A couple of things that didn’t make it into today’s Chargers story:
- Many local people I’ve interviewed recently have gone out of their way to say they believe the Chargers are committed to staying in the region, citing, among other things, the amount the team has spent locally on consultants and studies throughout the years.
- Economist Dan Rascher said today’s football stadiums just don’t work financially without the benefit of some public assistance. “That is a basic sports economy tenant,” he said.
Arenas can because they are used for so many different things like concerts, events and games. But it’s not that football stadiums can’t be built without public help, Rascher said, it’s just that they’d have to be lower-quality stadiums. “The reason they are so big and fabulous is because they are paid for partially by the public,” he said.
(The team has said its stadium would be privately financed, but could end up asking for a contribution of land. Rascher said he doesn’t consider a stadium to be privately financed if it does include the contribution of public land. Click here for more on that issue.)
- Kenneth Shropshire of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative said he had thought new NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s legacy would be to put a team in L.A., although the new commissioner didn’t say much about the issue during his first State of the NFL speech during Super Bowl week. “It’s still early, so I think it still may be,” he said.
Here’s what Goodell had to say during the speech, according to the Los Angeles Times:
It’s important for us to be in Los Angeles in the long-term, but we have survived quite well without Los Angeles, and Los Angeles has survived quite well without the NFL. But I think we would better together. I want to find a way to do that that would be best for all parties.
(Correction: The original version of this post misspelled Dan Rascher’s name. We regret the error.)