NFL approves Rams to LA, Chargers option to join

Kroenke was part of the ownership team that got the Rams to move to St. Louis from Los Angeles following the 1994 season.

The St. Louis Rams are no more, with a team that has moved many times in its history hitting the road again after about 20 years in the city.

Dean Spanos, the chairman of the Chargers board, said in a statement that he would “be working over the next several weeks to explore the options that we have now created for ourselves to determine the best path forward for the Chargers”.

Donald Miralle/Getty ImagesThe NFL owners voted on Tuesday night to approve the move of the Rams to Los Angeles, ending a 21-year drought for the NFL in the second-largest television market.

The return picked up steam last January, when Kroenke bought a parcel of land in Inglewood and signaled his intentions to move, spurning the subsequent promise of a new riverfront stadium in St. Louis worth almost $1 billion to stay. The Rams are expected to return to the Los Angeles Coliseum as a temporary home until the new stadium is complete. However, they won’t move into their new Ingewood home until the 2019 National Football League season.

The Chargers had partnered with the Oakland Raiders in a proposed stadium deal in Carson, another L.A. suburb.

The Oakland Raiders are uncertain which city they will call home in 2016 after the failure of their bid to move back to Los Angeles, owner Mark Davis said on Tuesday.

“As an owner, to be able to appeal to our fans, we have to have a first-class stadium”, Kroenke said.

As Davis told reporters in Houston after the announcement, he has no existing lease with Oakland and doesn’t know where the team will play in 2016.

St. Louis had a plan for an open-air, $1.1 billion stadium along the Mississippi River north of the Gateway Arch to replace the Edward Jones Dome.

Not sure how or why those recommendations would have been suggested when Rams owner Stan Kroenke had already purchased land for his Inglewood site. We understand the emotions of our fans. The long-running stadium saga turned nasty in the previous year as Fabiani fiercely opposed Faulconer’s proposals to keep the team in San Diego.

“It is more than just a stadium”, said Roger Goddell announcing the news tonight, “It’s a project, an entertainment complex, that we believe will be responsive to the kinds of things we need to be successful with our fans in the Los Angeles market”. “The facility will be absolutely extraordinary in the Los Angeles market”. Then they headed down the road to Anaheim, CA and then just before the 1995 NFl season, they moved to St. Louis. The other proposal put under consideration by the owners made by the Raiders and Chargers to relocate from Oakland and San Diego to Carson, California was rejected.

But the committee’s two-team recommendation didn’t have much support with the league’s 32 owners, who met in Houston to decide the matter.

The Raiders are another team that ended up leaving Los Angeles in the mid-’90s.