No Truce With Kings

The Wall Street Journal reports:

NFL Owners Approve Rams’ Return to Los Angeles

The National Football League is headed back to Los Angeles in a big way.

After two decades without a team in the nation’s second largest media market, NFL owners voted Tuesday to move the St. Louis Rams back to the city they called home for nearly 50 years. NFL owners also gave the San Diego Chargers the right to join the Rams if the two franchises can work out a deal to share the planned stadium.

The vote came after years of negotiations, land deals, stalled talks and bare-knuckled lobbying within the exclusive club that is the NFL owners group. Ultimately, the owners voted to approve a move by one of its wealthiest owners, Stan Kroenke, who controls one of the most valuable large parcels of undeveloped land in the Los Angeles region—site of the former Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood where the franchise plans to build a $2 billion stadium, and Alex Spanos, scion of the Chargers, who has owned his team for more than 30 years. […]

What great news. Now Mr. Kroenke (and the NFL owners cartel) won’t be trying to milk the city of St. Louis and the State of Missouri to build him a stadium.

A recent report about Kroenke’s unflattering comments about St. Louis as a venue for pro football excited some public resentment here. What amused me most was his remark that game attendance “has been well below the League’s average”. Maybe you should have given some thought to prices, chief, particularly given the StL Rams dismal record.

Good bye and good riddance, Mr. Kroenke. Take your Rams and go home.

What St. Louis needs is a business like one that-comes-after-TWA or that-comes-after-Google or that-comes-after-Caterpillar. Something productive, in short.

What it doesn’t need is the liability of subsidizing a wealthy person’s entertainment company.

Update

There’s more good news (says the person who couldn’t care less about pro sports).

Jaguars owner not interested in move to St. Louis

The Rams are gone. Mark Davis continues to insist he’s not interested in moving his Oakland Raiders to St. Louis.

So what about Jacksonville?

A small market that struggles to fill seats. Currently plays a game a year in London to help generate revenue. And owned by Shahid Khan. You know, the central Illinois businessman who unsuccessfully bid to purchase the Rams in 2010.

With the St. Louis market currently vacant as a result of Tuesday’s relocation vote by NFL owners, would Khan be interested in bringing his Jaguars to the Gateway City?

“I don’t see that at all, OK?” Khan said firmly.

He spoke just before midnight Tuesday in the lobby of the Houston hotel, where just a few hours earlier NFL owners decided to spurn St. Louis and let the Rams move to Los Angeles.