So long, San Diego
Hailey Gajadhar, SPORTS COLUMNIST
I’m sorry San Diego, the loss of the Chargers rocked me to my core. Does Los Angeles really need another National Football League team? Where did this come from?
Let’s look at the facts.
The Chargers called San Diego home for 56 years. Sure, they came from Los Angeles in the first place in 1961, but after 56 years, the Chargers were a part of San Diego and vice versa.
Los Angeles was without a team from 1995 until 2015. That’s 20 years. I don’t know about you, but that’s almost my entire life, so that seems like a pretty long time to me.
I’m not saying that I don’t think Los Angeles deserves a team. They do. They have a huge market with people who have a lot of money to throw away. However, can they handle two teams? They just got the Rams back. Their entire population probably cheers for the Rams now. And the Chargers are expected to go in there and steal the hearts of millions?
That’s a lot to ask of a team.
At the end of the day, we can’t ignore the money. My facts so far have been entirely passion driven. As a Winnipeg Jets fan, I hate to see a team leave a city that loves it. But the ultimate deciding factor of the move was money to build a new stadium, and the Chargers just couldn’t come up with it.
In an interview on “The Herd” with host Colin Cowherd, Roger Goodell said, “We’re all disappointed. We all worked very, very hard with local officials, with the Chargers and [owners of the Chargers] the Spanos family, with all of our clubs, and we did some unprecedented things to try to keep the Chargers in San Diego, which was our first priority.”
After some digging, I found the “unprecedented” thing Goodell mentioned was an offer of 300 million dollars toward a new stadium in San Diego. It’s not completely out of the ordinary that the NFL offered money to help build a new stadium for a team. In fact, they usually give $200 million to help new facilities come to life.
New stadiums cost far more, however. San Diego would have needed to come up with at least $500 million to even consider building a new stadium. The stadium that was most recently built is the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minnesota, which cost $1.13 billion and had an initial budget of $975 million.
It sucks that the Chargers had to move away from diehard fans because of money—and the new Los Angeles Chargers logo sucks too.
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Hailey is a self-proclaimed champion heavyweight boxer.
Coming in at 5’1”, she has the reach of a 12-year-old boy and an opinion that won’t quit.
Having never been in a fight, she remains undefeated.
Follow her on Twitter @HGaj
