According to Fox Sports’ Mike Garafolo, NFL owners will meet next week and discuss selling season tickets to NFL fans in Los Angeles. As you are probably aware, there is no NFL team in L.A. for these fans to go watch with their season tickets, but who cares!
Here’s Garafolo:
The goal would be to start building a season-ticket base for the 2016 season now, rather than waiting until it’s clear which, and how many, teams will be making the move.
The league called next week’s meeting to allow interested teams to present their vision for a move to Los Angeles and fully share what they hope to establish there. In addition, the owners will hear about developments in the teams’ current markets in San Diego, Oakland, and St. Louis.
This isn’t the craziest idea in the world—there will be an NFL team in L.A. sooner rather than later, and the league knows it can sell these tickets on spec because fans will gobble up whatever Rams- or Raiders-flavored shit gets shoveled into their mouths—but this smacks of the NFL once again strong-arming St. Louis, Oakland, and San Diego. Holding up a bank account full of season ticket deposits makes the threat of L.A. that much more imminent, and would certainly increase the pressure on those cities to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars for a new stadium.