Rams, Chargers Reportedly Feuding Over New Stadium
The Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers will be sharing stadium in Inglewood, California starting next season but apparently all is not well in the relationship. A report Saturday night suggests the two sides may be feuding, with the Rams particularly upset.
Fred Roggin of NBCLA is reporting there is friction in the relationship between the two franchises. The Rams apparently don't believe the Chargers are fulfilling their end of the agreement the two teams signed.
This is happens to be the least surprising story ever.
It's well-known in NFL circles that Rams owner Stan Kroenke and Chargers owner Dean Spanos don't like each other. It's also publicly known that the Chargers have been a massive dud when it comes to selling the PSLs that will help fund their end of construction. Thanks to a hilarious lack of interest, Spanos and company had to wildly reduce the price of their seat licenses.
The Chargers told NFL owners they were projecting to make $400 million from PSL sales in Los Angeles. That number was part of the justification for leaving San Diego, as more money was available in the the nation's second-biggest media market. After being in said market for more than a year, the franchise "adjusted" that projection from $400 million to $150 million. A little quick math shows that's just 37.5 percent of the team's initial projection. That's also $250 million that would not be helping to fund Kroenke's stadium.
The NFL forced Spanos and Kroenke to make nice and sign an agreement for the LA stadium. Despite any puff pieces claiming the two sides are "equal partners" in the venture, we all know that's garbage. The stadium project is Kroenke's while Spanos and the Chargers are basically hangers-on. If Kroenke can show the Chargers aren't living up to their obligations in the deal, things could get really messy.
Kroenke and the Rams would love nothing more than to completely remove the Chargers from the equation and have the Inglewood stadium all to themselves. They were forced into the lease agreement by the NFL and would love to be rid of it. Meanwhile, the Chargers have struggled to make any dent in an LA market that didn't even want them and would essentially be homeless.
We'll see how this plays out, but if this is true, it's yet another sign that the Chargers are and always have been a bad fit in Los Angeles. The NFL has to be questioning why it ever allowed Spanos to move in the first place.