of the funding (in St. Louis) ended up being contingent on that use of the extra $100 million. You look at the city (financing) language, it’s predicated on a series of contingencies that include the state funding and the NFL funding and the level of the PSLs.”

Grubman said this was discussed in a call with Peacock and two owners on the LA Opportunities committee — Robert McNair of the Houston Texans and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But in the end, the move of the Rams back to Los Angeles may have been a “perfect storm” of events that all worked against St. Louis. The league had a chance to build a showcase stadium in Los Angeles, with the stadium bankrolled by one of the league’s wealthiest owners in Kroenke.

“I’m not sure that anybody, including St. Louis, knew the kind of project that Stan Kroenke was gonna assemble in Los Angeles, and how big and ambitious it was,” Grubman said. “Because that clearly had a big impression on owners. But no one knew that when we began the process.

“To me, these things are always about control — what you can control. St. Louis couldn’t control what Stan Kroenke was gonna do or propose in some other city. They could only control what was being proposed for Stan to consider for the Rams and for the NFL to consider in terms of keeping them there (in St. Louis).

“So I go back to what I said. If they could have stuck with the original vision, taken the risk (of a vote), and kept the county in there, they would have had a more powerful project with fewer contingencies and fewer risks.

“How might it have come out if they did that? I don’t know. That’s a hypothetical.”

Echoing comments made by Goodell during his news conference, Grubman wouldn’t close the door on the NFL returning to St. Louis in the future.

“I think it’s all about what St. Louis wants,” Grubman said. “If St. Louis wants to be an NFL city, they’ve got a hell of a chance of being one. If they don’t, or they’re ambivalent about it, then it’s a lot tougher.

Forbes: The Rams’ Big Move Comes With Big Risks

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brianmenickella/2016/02/15/the-nfls-disney-world-a-big-move-with-big-risks/#7425a27d1012

Our beloved football season is now over, but there is still much to discuss. Was this Peyton Manning’s last season on an NFL roster? How will the Carolina Panthers rebound from a disappointing loss viewed by over 110 million people? Was that the best halftime show ever? The questions stemming from the results of the 50th Super Bowl in Santa Clara can dominate any headline, yet much of the talk has been about a different California city and its reemergence in the NFL.

56,000 deposits collected for season tickets in 2016. Magic Johnson has not been able to contain his excitement. A town known for its bright lights and stars just added another shiny notch in the diamond-studded belt—and it’s a big one.

The Rams are officially returning to Los Angeles. After a tumultuous several years of back and forth negotiations, protests and bargaining, the United States’ second largest media market once again has a football team to add to its impressive list of attractions. The city of St. Louis has found itself on the losing end of this equation, and with the mass exodus comes questions regarding the influence of a sports team on a community’s economy. How will they recover?

Welcome Back

The Rams’ proposal was approved after several years of ongoing debates regarding funding and location issues for any team considering a move to Los Angeles—the city made it clear that there would be no taxpayer funds allocated to help build a stadium for any franchise looking to move. In the past, the city allowed taxpayers to foot the bill, therefore, NFL owners petitioning for a new stadium deal have used a move to Los Angeles as a leveraging tactic of sorts, dangling the possibility of a Browns-like fiasco over the heads of their fans.

That leverage is now gone, as the community welcomes its former football team back into the fold after the Rams’ original departure in 1995. With a plan to have a stadium built in nearby Inglewood by 2019, the venue which is estimated to total $3 billion once completed, will provide several entertainment opportunities besides watching football on Sundays, including “an adjacent 6,000-seat performing arts venue, a ‘Champions Plaza’, a lake with waterfalls, retail and office space, a hotel, housing, and 41,000 parking spaces within 1.5 miles of the complex.”

All of these amenities are flashy and sell headlines, but can this bold move by owner Stan Kroenke prove to be a success once the dust settles? With so many factors playing into a franchise’s rise and fall, it’s somewhat difficult to nail down the Rams long-term earning potential in Los Angeles and how it would compare with its St. Louis counterpart.

It’s a Business After All

The current belief and widespread thinking is that with Los Angeles’ significantly larger market size, there will be an inevitable rise in merchandising sales, fan endorsement and tax revenue that both the city and the franchise can mutually benefit from. Along with an estimated 40,000 jobs being created due to the construction process and ongoing operations, anyone with some common sense would deduce that a city garners more revenue as a result of a professional sports team joining its economy.

As it turns out with so many assumptions made in today’s age, the end result is not as clear cut as it sounds.

According to Vanderbilt sports economist Josh Vrooman, a stadium’s impact on a city’s economy is often unfounded and overblown. “The net local impact of a professional sports team is zero, if not negative sum, particularly for an NFL team playing in a monolithic space-eating stadium,” Vrooman said in an email conversation with the Los Angeles Daily News. “The stadiums are rarely used, and the economic architecture is designed so as to hermetically capture almost all of the gains within the venue.”

Impact studies for venues like the Inglewood project tend to leave out factors that can negatively influence an area’s profitability. Increases in traffic congestion, the diversion of economic activity which may weaken the surrounding area’s small businesses, and low-paying seasonal wages for stadium employees are just some of the concerns moving forward.

In order for the stadium project (and essentially the Rams as a whole) to be successful in Los Angeles, economists cite the ability to use the venue for purposes other than football as a way to maximize its earning potential. Kroenke plans on doing just that, creating a layout for the complex that one anonymous owner in Los Angeles likens to a “NFL Disney World.”

Utilizing a stadium for only ten Sundays a year doesn’t make sense, and it’s crucial for the Rams organization to establish its venue as an “entertainment experience” in order to draw in non-football fans looking for the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles’ nightly antics.

What Happens Next

Seemingly forgotten in the hype and headlines of the big move, St. Louis finds itself picking up the pieces after what now looks like a temporary rental of a pro football franchise. Regardless of the team’s recent struggles, the Rams had an established fan base due to a championship pedigree found early on in St. Louis—a time famously known as the “Greatest Show on Turf.”

Now that the city’s team of 21-years has skipped town, what’s the next chapter for St. Louis, and will the Rams’ absence severely affect the city’s progress moving forward?

It’s not as grim as one might think when all is considered. By losing out on keeping its franchise, the city of St. Louis and Missouri as a whole managed to save an estimated $550 million in public funding—money that would have been used to build a new stadium demanded by Kroenke.

On top of the immense amount of taxpayer dollars being saved for public service improvements (schools, parks, infrastructure, etc.), the tax subsidies that had to be promised in order to build a new stadium is a crummy deal nixed before it could do any real harm.

Although St. Louis was receiving $4.2 million year from collecting taxes on tickets, concessions and other transactions, part of the deal to keep the team in Missouri included having the city pledge all “game day” revenue towards financing a new stadium. Now city goers can spend more on bars, restaurants and other local businesses that don’t require tax subsidies.

In the end, St. Louis taxpayers and citizens came up with a surprising win. The Rams unintentionally saved the city and state from spending hundreds of millions of dollars that could be better used elsewhere. And while the big move will leave some football diehards reeling, hope for sports-crazed St. Louisans is still on the horizon—opening day is only a month and a half away.

Brian Menickella is a co-founder and managing partner of The Beacon Group of Companies, a broad-based financial services firm.