* Has St Louis been adversely affected by Ferguson and related issues? I understand St Louis County is where the people with means have moved, and St Louis city is where the stadium is. Is the city that bad? Would they have had a better chance if they had a stadium in the suburbs?
* St Louis City is a rust belt-style city that has been in decline for a long time now. But thanks to 1990s reductions in crime there had been a bit of gentrification.
After Mike Brown and the resulting protests, there was a massive crime wave in St Louis that couldn’t have been good for an NFL franchise or any business.
* The NFL as a league, like every other professional North American sports league, is probably a natural monopoly. The league, in turn, divies up territories for individual franchises the same way that McDonalds does, except the barriers to entry are, shall we say, a tad bit higher. It’s not all that unusual or outrageous.
The fact that so many of us (including me) are drawn to it and will spend a significant chunk of our disposable income on following those teams is a much more interesting or perhaps depressing phenomenon, depending on your point of view. As Jerry Seinfeld said, we’re all just rooting for the laundry.
* A commenter somewhere on the internet suggested that the value of the Rams will jump from $1.5 billion to $4.5 billion when they become a Los Angeles team.
* St. Louis County, depending on which parts of it, is either very nice but peaked in population or blackening and declining. The reason I don’t think a suburban stadium would have made the difference is that a suburban St. Louis stadium would still have been in the St. Louis area. Remember when Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion for the “other” NBA franchise in Los Angeles, when it was valued at $430 million before hand, this both reset the scale vastly upward in favor of pro sports franchises (which is why I think the other owners arranged the hit on Donald Sterling), but it also showed how much a pro sports franchise in Los Angeles is worth. This really got Kroenke dreaming. The Los Angeles Rams are now instantly worth way way way way more than the St. Louis Rams ever could have been.
* The NFL television revenue sharing was aimed at two teams, the SF 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys. That and the salary cap sufficiently hobbled them to where we regularly lose to Arizona and Seattle now. Ugh.
