With Raiders Headed to Vegas, The NFL has Played the New Stadium Scam to Perfection

It's official: The — Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet)March 27, 2017

NFL teams move for one reason: a new stadium. Any other reasons owners or the NFL might peddle are total bullshit. NFL teams move because there's a prettier, nicer stadium in another city that someone else is paying for and will make them more money. They're moving for the same reason you would move if another city offered to cover 75 percent of your new mansion's cost and you could keep your Airbnb earnings so long as you relocated there. Or, more specifically, the Raiders are moving to Vegas because the taxpayers will be subsidizing $750 million of the new stadium costs and the NFL isn't in the business of turning down three quarters of a billion dollars.

The Raiders are the third team in 14 months to move—the Rams and Chargers to Los Angeles being the others—which puts into perspective just how perfectly the NFL played this whole LA thing. Everybody and their extended families knew the NFL kept the LA market open as leverage for negotiations with existing NFL cities. Pony up for a new stadium with many fancy luxury boxes or we bolt to LA, was the (generally implicit) threat in every stadium negotiation.

The majority of teams got what they wanted. Since the Raiders and Rams vacated the LA market in 1994, 22 NFL teams have gotten new stadiums, almost all of them at significant taxpayer costs (the Jets and Giants of course share a stadium). The Raiders were one of the last stadium-hungry teams. By moving them to shiny new digs in Vegas and with the Los Angeles glamour palace already in construction, the NFL stadium situation will mostly be settled.

Of the NFL's permanent homes, the only ones constructed before 1995 are Soldier Field (a literal designated landmark that got a major nine-figure facelift in 2003), Lambeau Field (had a series of gradual renovations over the last two decades), Arrowhead Stadium (got a $375 million facelift in 2007), whatever they're calling Ralph Wilson Stadium now (more on that in a bit), the Superdome (renovated post-Katrina), whatever they're calling the Dolphins stadium now ($350 million renovation), and Jacksonville's EverBank Field.

Of those stadium situations, the only two that didn't recently get major like-new renovations are the Bills and Jaguars. For their part, the Jags seem to be halfway to London. And the Bills are still in Buffalo because their new owners seem refreshingly unmotivated to demand anything, much to the league's general chagrin.

So who might be the next to get a new stadium? Washington would be the likeliest, since their owner has already kicked the tires, has three different state-like entities to negotiate against each other without having to relocate markets, and is dickish enough to do it. Other than that, it's really hard to imagine any team getting a new stadium any time soon. The Bucs? Browns? After that, you're looking at stadiums built in the 2000s like Heinz and CenturyLink Fields, which are near-flawless, modern stadiums. These were the stadiums from the big 90s/2000s stadium boom the NFL negotiated so hard for in the first place.

All that hard work paid off, and everyone is happy. Except the fans, but they're used to that by now.