History of the National Football League in Los Angeles

Professional American football, especially its established top level, the National Football League (NFL), has had a long and complicated history in Los Angeles, which is the center of the second-largest media market in the United States. Los Angeles was the first city on the West Coast of the United States to host an NFL team of its own, when the former Cleveland Rams relocated to Los Angeles in 1946 and played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ("The Coliseum") from 1946 until 1979. The Rams, after moving to suburban Anaheim, California in 1980, were joined in the Los Angeles metropolitan area by the Los Angeles Raiders when that team moved into the Coliseum in 1982. A combination of a split fan base and earthquake damage to the Coliseum prompted both teams to leave Los Angeles simultaneously prior to the 1995 season: the Raiders returned to their original home of Oakland, California, while the Rams began a 21-year tenure in St. Louis, Missouri.

The two-decade span in which Los Angeles lacked an NFL team was brought on in part by the obsolescence of Los Angeles's existing stadiums, the unwillingness of the league to add expansion teams after 2002 (when the Houston Texans were founded) or relocate any other teams, and an inability to agree on a plan to build a new stadium, despite several proposals that received full regulatory approval but never landed a team willing to relocate under the developers' terms. The threat of a relocation to Los Angeles was, in that span, used as an effective bargaining chip for teams in other, smaller markets; a team could blackmail their home city into contributing more toward constructing or renovating a stadium by raising the specter of leaving for Los Angeles if their demands were not met. The league's absence from Los Angeles ended in early 2016, when the Rams received league approval to return to the area beginning at the start of the 2016 season. Currently, Los Angeles is the home of the NFL's Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, the last of whom announced their intent to relocate from its previous home in San Diego in January 2017.

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