When the Raiders host the Broncos on Monday night, it could be the last NFL football game we ever see played in Oakland.
“Could,” because the team may still return to the Coliseum in 2019. The Raiders’ new stadium in Las Vegas is expected to open in 2020, leaving the organization scrambling to find a sublet. In theory, the city of Oakland could take the Raiders back for one more season at a considerable rent hike. But the two sides do look a bit like feuding roommates at the moment, including the urge to spite each other before never seeing each other again. Oakland is suing the Raiders “to compensate Oakland for the damages the defendants’ unlawful actions have caused.” The Raiders are trying to keep their shit together with duct tape.
Lost in yet another example of an NFL team sticking a city with a tab is that an era is ending. Oakland has had the Raiders for the last 23 years. A lot happened in that time, including winning football seasons on occasion and the cultivation of a fanbase garbed like Bike Satan that seemed to feed off the team’s chaos instead of get worn down by it like the sane and rotten rest of us would have.
The Oakland Raiders may not have done much right in their existence, but they did a lot interestingly. It’s hard to believe that Christmas Eve may be the last time we ever see them in their element. Worse is what their move to Vegas portends for the rest of the league.
Why is this happening?
The Raiders’ efforts to get a new stadium began perhaps in earnest in 2009 when the team announced that its lease with the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority would end after the 2012 season. There were lots of ideas about what the team could do — proposals around Oakland, but also ideas of moving in with the 49ers, going to San Antonio, or moving back to Los Angeles — that all fell through for no reason bigger than the Raiders didn’t have very much money. They couldn’t convince Oakland or any other municipality that they were worth spending money for.
In March 2017, the NFL announced that it had approved the Raiders’ relocation to Las Vegas. The Raiders got a sweet deal — their projected $1.8 billion new dome stadium will be built with $750 million in public funding, despite the fact that claims of local economic stimulus are almost always vastly overblown.
Should I feel bad for the Raiders?
Nah. Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf pushed back at late owner Al Davis and current owner Mark Davis at every turn because new stadiums and sports teams are largely a bad deal for cities. Via a story I published in 2015:
Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, found in 1997 that pro teams, on average, account for just 0.2 percent of a city’s total employment. Charles Euchner, author of Playing the Field: Why sports teams move and cities fight to keep them, and Alex Fynn, a British author who has written extensively about Arsenal, separately determined that a pro sports team provides roughly the same economic benefit to a community as a large supermarket. In the 1990s, Fynn found that Premier League soccer clubs averaged less revenue than each of Tesco’s 20 largest stores.
Oakland has had a better relationship with the Athletics, whose latest ballpark renderings look really promising.
What’s going to happen Monday?
If it’s anything like the Chargers’ goodbye Qualcomm Stadium in 2015, things could get emotional.
Fans and players are collateral in relocation battles. Fans are willing emotional hostages, giving up control of their feelings to teams that will almost always disappoint them. Players are contractual hostages. Sure, they make a fair bit of money, but they also have a dangerous job that often requires them to move and completely remake their lives every few years when they’re cut, traded, or relocated along with the franchise.
That Sunday in San Diego, players and fans alike embraced each other in a powerful post-game scene. Philip Rivers visited with fans and fought back tears as he walked off the field. Eric Weddle was signing autographs well after many players had hit the showers, and laid down at midfield for a long time picking grass. Rivers acknowledged that the moment was special:
The fans in San Diego, oft-criticized for being quiet, were heartbroken.
It’s easy to take players and fanbases for granted when they are attached to bad teams. The two have a close, personal relationship, however, and have much more emotional stake in their teams and cities than those entities could possibly know.
The 2018 Raiders are similar to the 2015 Chargers in quality — 3-11 overall, whereas the Chargers had to win that Week 17 bout against the Dolphins to finish 4-12 — and by consensus have a more rabid fanbase. Expect an outpouring like only the Black Hole could possibly engineer.
Didn’t the Chargers play in San Diego again in 2016?
Oh yeah. And it was awkward. Fans booed.
That’s the other thing: You only get to say goodbye once.
So there’s no going back?
Yep. Sure, teams move all the time, and sometimes back to cities they used to live in as Raiders fans know. But fans are better off cutting out any hope of their team returning. Teams certainly go to great lengths to convince fans that they never really mattered, even after demanding decades of emotional and financial investment.
Indeed, the fact that the Raiders are going to Las Vegas at all is an admission that a passionate fanbase isn’t really a priority for NFL teams any more. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was one of the primary motivators of the Raiders’ move to Vegas because of its earning potential in a city that peddles cartoon luxury. Meanwhile, the Rams’ and Chargers’ new stadium being built in Inglewood has been compared to an NFL version of Disney World, stuffed with luxury box seats for an exorbitant price just 20 minutes from LAX.
None of these places are being built with the dedicated, recurring fan in mind. Doing so would also require trying to put a quality product on the field, and teams don’t have much incentive to be good any more, thanks to revenue sharing and a whopping TV deal.
Monday night may only be a wave goodbye to Oakland. Fans will not only be waving goodbye to the Raiders on Monday, but to the idea that NFL teams have any reason to care about fans at all.
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