LAC owner Alex Spanos has passed away

[thrILL!]

On 10/9/2018 at 7:22 PM, PapaShogun said:

I do wonder if San Diego won a championship in the last 15 years or so would the team still be there. Like in 2006. Winning seems to always give a team on the fringe more oxygen. The franchises that move are the ones that seem to be annual doormats. 

What's messed up is how terrible the Padres have been for years while having one of the nicest ballparks.  San Diego should've given Petco Park to the Chargers and had the Padres play at San Diego St.  LoL

[SteelKing728]

if the Chargers move again, will divisions be realigned you think, or stay as they are?

[Chargers]

31 minutes ago, SteelKing728 said:

if the Chargers move again, will divisions be realigned you think, or stay as they are?

If another relocation were to happen, say to St Louis as some poster pointed out we'd probably fold as franchise and a new expansion team would take our entire roster ala the Ravens. Not sure why division realignment would be necessary at that point.

[SteelKing728]

1 hour ago, Classic said:

If another relocation were to happen, say to St Louis as some poster pointed out we'd probably fold as franchise and a new expansion team would take our entire roster ala the Ravens. Not sure why division realignment would be necessary at that point.

I see. Would you be a fan of the new team? 

[DigInBoys]

The Chargers aren't moving, for a lot of reasons.

[Xenos]

Postgame locker speech honoring Alex and his wife. I thought it was nice.

https://www.chargers.com/video/anthony-lynn-post-game-locker-room-speech

 

[August4th]

 

[Shanedorf]

ESPN's Seth Wickersham reports the Chargers' viability in Los Angeles will be a "major discussion topic among NFL owners and executives at this week’s league meetings."

"As Adam Schefter notes, it's a "troubling issue" for the league. The Chargers' PSL (personal seat license) sales have been a real struggle, and Wickersham says the team is expected to revise its Inglewood revenue goals sharply to a more realistic number of $150 million from initially setting it at $400 million. The Chargers are a team without a home as the Rams have cornered the L.A. market, and the Bolts are the stepson to the city. There were whispers last year of the NFL considering moving the Chargers back to San Diego. It should be done, but it would be a total admittance of failure by Roger Goodell and his billionaire buddies."

 

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone sent Fredo off to Las Vegas....where will the Corleone's send Fredo Spanos now that the Vegas market is taken ?  Perhaps the owners will make him an offer he can't refuse to sell the team and move it back to San Diego.

[AFlaccoSeagulls]

5 minutes ago, Shanedorf said:

ESPN's Seth Wickersham reports the Chargers' viability in Los Angeles will be a "major discussion topic among NFL owners and executives at this week’s league meetings."

"As Adam Schefter notes, it's a "troubling issue" for the league. The Chargers' PSL (personal seat license) sales have been a real struggle, and Wickersham says the team is expected to revise its Inglewood revenue goals sharply to a more realistic number of $150 million from initially setting it at $400 million. The Chargers are a team without a home as the Rams have cornered the L.A. market, and the Bolts are the stepson to the city. There were whispers last year of the NFL considering moving the Chargers back to San Diego. It should be done, but it would be a total admittance of failure by Roger Goodell and his billionaire buddies."

 

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone sent Fredo off to Las Vegas....where will the Corleone's send Fredo Spanos now that the Vegas market is taken ?  Perhaps the owners will make him an offer he can't refuse to sell the team and move it back to San Diego.

Nah, they'll just move another team to Los Angeles and call it good.

[swede700]

They can't move the Chargers back now...those bridges were burned.  It took 20 years for the Rams to move back to LA (they never should have moved in the first place) and it's not really a Raiders' situation when they moved back to Oakland (which they probably will again in 10-15 years after the Vegas experiment fails, since Vegas needs a team to actually be competitive).  The Clippers never moved back to San Diego, the Chargers won't either.  They'll eventually settle in as the cliche'd red-headed stepsister.  

[kramxel]

LA is like those pricey real estates in monopoly... eventually a team will fall there, and the league will make billions.... or they'll fall somewhere else, and the league will keep making a lot of money.

My bet is the league will wait till they're both in Inglewood before making a decision.

 

[Woz]

2 minutes ago, kramxel said:

LA is like those pricey real estates in monopoly... eventually a team will fall there, and the league will make billions.... or they'll fall somewhere else, and the league will keep making a lot of money.

My bet is the league will wait till they're both in Inglewood before making a decision.

Kroenke definitely will approve of that since the Chargers rent will help towards paying off the construction costs, but doesn't look to be impeding merch/PSL sales.

[Dr LBC]

On 10/15/2018 at 4:56 PM, DigInBoys said:

The Chargers aren't moving, for a lot of reasons.

At least not until after the league inks the next media contracts (2022, IIRC?).  The NFL absolutely wants the leverage of having two Los Angeles teams in addition to two New York teams to demand even more money from the networks to air its product.

After that point, you might see a coup by collective ownership to sell Dean down the river and leverage him into selling the team to an owner either more capable of succeeding in LA (would have to be someone with a succession plan that included securing a stadium elsewhere in the market - a possibility if said owner were to partner up with Arte Moreno and the Angels who are going to at the very least exploring future stadium site options in Orange County) or who would be more welcome in San Diego (and even then, they'll likely want to try to bring some of that Orange County market with them and likely look at a site as much as 50 miles north of San Diego, possibly just inside the county line, similar to how the Niners are still the San Francisco 49ers but play now in Santa Clara in the southern part of The Bay as opposed to the north.

[DigInBoys]

3 hours ago, The LBC said:

At least not until after the league inks the next media contracts (2022, IIRC?).  The NFL absolutely wants the leverage of having two Los Angeles teams in addition to two New York teams to demand even more money from the networks to air its product.

After that point, you might see a coup by collective ownership to sell Dean down the river and leverage him into selling the team to an owner either more capable of succeeding in LA (would have to be someone with a succession plan that included securing a stadium elsewhere in the market - a possibility if said owner were to partner up with Arte Moreno and the Angels who are going to at the very least exploring future stadium site options in Orange County) or who would be more welcome in San Diego (and even then, they'll likely want to try to bring some of that Orange County market with them and likely look at a site as much as 50 miles north of San Diego, possibly just inside the county line, similar to how the Niners are still the San Francisco 49ers but play now in Santa Clara in the southern part of The Bay as opposed to the north.

I'm just going to re-post some posts I made on another site when someone said the Chargers would move back to San Diego eventually:

 

Quote

 

Yes, the NFL in its obsession with money and popularity is going let the Chargers move back to San Diego, reducing the Chargers potential fanbase from 20 million people to 3 million(roughly speaking) where a publicly funded stadium will never happen.

 

The Chargers will never be able to build a fanbase? Tell that to the Clippers who for 30 years were the biggest joke in sports run by the worst ownership ever.

 

There's a reason the Jets, Mets, White Sox etc. have never left despite being the secondary teams.

 

The league and owners(who control the league) will never "force" a team to leave a larger market for a smaller market for the dangerous precedent it would set...for themselves. 

 

You're ignoring the social, political, and most importantly economic facts of the situation.

 

That's just not the way the real world works, especially not with the NFL in the 21st century.

 

 

Quote

In an area with 20 million people, that supports 2 pro basketball teams, 3 baseball teams, 2 hockey teams, 2 soccer teams, which was able to support THREE NFL teams 30 years ago(before 2 terrible owners forced their way out of the area), in addition to countless minor and secondary teams, the Chargers won't be able to carve out a fanbase(Counting what they will retain from San Diego) and fill a stadium 8 times a year, got it.

 

No team is going to make more money being a San Diego team than it will an LA team, it's like saying water isn't wet.

 

I mean, that's the whole reason the Chargers moved in the first place..

Quote

Ok, the thinking being applied in here is way too simplistic and short-sighted.

 

I don't know why we're talking about the Chargers moving back within the next few years much less in the long-term.

.

If memory serves, the NFL stipulated that the teams moving to LA could not sell within 10 years.

 

The NFL/Spanos are not moving back to a smaller portion of the market where many of the fans/politicans hate ownership to play in a 50 year old stadium which they tried to replace for 20 years.

 

Between the relocation fee and the G-4 loan Spanos has almost almost a billion dollars invested in this move.

 

This is a decades long financial move by both the NFL and Spanos with billions of dollars invested in it.

 

Suggesting going back to San Diego is even a remote possibility is showing a complete detachment from logic and the reality of the situation.

 

 

 

[Dr LBC]

@DigInBoys  Yep.  Ultimately, the rest of the owners aren't going to sacrifice having 2 teams in the LA market for pretty much anything - and I think that may include Dean Spanos, "loyal soldier" that he may have been to this point.

I had a couple site entries published a little over a year ago that delved into the blueprint to how the Chargers could have succeeded but didn't for one specific reason: Ego/hubris.  Dean would have stood a better chance going tet-a-tet in the market against the Raiders (and I think he and his people knew it too, which was why that Carson stadium plan and partnership with Davis was so favorable to him).  Mark Davis is as clueless as Dean is in marketing to and attracting the Beverly Hills/Malibu/Palisades crowd so that would have been a level playing field.  The Chargers had a modest following in Orange County that could have been built upon and still left a slew of corporate partnerships (trust me, neither the Angels or the Ducks are hurting in this department - Tesla is headquartered in Orange County for crying out loud).  The Rams, however, were the team that had a darn near stranglehold on the Orange County and Southern LA market in the 80's and 90's though, when they were here, because the players themselves lived in Orange County and were extraordinarily active in the communities (before the league was really pushing players to do so for PR purposes).

If/when push comes to shove, my feeling is that if they're worried they're not making as much money as they should from the LA market, the other owners will find something to give them leverage on the Spanii to force them out - or leverage a sale to an owner of their preference.  Maybe it's Steve Ballmer, maybe it's someone else or a consortium (the league doesn't tend to be fond of these though).  The earliest I could see it happening is about 4 years or so out of the Olympics being in LA because said new owner might stand a fair chance at parlaying some of the Olympic/Coliseum refurbishment along with their own money into a stadium of their own (maybe a renovated Coliseum, maybe somewhere else and they try to persuade - ironically enough - the LA Galaxy into leaving StubHub Center and following them to new digs.

Dean may have been a loyal soldier, but push comes to shove, he's disposable because he simply isn't wealthy or influential enough to matter.