NFL club owners met Wednesday to consider relocation bids to Los Angeles by the St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers as well as hear from their current cities.
All 32 team owners will hear the latest on stadium plans in the Los Angeles area as well as offers, or the lack of them, to prevent such moves.
Rams owner Stan Kroenke plans for an 80,000-seat stadium on land he owns near Hollywood Park horse track in Inglewood at a cost of $1.86 billion while the Rams and Chargers are combining on a $1.7 billion proposal to share a stadium.
All three teams involved once called Los Angeles home, although America’s second-largest metropolitan area has not had a team to call its own since the Rams and Raiders departed in 1995.
A report in the San Diego Union-Tribune indicated Kroenke might be willing to share his planned stadium, with a second team sharing stadium construction costs but only able to earn its game-day revenue from the venue and the partner not involved in the surrounding development or any aspect of the stadium’s design.
In any case, the NFL wants an answer on relocation to Los Angeles sooner rather than later.
“We want to get something done in January,” Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said Wednesday.
He and New York Giants owner John Mara and Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt have all indicated a similar timetable. They are three of the NFL’s six owners on the Los Angeles committee.
Bob Iger, chairman and chief executive of Disney, was appointed last month as non-executive chairman by the group trying to land the Chargers and Raiders in a stadium deal.
Teams need 75 percent support, or the backing of 24 of the 32 team owners, to be approved for relocation.