If you are Los Angeles, you can let the team(s) walk until someone finally decides to pony up the building money.
If you are Jacksonville, and have no other sports teams, the team can threaten to move credibly, and the city doesn’t want to lose an NFL franchise.
If you have a dedicated fan base with more than half-a-century of team history where the city is part of the team’s identity, the bluff can be called. The Raiders can move, the Cowboys have to stay near Dallas.
Just because the owners make money, doesn’t mean they don’t want to make more. Just because a municipality/state spends money, doesn’t mean that agents don’t want to spend more if the alternative is losing an NFL team.
Then we could get into why cities want to subsidize these sports teams.
Is there really that much Prestige or civic pride involved in having a team in major league baseball , NFL football, NBA basketball , or NHL hockey?
I know the boosters always say that a new stadium will generate Economic Development, and so these projects are a net benefit to the city. Has this ever happened anywhere?
That’s right, living here in Jacksonville, there is some grumbling over the stadium renovation, especially with a 2-billion-dollar price tag.
Shad Khan is supposedly putting up 1 billion of his own money as part of the deal, we have a crazy female liberal mayor, but we also have only one professional team and if they were ever to leave, we would have no chance of getting another one.
Added to that, there has been millions of dollars pledged to restore and develop the area around the stadium by Shad Khan, if the stadium deal were to fall thru, all that development would likely fall thru as well.
Regardless of the grumbling I don’t think any mayor of Jacksonville would want to be known as the mayor who ran off the NFL team.