San Diego Chargers Not Close To A Los Angeles Relocation
By Mike Dyce
According to a Yahoo! Sports report, the San Diego Chargers are not “closer” to moving to Los Angeles after Roger Goodell’s memo. Mark Fabiani, who has been advising the San Diego Chargers for a decade on stadium issues said the memo “doesn’t move the sticks” in bringing or enticing San Diego to head to Los Angeles.
"“We saw it simply as a re-affirmation of things that the commissioner and the league were saying for a long time,”Fabiani said."
The Chargers are the one NFL franchise whose road to Los Angeles is the easiest. They have nothing that would prevent them from playing in LA in 2013. Other franchises rumored to be interested in a move to LA or linked to Los Angeles have stipulations or tie ups that would make the road more difficult to moving to Southern California. Not impossible. Just more difficult.
Teams rumored to be linked to an LA move are the St. Louis Rams, Buffalo Bills, Minnesota Vikings, Jacksonville Jaguars and the Oakland Raiders.
Another hurdle in ANY franchises move to Los Angeles is the current stadium situation. Negotiations to build a new stadium in Los Angeles are still early on, and any team might not want to temporarily spend time in the LA Coliseum or the Rose Bowl while they wait. Both are old stadiums and both host college football teams already.
“Although substantial uncertainties remain,” Goodell wrote, “stadium development in Los Angeles has advanced to the point where the prospects for a new facility are better than they have been in many years.”
Goodell says in his memo that Los Angeles might be closer then ever to building a new stadium however. It is intriguing, a large market that would have any owner in a subpar market or stadium interested.
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