Officially, the NFL detests relocation, respects tradition and cherishes its almost century-long history of all-for-one, one-for-all family ownership.
When no one’s watching, though—like when the owners are taking a secret ballot—it’s clear the league isn’t worried about stewardship of its great game, or preserving its current success. No, commissioner Roger Goodell and his 32 employers have their big, shining eyes fixed on a glorious future.
It’s a future where NFL football is the biggest moneymaker in showbiz, the great tentpole holding up the American digital media market. It’s a future where the lowest-rated NFL game still pulls more eyeballs than the highest-rated anything else, where they make eight- and nine-figure paydays selling broadcasting rights over and over to nations all around the world and Silicon Valley giants are bidding billions for over-the-top streaming rights.
It’s a future where the NFL’s in-house media operation runs circles around those of its broadcast partners, giving the league a firm grip on not only how we watch, but how we follow and think about its product. It’s a future remade by another round of franchise free-agency, market-hopping, stadium subsidies, realignment and maybe even international expansion.
When Stan Kroenke’s $1.8 billion Inglewood stadium opens its doors in 2019—along with condos, retail, convention space, and new headquarters for the NFL Network and NFL Media—that future may be reality.
When it came to football, the rival Carson project was the clear winner: The two California teams staying in California, with easy freeway access for the Raiders and Chargers fans making the pilgrimage to watch their old teams play and acres of parking for fan-friendly tailgating. Chargers owner Dean Spanos, and Raiders owner Mark Davis, were an old-school package deal on a stadium proposal even the NFL’s relocation committee agreed was superior.
But swashbuckling Stan Kroenke’s dazzlingly ambitious Inglewood project saw the NFL as the centerpiece of a commercialist Mecca, 260-acre chunk of uber-gentrification that would have a little bit of everything for everybody—and countless streams of revenue for Kroenke. Jerry Jones loved this plan.
Publicly, there was plenty of support for Carson. Privately, the earning power and wow factor of Kroenke’s Disneyfied NFL-Land pulled a shocking 20-12 majority in the initial secret ballot. As Peter King wrote for The MMQB, Spanos and Davis relied on the best interests of football and the NFL’s generational old-boys network to fend off the domineering Kroenke and his profit-above-all-else ambition.
But it turns out many of the old boys (and women-of-a-certain-age) in charge now share Kroenke’s ambition.
It’s been noted many times the NFL is an incongruous mix of capitalism and communism. This is the perfect example: A stadium that makes more money for Kroenke makes more money for everyone else. Placing the new NFL stadium at the heart of a nouveau-riche L.A. neighborhood gives the entire NFL shield a glossy Hollywood sheen. The facility will be showcased by, and a purpose-built showcase for, every NFL event: Super Bowls, Pro Bowls, the draft, the red-carpet NFL awards show.
In five years, the Inglewood project will cap a wave of stadium-building that includes the glass Viking cathedral in Minneapolis, and the kinetic football/soccer Buckyball in Atlanta. These facilities will set the tone for the next decade of the NFL: Enormous and outrageous, incredible and inescapable.
Just as in the 80s and 90s, NFL teams with perfectly good stadiums will be playing TV-market musical chairs, building their own team-themed theme parks in any city fool enough to finance it. Relocation, realignment and even expansion will keep growing the pie, making the owners who missed out salivate for their own slice, replenishing the NFL’s stadium-loan coffers that make the deals possible in the first place.
There are men and women of legal drinking age who have no memory of the NFL before its current stable, symmetrical, 32-team configuration. There are babies being born in St. Louis whose parents’ earliest football memory is their Rams winning the Super Bowl.
This is far from the first step the NFL has taken towards billionizing everything they do. This will hardly be the last time the NFL goes big instead of going home. But this is the first time the NFL’s fraternity of owners has so explicitly broken with their own past. This is the first time a bunch of Juniors and IIIs and widows and nephews and grandchildren of a bunch of 1920s bookies and car salesmen voted against two of their own in favor of a cold-blooded businessman in it only for the money.
Spanos, he obliquely admitted to Yahoo! Sports’ Charles Robinson, was one of the only two votes against the compromised Inglewood deal. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reported Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown may be the other “No.”
Brown is the exemplar of the old-school NFL. He inherited the team, he’s run it on a shoestring budget, he’s repeatedly voted against anything that grows the pie or raises the salary floor or makes him have to spend any money. His team plays in an all-but-free stadium, he never fires coaches and he’s notoriously skimped on scouting and football staff wherever possible. He used to be able to take his chunk of revenue-sharing money, cover all his expenses, field a viable team, and not have to compete with the Joneses and Kroenkes of the world.
With this vote, those days are at an end.
From now on, if you’re a generational owner with no wealth beyond of your family’s stake in the team, your days are numbered. Oakland’s stadium “proposal” involved Davis paying for construction by selling 20 percent of the Raiders to the construction company. Even if the extra $100 million the NFL ultimately promised if the Raiders get a deal done with Oakland, Davis will probably have to sell a significant stake to a big-money bag man who can be the modern NFL owner Davis isn’t.
This vote spells the end of the most unlikely, fascinating, influential, long-running cartel in the history of American economics—and with it, the idea that your NFL team is any kind of public trust or community fixture.
Pro football is too big a business now to care about anything but embiggening the business.
