Cynics have long claimed that the NFL isn't interested in actually bringing a football team to LA--they're just interested in threatening to bring a football team to LA. When the threat looks real, whiny billionaire team owners can use it to extract shiny new taxpayer-funded stadiums out of their home cities, and the furor quiets down another season. AEG's big Downtown stadium plan, Farmers Field, was perfect for this. Well, until the stadium got approved and it turned out that all those teams grumbling about an LA move weren't so interested after all, and the NFL turned up its nose, and the plan died (for now anyway, these things never seem to stay dead). But without even a plan for a stadium plan, the "build me a stadium or we're moving to LA" threat must be looking pretty hollow. Which is perhaps why team owners have been sniffing around everyone's favorite dead NFL stadium plan from the nineties: Hollywood Park. The soon-to-be-former racetrack is slated to be turned into a massive hotel/casino/residential/commercial megadevelopment, but why not just scrap that and build a stadium instead!?
According to National Football Post, two teams have asked Hollywood Park owner Terry Fancher if he'd either sell them the site or join them on a stadium deal. They say Fancher would want at least $500 million for Hollywood Park to recoup what he's put into it, and isn't the football-team-owning type. So this is never going to happen. Next stop on the NFL merry-go-round: City of Industry?
· Exclusive: Hollywood Park attracts interest from NFL again [NFP]
· Hollywood Park Archives [Curbed LA]
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