Shameless!

The Oakland Raiders decided to move out of Oakland to Las Vegas last week. It was a sad day in the Bay Area. It was a day the locals were hoping will never come though it always seemed imminent. The Oakland stadium issue and the relocation threat, especially the LA story, has been hanging over the Raiders’ head for years, maybe even a decade. But it still feels like this relocation came quick and fast in somewhat of an unexpected way. That’s because the Raiders didn’t seem to have the money or the clout with the NFL to make a move happen. Cities like LA couldn’t muster any realistic plan for years and the NFL didn’t seem to want the Raiders back in LA anyways. As bad as the stadium and the financial realities were at Oakland, the fans were still hoping the Raiders are stuck there by default. And when Las Vegas came calling, it looked like an unrealistic negotiation trick at first if not a circus act since sports leagues have religiously avoided Vegas. And then the Vegas plan hit a couple of snags as well. But they eventually came up with the money and the requisite NFL vote to move them happened fairly quickly after that. Oakland is understandably shocked and upset.

The real culprit here might be the NHL. They seem to have opened the flood gates as far as putting a pro franchise in Vegas goes and they made it infinitely easier for the NFL to follow suit. I do think the holier than thou, pretentious snobs in the NFL might have hesitated to go to Vegas if they were the first sports franchise moving there. Of course, everything has a price and when Vegas came up with $750 million, NFL owner’s jaws and probably their draws dropped and they sold their soul in a minute. The Raider are expected to still play in Oakland for 2 or 3 more years since this thing came so quick and there is no landing spot for them in Vegas until the new stadium gets built. Unlike the Rams or the Chargers, the Raiders get to play in the same old city for better or for worse until the new behemoth gets built in Vegas.

The net-net of this is, 3 NFL teams have moved geographies in about a year or so. What kind of a league is this? The sad part is, NFL is neither apologetic nor ashamed about any of this. Sports teams are civic entities. A huge part of their customers and supporters are spending money on them because they belong to Oakland or Boston or Phoenix in their eyes. It’s not just another business along the lines of a Google or a Pepsi. People don’t search on Google because it is based out of Mountain View and I don’t even know where Pepsi is headquartered. Whereas everybody associate the Raiders with Oakland, Cowboys with Dallas etc. This is why billionaire owners of these teams shamelessly go to the city asking for money in the first place. Google and Pepsi are not asking for public funding for building their cubicles and conference rooms. Sure, cities do lure the corporations sometimes with tax breaks, cheap land, etc. for the jobs, but it’s only sports team that ask for straight cash (as Randy Moss would put it) from their host governments to run their core business. 

So, what are you, NFL? Are you a civic entity or a business? You have no right to ask for money from Vegas or Oakland or anybody else if you are a pure business. If you have the gall to ask for hundreds of millions of dollars from a city, have some decency and morality and show some concern for the local fan-base, your primary paying customer who have supported you for decades! You can’t have it both ways. And don’t even try to turn the argument around and say if the teams are a civic entity, cities like Oakland must pay public money. They don’t have to because the city will and can still will go over and above and help its sports team, the civic entity, in many ways. They can give you some land, invest in some infrastructure, and public transportation around the stadium etc. The idea of public funding to the tune of 100’s of millions of dollars for a sport stadium is a big no-no and such an outdated idea. Out of the many things you have to love about California, the fact that it’s the hardest state to get public money for sports stadiums is a true badge of honor. Even a sleepy suburb like Santa Clara barely voted to fund the stadium for the Niners, an incredibly beloved and popular team in the area. And look how that’s working out. There are all kinds of challenges and controversies in the city as they are still figuring out some of the financial details many years since the shovel hit the ground.

Asking for public funding and black-mailing the hometown is pure greed on the part of these billionaire businesses. And of course, who is going to stop now if cities like Vegas are stupid enough to line up and scratch a 750 mill check. Vegas has so many tourists and hotels that they can generate a lot of money by charging us tourists for this stadium grant. At the end of the day, we are going to be paying for it when we travel to Vegas. The whole thing is a racket and it made a little more sense when mom and pop were running the sports team in a prosperous America and didn’t have much money to refurbish an old, dilapidated home stadium. It doesn’t make any sense in today’s economic climate in our country to donate tax dollars to a 10+ billion dollar sports league just so that they could build better and newer stadiums every 3 months to generate more millions for themselves.

The fact that our richest and also the greediest sports league, the NFL, has uprooted 3 teams in a year from their hometowns and treated their paying customers like garbage tells you all you need to know about the National Football League. They should be ashamed of themselves if they have even a shred of integrity, which of course they don’t. Only the Dolphins owner seems to get it as he was the lone dissenting vote against the Raiders’ move. The other leagues are no saints, but at least the NBA made sure the New Orleans franchise didn’t ditch that town after hurricane Katrina. Maybe NFL was a little nice to New Orleans too, but NBA I thought was also very dignified and decent in the way it handed the Sacramento Kings. At one point, they were all but gone to Seattle, but the stakeholders worked some magic to pull it back.

NFL is apparently not into such feel-good stories. The only story they feel good about is going to the bank and cashing the checks. I like Draymond Green’s idea suggesting the fans should boycott the Raiders in Oakland. I total agree, but like my cousin pointed out, it’s just April and we are all already waiting for the first NFL Sunday. He says nobody is boycotting anything and I agree with that take too. NFL is king right now, but not for long if they continue in this arc. NBA is coming hard and fast! All of this reckless greed will catchup to the NFL sooner or later. But sports today, unfortunately, is the last surviving legal monopoly in our economy. They can and often do get away with murder and the Oakland Raiders are the latest casualty. On the bright side, at least the Oakland Athletics seem serious about staying in Oakland and there is new momentum on their stadium front since the Raiders news broke. The city might even pitch in. At least baseball gives the city 81 dates of jobs and beer sales as opposed to the measly 8 dates that the NFL brings to a 2 billion-dollar stadium.