Feel bad for Chargers fans who drove up 2+ hours to to go the game, only to see them lose it in the final seconds again.
Not a big NFL fan -- can anyone explain why everyone's teams have moved to LA?
And is it anything more than just money?
It's all for money, it's always money.
That said it makes perfect sense that there would be an LA football team, in that it's the second largest city in the US and it did not have an NFL football team for ~20 years. The Rams and Raiders both used to play in LA but both left in 1995. There were rumors of teams moving to LA for the last 20 years... the former Seahawks owner tried to do it in the 1990s. It's just a huge market and unusual that there's no professional football team.
You hate to see any franchise move but the NFL, like the NHL, is a sports organization that has weird historical locations for teams because the sport was widely popularized with blue collar workers (same with hockey), and so teams would be in odd locations and once those cities shuttered with industrial failure, it becamse common for the franchises to move as well. The most notorious move is called "
The Move," and was the Cleveland Brown's owner abandoning Cleveland and moving to Baltimore, to become the Baltimore Ravens.
Both of which are domes with retractable roofs which aren't needed in San Diego. He could have built a more than suitable outdoor arena for $650M in San Diego. Again, Gillette Stadium, one of the best arenas in football, was built for $325M of private money and they have more than enough luxury suites to sell.
Kraft's hand was forced a bit with that. He had sought funds from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and at least with Connecticut, it was approved that the state would spend some $1b on infrastructure changes, and part of that would be for a new stadium for the Patriots outside of Hartford. The plan fell through when the public rejected it by referendum, and because Kraft was rejected by the public in Hartford, Boston, and Providence, he was pretty much left with Foxborough.
A stadium could be built 15+ years ago, in Foxborough MA (a town 45mins from any major city, that literally has nothing but the complex that Kraft has built), for $325m, privately funded. They used the existing "parking lots" for the construction site of the new stadium, so there wasn't much demo needed.
If Gillette were constructed today, I'd imagine the project would be much, much more expensive, especially if it were around any of the major New England cities... Boston, Worcester, Providence, Hartford, etc.
