relocation articles & links … 1/25 & 1/26

Los Angeles to build world’s most expensive stadium complex

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/19/architecture/new-nfl-stadium-los-angeles/

(CNN)Los Angeles will welcome the return of NFL football with the construction of a new 80,000-seat stadium complex and “NFL Disney World,” expected to become the world’s most expensive sports arena.

The 300-acre development in Inglewood, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, will provide a new home for the NFL’s Rams franchise, whose return to their former home city was approved by league officials last Tuesday. The development has an estimated cost of $2.6 billion — more than $1 billion more than New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, currently the league’s most costly venue.

The capacity of the new stadium could exceed 100,000 for special events, say developers. Inglewood Mayor James Butts has already announced ambitions to host the Super Bowl at the arena, which developers say will be the “cornerstone” of a year-round sports, music, and entertainment events district.

An unnamed “owner” is reported in the Los Angeles Times comparing their ambitions for the development to Florida’s Disney World theme park. The development’s footprint is about twice the size of the original Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, and will also host a 6,000-seat performance venue, more than 1.5 million square feet of retail and office space, 2,500 homes, a 300-room hotel, and 25 acres of parks.

The Rams, who played in the Los Angeles area for almost 50 years, will give the city its first NFL team since 1995 — the year the Rams left for St. Louis, and the Raiders departed for Oakland.

Rams owner and property developer Stan Kroenke, who has an estimated personal net worth of $7.4 billion, is credited with spearheading the return of NFL football to the country’s second largest city.

The new stadium is expected to be complete in time for the 2019 NFL season, with the team playing at their former home at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, until then. The team’s owners have begun courting the San Deigo Chargers and Oakland Raiders to join them at the new venue, on the site of the former Hollywood Park horse racing track.

International architecture giant HKS have been contracted to design the venue and have announced that it will center on a 19-acre transparent canopy, which will cover the entire stadium and parts of the surrounding development.

The canopy will be made from the same transparent ETFE plastic that coats Bayern Munich’s stadium, the Allianz Arena, and the Beijing National Aquatics Center.

Munich’s stadium changes color, from red to white to blue, according to which team — Bayern, second division side TSV 1860 München, or the German national side — is playing at the stadium that day. The architects have not yet said if similar color indication would occur if two or more teams host matches at the new stadium in Inglewood.

The Rams are urging the Chargers, currently based 200 km south of L.A. in San Diego, to join them at the stadium, and fund a portion of the massive costs, with the Oakland Raiders considered a fallback option.

Kroenke has publicly estimated the cost at $1.86 billion, but the Los Angeles Times quotes unnamed “(NFL) officials and owners” who say the true cost could reach $2.66 billion. The New York Times and others have put the value at nearly $3 billion.

The NFL already claims the world’s most expensive stadium. That title belongs to the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, home to New York teams the Giants and Jets, which opened in 2010 at a cost of $1.6 billion. The Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers are also among a minute group of teams worldwide to play in stadiums costing more than $1 billion.

Outside the U.S., stadiums with budgets exceeding $1 billion dollars are rare. London’s home of soccer, Wembley Stadium, crossed the mark in 2007. Tokyo abandoned plans for a $2 billion Zaha Hadid-designed stadium last July amid rising costs, with a cheaper design now underway.

zn wrote:

Steve Hartman ‏@cannonhartman

High ranking Rams official says talks have stalled for a Chargers move to LA in 2016…most likely the Chargers staying in SD in 2016

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Report: Rams, Chargers at impasse over L.A. move

Mike Florio

Report: Rams, Chargers at impasse over L.A. move

Here’s a surprise. Rams owner Stan Kroenke apparently is driving a hard bargain with Chargers owner Dean Spanos.

According to Steve Hartman of XTRA Sports 1360 (via NBCSanDiego.com), the Rams and Chargers have reached an impasse in their effort to work out a deal that would bring the Chargers back to L.A. as tenants or partners in Kroenkeworld, the new, multi-billion-dollar stadium being built in Inglewood.

Hartman’s information comes from an unnamed Rams official, news which comes only days after the Rams and Chargers issued a statement that the two teams had agreed not to disclose information regarding their talks.

The Chargers have until January 15, 2017 to negotiate exclusively with the Rams. However, the Chargers need to quickly determine whether they will be staying in San Diego for another year or moving to L.A. on a temporary basis in 2016.

It’s possible that the Chargers have decided that it makes sense to spend one more year in San Diego than to rush to L.A., presumably joining the Rams and USC at the Coliseum. Or maybe Kroenke has realized that he should insist on terms so onerous that neither the Chargers now nor the Raiders later will choose to horn in on the Rams’ new turf. Whatever the value of sharing space with a team that would double the inventory of annual NFL games, the Rams presumably would make a lot more money for themselves if they own the L.A. market exclusively.

Even if they simply squat on L.A. for a year or two, they’ll have a huge head start over whoever joins them there.

PFT initially raised the red flag regarding the possibility that the man known in St. Louis as Silent Stan will be as calculatingly ruthless with a potential partner as he was with a hometown he supposedly loves and then left. League sources have expressed optimism that the deal finalized two weeks ago in Houston comes with assurances that Kroenke will be reasonable, and incentives for him to quickly welcome another team to L.A., including for example the immediate ability to sell premium products at the stadium to be opened in 2019.

Ultimately, Kroenke is going to do what’s right for him and his franchise. The best outcome for Kroenke and the Rams could be to own L.A., with the Chargers staying in San Diego and the Raiders staying in Oakland or going to anywhere else but L.A.

For the Chargers, the best outcome could be staying put. With $100 million in new money from the NFL and $550 million in relocation fees that would be avoided by not moving, that’s plenty of extra cash that could go toward building a new venue in San Diego, if Spanos would be willing to surrender on the issue of finagling public money that simply isn’t there to be finagled.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke won more than just L.A.

Dan Wetzel

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/rams–stan-kroenke-won-more-than-just-l-a–in-the-american-sports-landscape-055506325.html

DENVER – Stan Kroenke owns three major professional sports franchises in the Denver area: the NBA Nuggets, the NHL Avalanche and the MLS Rapids, plus the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League.

When he is here to tend to their business, which is often, he lives in a spacious penthouse jutting out of one side and on top of the Pepsi Center, the 18,000-seat downtown arena he also owns.

It’s an incredible home, spacious and brilliantly decorated, with multiple outdoor spaces and views of both downtown and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. Once inside, it feels like a standalone home off in some gated community in the suburbs, not something that is an elevator ride from a raucous arena.

“Convenient commute,” Kroenke said with a laugh to Yahoo Sports on Saturday night while watching his Nuggets defeat the Detroit Pistons.

It’s every young sports fans’ dream – can’t we just live in the arena?

“Sports and real estate development is a large part of what we do,” said Kroenke, who Forbes estimates is worth $7.7 billion.

Sports and real estate. Real estate and sports.

It’s how Stan Kroenke, despite lacking the big personality or high-profile of a Jerry Jones or a Mark Cuban, has emerged as one of the world’s preeminent professional sports owners and, with construction set to begin on a state-of-the-art, 100,000-capacity, clear-roofed stadium in a 300-acre development in Inglewood, Calif., undeniably one of the most powerful figures in sports in this country.

The franchises here in Colorado are big, his other two are bigger. There is the London-based Arsenal Football Club of the English Premier League and its home arena, Emirates Stadium, the third largest in England.

Then there are the Rams of the NFL, which after approval this month from the NFL will leave St. Louis and return to their Los Angeles roots and into what is expected to be the envy of any venue in the world. It was Kroenke, who after two-plus decades solved the NFL’s L.A. riddle, something many billionaires, businessmen, entertainment moguls, governors, mayors and so on couldn’t.

“The NFL had a problem out there, I was on the committee [looking at relocation possibilities] for years,” Kroenke said. “We never got anything done. It’s hard to get things done in California.”

Hard, but, it turns out, not impossible.

*****

Kroenke, 68, grew up in rural Missouri, where as a child he served as a bookkeeper to his father, a small business owner. He later attended the University of Missouri, where he also earned an MBA. He focused on real estate and operates a vast array of companies and interests, although he still carries himself with a calm, down-home style that belies his immense wealth. His preferred drink is a very cold Coors Light. His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke, is herself a billionaire, part of the Wal-Mart family fortune.

This is the background, the experience, the financial might, the business acumen and the quiet but determined personality that was probably required to solve one of professional sports’ most vexing challenges.
Kroenke was brought in as a local Missouri-based minority owner for the Rams in 1994 to help move the franchise to St. Louis, where the city had built, entirely with public funds, a dome stadium that lacked a tenant. In 2010 he took over full ownership, but plans for a new stadium were slow and complicated and forced him to find alternative options.

In L.A. he quietly purchased the land, most of it the old Hollywood Park racetrack, to put up a sporting palace.

“As a real-estate developer, its 300 acres,” Kroenke said. “Three-hundred acres in a city like Los Angeles, in the middle of everything, is very, very unusual to say the least. So that’s a real-estate developer’s dream.”

The project will include much-needed retail, housing and office space for the area, plus the cutting-edge stadium. Costs are expected to soar well over $2 billion. While the NFL has granted San Diego Chargers owner Dean Spanos a one-year window to join Kroenke as a partner on the project, even if Kroenke goes it alone, there will be no direct public funding, almost unheard of in sports business these days.

The plan, both the concept of the stadium and the competency of Kroenke’s team, overwhelmed Spanos’ attempt for a joint stadium with the Raiders down in Carson, Calif. The vote went 30-2. Now they are awaiting Spanos’ decision. If Spanos passes, Raiders owner Mark Davis has one year to consider coming also.

“There is tremendous excitement,” Kroenke said. “It’s amazing.”

Last Monday, the Rams offered a chance for fans to get on a list to buy up to eight tickets each for games the next three years at the L.A. Coliseum, while the new venue is being built. It’s already approaching 50,000, an eye-popping number even for the NFL, and if all come through it would easily exhaust supply.

While the league never doubted there would be interest, the vision for the epic stadium closer to the city’s moneyed Westside is undoubtedly a factor. This is L.A., where they expect big things. So too is the fact it is the Rams that are returning, where a fan base that grew up with them are now in middle age.

Kroenke related a story about a man who was wearing a Rams jersey during the week of the NFL vote as a public display of hope.

“He said, ‘I grew up rooting for the Rams and when they left for St. Louis [in 1995] it was tough for me. So this could be the best week I’ve had in 21 years,'” Kroenke said.

*****

The process, of course, wasn’t all fun. Kroenke notes that the league purposely makes relocation difficult because “it should be difficult.” It is almost always preferred that teams remain in their current markets. However, the realities of the stadium lease in St. Louis and the enormous possibilities of moving to the nation’s entertainment capital was too much. He’s a businessman and has never apologized for it.

Kroenke talks of needing rhino hide to deal with some of the anger back in St. Louis – the reaction could be described as nuclear, if not worse. The truth, however, was he never misled about the possibility of a move, speaking bluntly about the challenges of staying and the possibilities of leaving from the start.

At least some of the local media, most notably Bryan Burwell, the late, great St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, paid attention and wrote extensively about Kroenke demonstrating a willingness to make an unpopular business move. The portrayals through the years weren’t always flattering, but they spoke to an owner who wasn’t hiding behind glad-handing or phony news conferences (he rarely speaks to the media at all).

Perhaps no one else paid attention or believed Burwell that it could happen. Perhaps they thought L.A. was impossible, or underestimated Kroenke. Perhaps they just couldn’t see past the Arch. This despite year after year Kroenke making clear statements and buying land in Southern California that spoke to his resolve.

Kroenke is acutely aware of how some fans in Missouri feel about the team returning to L.A. He also knows there is no simple answer that solves that.

“There’s an emotional side to it,” Kroenke said. “I understand that. I also think that people in Missouri understand you can’t just throw rational thought to the wind. You have to do something that makes sense. And by the way, the league and my partners are not going to let me stay in a deal that doesn’t make any sense.”

Business is business. It’s what got the Rams out of L.A. in the first place, after all. Still, what do you say to the regular guy who just wanted to have a team?

“I say that 22 years ago they had a stadium that was built and it had no team,” Kroenke said. “And we had a lot to do with bringing a team in for 21 years. And by the way we won a Super Bowl and participated in another one. Some people never do who have been around the league a long time, so I’m proud of that.

“I understand the emotional side of it. But it has to make sense.”

*****

There is little question that L.A. makes sense. On a macro scale having a team and stadium there rather than Missouri is non-comparable. It’s not just the Rams and potentially the Chargers or Raiders who will play at the new stadium, set to open in 2019. It will assuredly host Super Bowls, Final Fours, college regular-season and bowl games, not to mention concerts, rodeos, political conventions and anything else they can think up.

Jerry Jones has said he expects it to eclipse his AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, as the country’s finest venue.

“The commissioner [Roger Goodell] said he thought it would be the greatest sports complex in the world,” Kroenke said. “I’m proud of our architects. It’s a great place that everyone knows, Hollywood Park. I love it. We’ve got a great design, a spectacular stadium and it’s a fantastic place to do everything.

“It’s an opportunity that doesn’t come along every day.”

Actually, it was there for the taking for two decades. No one could get it done. Stan Kroenke, a guy who cumulatively lives months each year inside a sports venue, did. Maybe that total immersion was it. He was a billionaire who was hands-on every step in the way.

The hardest part done, the NFL political battle and relocation behind him, L.A. is now more about fun, the dream project to see fulfilled. The new stadium will have everything, except one thing – a built-in home like this one.