The Fans Are Just an Afterthought

The St. Louis Rams are moving to Los Angeles. In American professional sports, the bottom line is the top priority.

Imagine that you wake up one morning and hear that your favorite sports team has moved to anther city. All the memorabilia you’ve collected over the years — the jerseys, T-shirts, coffee cups, hats — is all going to the secondhand shop because your team no longer exists as such. Tuesday, they were the St. Louis Rams, and on Wednesday, they became the Los Angeles Rams. A nightmare scenario, right?

LA Had To Wait 21 Years for Another Professional Football Team

What would be disconcerting to a European is now part and parcel of being a sports fan in America. Athletic teams — franchises — in the United States are not bound to a city but to an owner. If he decides for some reason that he no longer likes the place his team calls home, he is free to pack up everything, including the team members, and move on. And that’s what happened to the St. Louis Rams. They’re returning to Los Angeles where they originally played from 1946 to 1994. With this move, the second largest city in the United States will have a professional football team again for the first time in 21 years.

From the Economic Point of View

The decision, which required the approval of the other franchise owners in the National Football League, makes sense. That America’s favorite sport had no representation in the nation’s second largest market seemed backward considering that cities like Tampa and Jacksonville in Florida and Buffalo, NY did. In Los Angeles, a new $1.8 billion stadium will be built, [with a] projected completion date sometime in 2019.

The city of St. Louis was not prepared to invest in building a new stadium. At the moment, it has a fairly modern venue, but one with reduced utility without its own football team. People may find it outrageous that billionaire franchise owners can put pressure on communities merely by threatening to move their team to another city unless their (financial) demands are met. On the other hand, cities profit from having professional sports teams. The only losers in that power struggle are the fans who lose their beloved teams. But in American sports, the emotional bonds between fans and franchise owners traditionally play only a secondary role in decision making.