The Economist on why L.A. has no football team:

(John Vrooman, a sports economist at Vanderbilt University) points out that the league (the NFL – ed.) likes to leave one prominent city without a football franchise, “like an empty seat in musical chairs”, so that teams in other cities can threaten to move if they do not get their way. This invariably prompts state and local governments to contribute public money to help teams that replace old stadiums with new ones. Los Angeles residents have been scratching their heads about why the country’s second-largest city has had no football team since 1994. But the NFL has made far more money from new stadiums that have been built using Los Angeles as a threat, says Mr Vrooman, than it could have made by actually putting a team there.

So don’t be surprised if Mayor Villaraigosa comes back from the NFL’s Dallas meetings empty-handed …

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 3:21 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.