by David Zizmor

ALAMEDA–What’s been going for along time there hasn’t been an NFL team in Los Angeles going on 20 years now and there are three teams that have had a history in Los Angeles the Rams, Raiders and the Chargers. The Chargers date back to the early days of the AFL back in the days of former Charger receiver Lance Alworth before moving down to San Diego. The Rams were the original team in L.A. they played there from the beginning of the AFL before becoming part of the NFL.

The Rams moved from L.A. in the mid 90s to St.Louis and the Raiders moved to L.A. in the mid 80s and moved back to Oakland in the 1995. All three of those teams have a history in L.A. all three of those teams have situations with their stadiums that could allow them to move back to L.A. The Raiders lease is up at the end of the year at the Oakland Coliseum, the Chargers lease is up at Qualcomm, and at Edward Jones Stadium the Rams lease is up as well.

The Chargers have had a lot of talk about leaving San Diego and they look serious about leaving San Diego. The big problem of course is that there is no NFL stadium in Los Angeles and they’ve tried to build a brand new stadium there for years and years. Nobody there has been able to pull it off, it’s very similar to the Bay Area that no public entity wants to pay for it and their not able to blackmail anybody.

It’s not like other cities where teams just threaten to move and the local government finds local funding to save the team. That won’t happen in this case public funding for a new stadium won’t work in California and the tax payers won’t accept it and they won’t listen and they won’t give into the threats of a team leaving. That’s one of the reasons why you have a couple of privately financed stadiums in the Bay Area namely Levis Stadium and AT&T Park in Santa Clara and San Francisco.

Dodgers Stadium was privately financed in 1959, AT&T Park in San Francisco was one of the only privately financed Stadiums in all of baseball. Then the 49ers Stadium Levis Stadium that as well is privately financed, so an NFL team who plans to move to L.A. will most likely will have to privately finance a new stadium. There have been a lot of potential plans out there that have never come to pass.

Some of the reasons why some new stadiums run upwards into a billion dollars to build is that an NFL caliber stadium averages at a billion. What NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said is he is accepting applications from teams that would potentially like to move. That really doesn’t mean a whole lot because there is not anyone place to move. You could move but if there is no stadium it doesn’t make any difference.

All three of those teams the Rams, Raiders and Chargers anyone of those teams could move and it seems two of them is likely to go back to L.A. as L.A. is big enough to handle that as they did in the past. Right now all of this speculation being that no team can move until 2016. You have to look at all those particular cities if there is stadium plans that would keep those teams in place.

David Zizmor covers the NFL for http://www.sportsradioservice.com