In a new and entertaining book on the NFL, it’s reported that Dean Spanos surprised NFL power brokers when he chose to relocate his Chargers to greater Los Angeles; that Rams owner Stan Kroenke ignored Spanos for a week after the move was announced, and that club owners were “miffed” with Spanos for severing a 56-year relationship with San Diego despite having handed him an L.A. option.
“We should have given him a puppy,” one AFC executive says.
Spanos doesn’t come off as happy, either, in the early aftermath of the relocation,
“Now I know how Art Modell feels,” he says of the detested late owner who moved the Browns to Baltimore.
“Big Game, The NFL In Dangerous Times,” authored by New York Times Magazine writer and Patriots fan Mark Leibovich, devotes most of its 349 pages to other recent events and current topics, but Spanos gets a cream pie to the face from both Leibovich and the NFL power brokers he granted anonymity.
“He is generally well liked by his partners around the league, but no one would mistake him for a visionary or even that significant of a force. He seemed to engender greater sympathy than respect from his fellow owners, as if he were a hapless little brother. ‘Dino,’ they call him,’ ” Leibovich writes.
The spin that the anonymous NFL brokers put on Team Spanos’ relocation is that Spanos underachieved in attempts to get a San Diego stadium despite their noble efforts to empower him.
His brethren gave Spanos first dibs to join Kroenke in his privately financed Inglewood palace, though not before he would have to spend a few years in a small soccer stadium in Carson. Along with dangling an extra $100 million in NFL money toward a San Diego project — the carrot — the League handed Spanos the L.A. option as leverage (the stick) to get a deal done in San Diego.
Sympathy for Spanos, therefore, was in short supply when he invoked Modell.
Owners “were miffed at him for turning what had appeared to be a somewhat elegant solution to the L.A. problem into a towering embarrassment,” Leibovich writes.
The spin of NFL dismay with “Dino” is convenient and reported accurately, I believe, but it’s not altogether convincing.
The NFL didn’t want the Raiders in Los Angeles yet gave Raiders owner Mark Davis the option to co-habitate with Kroenke if Spanos passed on going north. So when Spanos blocked the Raiders from going to L.A., the NFL lords had reason to celebrate, even if it’s also true that they regarded “Dino” as a lightweight and felt pangs of remorse about leaving San Diego.
Kroenke wanted the Raiders as a co-tenant like he wanted a bad cold that never goes away. The Raiders, as the only Southern California franchise to win a Super Bowl, still have a strong following in L.A. Where the Chargers have no real footprint in L.A., the Raiders are real competition.
Keeping the Raiders out of L.A. also directed their owner, Mark Davis, toward Las Vegas and $750 million in free money from the state of Nevada, an unprecedented subsidy even for the powerful NFL. San Diego, for good reason, wasn’t going to kick in anything like that money to build the NFL a stadium. And though the brethren gave him favorable terms on a payment schedule, Spanos fattened their wallets by opting for L.A. because he must pay a relocation fee of $650 million.
Also, it strains logic to think the NFL expected Spanos to get a deal done in San Diego, even with the league’s help, such as it was. Houston Texans owner Bob McNair had ripped San Diego’s political leadership of the past several years, cherry-picking long-ago incidents of corruption at City Hall. Per Chargers stadium consultants Fred Maas and Mark Fabiani, when NFL officials attended a fruitless meeting in 2016 between the club and a coalition led by lame Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the NFL men pressed Faulconer and deemed him insincere about wanting to keep the team in San Diego.
It’s interesting that Spanos felt so besieged he’d claim to feel as reviled as Modell.
If he were to still feel that way, it adds some degree of weight to conjecture — which I’ve heard in NFL circles — that Spanos, with input from his three siblings, will sell the team within several years of the move into the Kroenke Dome on the grounds that the company’s value will have peaked. There’s also a theory that “Dino” will fall back in love with the NFL if the team can have a lot of success on the field. The Chargers as a team are loaded with talent. How they use that talent is another question. If you have a really fast sports car, you better damn well know how to drive it or you will surely spin out. It seems the Chargers may be experiencing just that. Plenty of power, but an inexperienced driver (head coach).
The thing about Spanos is, he has already agreed to pay a $650 million relocation fee to the NFL. Sure he may get that money back if the franchise value soars, but he never offered that kind of money to The City of San Diego. I’m sure you have heard of the term creative financing, Spanos could have easily offered that same $650 million to San Diego, then added another $250 million from the NFL, then raised $150 million more with corporate sponsorships etc. and you would have over $1 billion to build a beautiful new stadium in Mission Valley where it belongs. But what’s done is done. Your witnessing greed and selfishness big time Spanos style.
The City of San Diego lost their Chargers because of a misguided owner and a lame City Hall. No vision. Spanos could have made money off the Aztecs year after year, not to mention other events like Soccer, Motocross, even Religious events and of course Concerts. Spanos would have been the majority owner of a money-making stadium right in the middle of America’s finest city. Imagine the revenue stream year after year. I can’t write anymore about this as I may have to puke. Now you know why it is called a Fight for L.A.