Do Raiders Own L.A. Market?

When it comes to pro football, who “owns” the Los Angeles market?

That’s one of the central issues of a contentious lawsuit between the Raiders and the NFL that is slogging along in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The case ultimately may hold the key in determining whether Los Angeles gets an expansion NFL team or whether the Raiders return to town.

Filed in 1995 but nowhere near trial or settlement, it is almost certain that the legal wrangling between the Raiders and the NFL will still be going on Feb. 16, when the league is due to meet to discuss expansion.

What impact does that hold for the expansion process? It’s unclear.

The Raiders assert that they own the Los Angeles market. They played in the Coliseum from 1982-94, then returned to Oakland, their ancestral home, before the 1995 season.

Their return to Oakland relates to another of the substantial issues in the case: Did the league interfere in 1995 with a deal that would have kept the Raiders in Los Angeles, albeit in a new stadium to be built near Hollywood Park in Inglewood?

Given that the Raiders are back in Oakland, Frank Rothman, the league’s Los Angeles-based lead attorney, called the team’s claim to ownership of the L.A. market “preposterous.”

Rothman said, “What [Raider owner Al Davis] is trying to suggest is that whenever a team moves from one market to another, it retains its interest in the market it left.” He added, “It doesn’t even rise to the level of intelligent discussion.”

Joseph M. Alioto, the Raiders’ San Francisco-based lawyer, said the team is confident that the law is on its side. Go back, he said, to the antitrust cases in the 1980s that followed the Raiders’ move to Los Angeles--cases in which the Raiders prevailed.

Those cases, he said, established the proposition that moving to a new market involves the payment of an “offset” for the privilege--a complicated formula typically involving the value of an expansion team in the new city minus the value of such a team in the old city.

The Raiders made such a payment, Alioto said, in installments in 1989, 1990 and 1991.

“The fact of the matter is, we paid for it,” Alioto said, meaning the Los Angeles market.

Now, he said, the league is going to have to pay the Raiders a substantial sum if an expansion team comes to Los Angeles. Or, he said, referring to league officials, “they’re going to have to try to encourage [Davis] to come back down and play.”

And just what would it take to get Davis back to Los Angeles? Nate Holden, a Los Angeles city councilman and a consistent Raider booster, said Davis would return if the Coliseum is refurbished according to the plans put forth by developer Edward P. Roski Jr. for a New Coliseum--meaning 66,000 seats, expandable to 80,000 for Super Bowls, and a raft of luxury boxes.

Standing before a pack of reporters that he had summoned Wednesday to the Coliseum, Holden added that the Raiders want to offer ownership of about a third of the team to Southern California investors.

Afterward, Holden downplayed the possibility that Roski will land an expansion team for a New Coliseum. Similarly, he dismissed mega-agent Michael Ovitz’s prospects for a team at a new stadium and mall in Carson.

“It’s not going to happen,” Holden said of an expansion team coming to Southern California. “Nobody’s going to step up to the plate to offer a billion dollars, and that’s what’s going to be required.”

Never mind, Holden said, that the City Council voted in October not to seek the return of the Raiders--and, for that matter, Davis--to the Coliseum.

Holden, the lone dissenter in the Oct. 30 vote, insists that he sees strains of “Raider fever” all across Southern California.

“Everywhere I go,” Holden said, “I see people saying they want the Raiders back.”