For NFL Teams, It Pays to Move

For the past 17 years, Los Angeles has been the National Football League’s lost city of gold. The second-largest media market in the U.S. hasn’t had an NFL team since both the Rams and Raiders left town after the 1994 season in search of new stadiums. Now, the league appears ready for a return to L.A., and one of the most likely candidates to relocate there is none other than those same Rams, currently playing in St. Louis. The team’s potential round trip illustrates team owners’ continual success at playing cities against one another to gain access to public funds.

The Rams are in the middle of a dispute with their landlord, the St. Louis Convention & Visitor Commission, over renovations to the Edward Jones Dome. Their lease includes promises to keep the 17-year-old dome in the top 25 percent of NFL stadiums based on 15 measures, including skybox suites, scoreboards, and concessions. When the CVC negotiated the lease, which figures to cost the state and city about $720 million in debt payments over its 30-year life, they were trying to lure the Rams from the much larger L.A. market. “We weren’t negotiating from a position of strength,” then-Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in January.