While one of the two Los Angeles football teams is heading to the Super Bowl, which will be played in two weeks in their home stadium, the other missed the playoffs by mere seconds. The team that just missed, the Chargers, have their roots not in Los Angeles, but another Southern California city.
Famed though fictional San Diego journalist Ron Burgundy was known for his evening television broadcast sign-off, “Stay classy, San Diego.” In an increasingly litigious world, this might be good counsel for the city as they consider a fight against the now Los Angeles Chargers.
Last week, former San Diego City Attorney, Michael Aguirre told the San Diego Union-Tribune that if the city doesn’t decide by the end of this week to move forward with a lawsuit against the Chargers, he will.
Teams leave cities all the time. The history of the NFL shows a mind-numbing number of moves and reimagining of franchise identities. Some moves have caused a lot more friction than others.
Many of us remember the Colts’ middle of the night escape from Baltimore. Over a dozen massive trucks were sent to the Colts’ Baltimore facility in the middle of the night with not even the drivers told the final destination until the next day. Told to head northwest, the most famous and infamous sports team move ever was heading to Indianapolis and setting chaos in motion across these cities and the NFL.
But that was almost 40 years ago. The NFL is a very different league today and we live in far more litigious times. Today, what will certainly be the catalyst for a lawsuit, if it actually happens, is St. Louis’s massive win in December against the now (once again, to be more precise) Los Angeles Rams.
What is really interesting is that St. Louis’s $790 million victory is more than the franchise was worth when it moved to St. Louis from Los Angeles in 1995. Let that sink in for a bit because we can be sure the San Diego City Council already has.
This win was also not lost on Aguirre, who told the Union-Tribune that he’s relying on the St. Louis result as the foundation for San Diego’s case:
“There is established legal precedent for the city of San Diego to recover taxpayer losses from the NFL and the Chargers, as was done under similar circumstances by the city of St. Louis and the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority.”
What we always have when a team leaves a city is an emotionally-charged situation. Fans justifiably feel that something important was taken away from them and the city usually looks at every possible angle to determine whether all or part of the move can be challenged. But as John Lawlor, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, points out, when we take emotion out of these team-former city conflicts, we are left with fundamental legal issues:
“These are, at their core, contractual issues. Professional sports teams lock into a variety of contracts with the cities. When the team leaves without giving legally adequate notice on each of these agreements, the city can sustain losses that might be able to be recovered in a lawsuit.”
Ultimately, the city of San Diego should file suit and not leave it to Aguirre. Even for the most skeptical member of city council, this lawsuit is basically like going to a casino — it is definitely a gamble but there’s a very large prize that you actually have a reasonable chance to win.
The Chargers have been part of the fabric of San Diego for many, many years. For old-school football fans such as your author, “Los Angeles Chargers” still doesn’t sound right and probably never will. If the city feels that there has been breach of legal obligations from the NFL or the team owners in moving their franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles, even a relatively expensive case to litigate such as this could be worth it.
The team may decide to settle with the city for an exponential amount compared to what they would invest in this case. Aside from the relatively few people in the city who would see this as a bad look for San Diego — see “not classy” — there is a lot of good that a couple hundred million dollars or so could do for the city.
Today, the Los Angeles Chargers are worth $3 billion. While a billion less than the NFC champion Rams, with whom they share the city and divide the huge fan base, that’s a massive amount of money and probably too tempting a target for San Diego’s city government to resist. One way or another, this issue should begin to move forward this week, as the city now has a more firm timeline, given Aguirre’s promise.
So while one Los Angeles team will prepare over the next two weeks to play for a Super Bowl trophy, the other may be spending that time with their lawyers working on a very different type of defense.
Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief legal analyst for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in CBS News, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, and many other leading publications.