Amid the sound and fury of the Brian Flores lawsuit, you may have forgotten that the Super Bowl kicks off on Sunday at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium. As challenging as it is to pick a winner between the Cincinnati Bengals and the hometown Rams – barely a field-goal favourite, by Vegas’ reckoning – one team has already lost: the Chargers.
You remember the Chargers. They’re the other NFL team that calls Los Angeles home, the one with the cute yellow lightning bolt on the sides of their helmets. Of course for 55 years they were the San Diego Chargers, the pro sports standard bearer for a sleepy SoCal idyll famous for sun and fun (they actually started life in LA before heading south in 1961 after a single season). In San Diego, they were one of the league’s heritage teams, in that group of pioneering AFL franchises with the Raiders and the Chiefs. Among other things, the Chargers were the team where Al Davis got started in pro football and where the vertical passing game was laboratory tested and perfected. They played at Jack Murphy Stadium, an architectural marvel that played host to three Super Bowls and two World Series – handling one of each in 1998.
For a time they seemed an ideally situated franchise – beloved by locals, nationally respected and synonymous with a town any football fan would kill to visit in December or January – and opposing fans from Chicago or Cleveland were famous for taking over the Murph. As someone who mainly attended games there as a member of the working press, the real treat was being able to watch the action from a lower bowl, outdoor press box. I can think of few better ways to spend a 72-degree fall Sunday.
Of course the picture in San Diego was not all sunny. The Chargers fanbase could be fickle (I was too when I lived in San Diego). The city, while nationally renowned, was a small market relative to California’s other NFL towns. And after the turn of the century the Murph was a dilapidated relic that couldn’t compete with JerryWorld, University of Phoenix Stadium and other football Taj Mahals. Seeing the writing crumbling from his stadium walls Dean Spanos, the Chargers’ longtime steward, did that thing all bajillionaires sports owners do when they feel the market has dealt them a bad hand; he threatened to move to Las Vegas or Oakland or Timbuktu unless the city built him a new stadium. And when his corporate welfare stickup was rebuffed, because San Diegans are awesome, Spanos took his ball and went north on I-5 to LA, leaving the town with a giant hole where a civic institution used to be.
Talk about a copycat league. The Chargers didn’t just follow the Rams (formerly of St Louis) to the City of Angels; they’re little better than dollar-per-year subletters at SoFi Stadium, the pet project of Walmart consort and Rams owner Stan Kroenke. Before moving into SoFi in 2020, the Chargers played inside a black box MLS stadium in Carson, which – culturally and sometimes with traffic – is about as far from Hollywood as Dubuque. And while they’re not the only NFL teams to share a stadium – New York’s teams share one in New Jersey – the Giants and Jets at least are an unbroken tradition in the TriState. The Rams and Chargers – who started in LA in 1946 and 1960, respectively – had been gone too long for locals to remember why they should care about them in the first place. In the interregnum the Raiders, Dallas Cowboys and the USC Trojans became LA’s football teams.
If there’s anything LA respects, it’s a winner. So it figures that now that the Rams are playing in their second Super Bowl in three years, and on their home field to boot, the Chargers barely register. In a recent survey designed to weed out the “saddest” NFL fans, or those “most emotionally upset” by wins and losses, the Chargers ranked dead last – which provides some sense of the depth of apathy here. Attendance is another quality indicator, and before the move to SoFi – again, the Rams’ house – the Chargers came in dead last through the turnstiles, too. And while LA Chargers crowds have picked up since they moved into SoFi, the vaccines rolled out and the superb young quarterback Justin Herbert came to town, at the end of the day, most of that lucre flows to Kroenke’s Rams.
It didn’t have to be this way. Besides the best town and loyal fans, the San Diego Chargers had another thing going for them. They were less than 20 miles away from Mexico, the closest NFL team besides the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills to an international border. Had Spanos been thinking ahead, he could’ve owned the Mexican market decades before the Cowboys, Raiders and 49ers set up shop. While the league was establishing games in London as a thing, it was also drawing similarly sized crowds for kickoffs in Mexico City. Spanos could have expanded his market to include an entire country, encroached deeper into Latin America and used those riches to build the stadium of his dreams. Given the NFL’s world-conquering ambitions and its efforts to ingratiate itself with the Latin community, leave no doubt: this is a massive fail.
The Chargers could have been exemplars – first to take off outside the US, leading the NFL’s foreign expansion, a more valuable franchise than perhaps even the Cowboys. Instead, they’re a second-class team in an A-list town. Only a bajillionaire detached from reality could see this as winning.
