So the Rams are leaving St. Louis and moving to Inglewood to return professional football to Los Angeles. The stadium they're building, though, can accommodate two teams perfectly equally—and two teams in LA means more money for the NFL, so the league has been hoping to get two teams in LA. The Inglewood/Rams plan was up against a plan that would've done that in one easy step—the Chargers and Raiders proposed a joint project in the LA suburb of Carson—but ultimately the NFL owners tasked with deciding on the move preferred the Inglewood plan. They still want that second team, though, so they also gave the San Diego Chargers a one-year option to decide if they want to move in with the Rams. And last month, Rams owner Stan Kroenke offered a 50/50 split on his stadium to a hypothetical second team.
But Chargers owner Dean Spanos didn't seem into it. He wrote in a letter to the NFL's Los Angeles committee that "Nothing in Stan's letter gives me any reason to reconsider my partnership with (Raiders owner) Mark Davis and our chosen stadium site." Now that that partnership has been officially killed off, he might be feeling differently, but he also has a new enticement to keep his team in San Diego: the NFL is giving a $100-million consolation prize to both the Chargers and Raiders if they stay in place (and San Diego, unlike Oakland, has been offering all kinds of goodies to the Chargers if they stay in town). Spanos has so far only said "I will be working over the next several weeks to explore these options that we have now created for ourselves to determine the best path forward for the Chargers."
So the Chargers actually have some incentives not to move, and if they make that choice, or let their year go by, that triggers a one-year option for the Raiders to move to Los Angeles, according to NFL.com. Oakland hasn't seemed very interested at all in giving the Raiders a shiny, expensive new stadium with their public money, as so many other teams have been able to pull out of their hometowns with the threat of a move, so they might find that Inglewood campus pretty attractive.
· Rams to relocate to L.A.; Chargers first option to join [NFL.com]
· Proposal Emerges For Chargers and Rams to Share New NFL Stadium in Inglewood [Curbed LA]
· Take a Good Look Around Los Angeles's Future NFL Stadium [Curbed LA]