LOS ANGELES—Home to an embarrassment of professional sports riches, Los Angeles has moved one step closer to securing not one, but two franchises in America’s favorite sport.
Thursday, the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders produced a joint proposal to relocate their teams to a shared stadium in Carson, California.
The two teams, fierce AFC West rivals, released the proposal in a statement. In the statement, the franchises expressed a desire to continue working within their home markets to find a solution to a shared necessity for a new stadium.
Both the Oakland Coliseum and Qualcomm Stadium are behind the standard set by newer state-of-the art facilities such as New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, home to the Giants and Jets.
If the proposal were to succeed, the Chargers and Raiders would share a home field much in the same way the New York Jets and Giants share MetLife Stadium. However, one unprecedented aspect of the arrangement is the fact that the teams are division rivals that face each other twice per season.
In the case of the Jets and Giants, the teams play in separate conferences, meeting only once every four seasons.
In Thursday night’s statement, the teams said: “We are pursuing this stadium option in Carson for one straightforward reason: If we cannot find a permanent solution in our home markets, we have no alternative but to preserve other options to guarantee the future economic viability of our franchises.”
This proposal is the second concerning the rebirth of NFL football in Los Angeles. St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke has suggested a joint venture in which an 80,000 seat stadium, in addition to other amenities, would be placed in Inglewood, California.
