Suburbs Next for NFL? : Pro football: With deadline approaching, former Riordan appointee says it’s time for L.A. to walk away.

After a day of meetings in Los Angeles--and maybe the NFL’s last visit considering a Sept. 15 deadline to produce an acceptable stadium plan--it appears the league has shifted its attention to Hollywood Park and the city of Carson in a last-minute effort to determine the feasibility of completing a stadium deal in the next year, thereby not immediately awarding Houston an expansion franchise.

Fred Rosen, involved in the very first meetings with the NFL four years ago as Mayor Richard Riordan’s appointed chairman of Football LA, said Wednesday maybe it’s time to stop playing the game.

“In business, if you can’t get to the end of a deal, it’s time to say goodbye,” said Rosen, the former president and CEO of Ticketmaster. “I’m disappointed. This is a good thing for the city, but at the same time being a businessman, the only way to make an intelligent deal is to leave the table when it’s not an intelligent deal.

“All long-term good deals are win-win for both sides. It’s a matter of compromise, but right now the league has it stacked 49-3 in its favor. That’s not a fair game. If the league doesn’t understand the city of Los Angeles and who we are, then we have to walk.”

The NFL continues to listen to financial proposals from proponents for the Coliseum, but its frustration with Los Angeles politics looks as if it has sent them shopping in the suburbs, where there is the promise of public money.

The league’s expansion committee will meet in Washington on Sept. 9 to hear the front office’s report on its L.A. visit, and then after a telephone polling of owners after the Sept. 15th deadline, the league is expected to drop L.A.’s exclusive hold on the league’s expansion opportunity.

At the same time it is not expected to award Houston the expansion team, leaving room for further negotiations by interested parties in the Los Angeles area.

“I think the NFL feels it’s in a very strong bargaining position and can get more from L.A.,” said Rosen, now investigating other enterprises after his time with Ticketmaster. “That’s why L.A. might have to say goodbye until the league comes to its senses. Other cities will give whatever it takes to be defined by the presence of a pro football team. This city is defined by its multi-interests. If people had a football team to see, they’d go. But L.A. doesn’t need it to define itself, and the league doesn’t understand that.”

After the departure of the Rams and the Raiders before the 1995 season, some fans expected the NFL to immediately have another team playing in the Los Angeles market within a year or two.

Rosen, who allowed Football LA to whither shortly after it was formed because the league considered it powerless, predicted from the outset that L.A. was in for a marathon rather than a sprint in its pursuit of a football team.

“If you were a realist today, unless the league changes its position, the odds of seeing football in the near future here are slim to none,” Rosen said. “It’s the classic Hollywood story--everybody loses.

“And for those teams that think they are going to use L.A. as leverage to muscle a better deal in their own city, no way. That’s going to be a five-to-10-year headache for the NFL, because nobody here will pay any attention to being leveraged.

“And for anyone who thinks they can back up trucks in the middle of the night and bring their team, they might as well stay home and save their gas. This city is too sophisticated to take someone else’s loser. Unless you have local ownership with local commitment to the city, anybody who moves here will fail.”

Rosen, who was not in favor of placing a team in the Coliseum when he signed on with Football LA, changed his opinion after the Cathedral, Disney Hall and Staples Center projects changed the outlook for the downtown area.

“You know, the city behaved as I expected it would throughout these football negotiations,” Rosen said. “They always assumed it was a private enterprise and nothing changed.

“It was my belief in the beginning that the league would try to understand the city and understand that the city could not be influenced by what other cities had done for the NFL. If there’s any disappointment, it’s the league failed to learn this about L.A.”

The NFL has never been specific with Los Angeles-area bidders for a football team in what it will take to win league approval, and Rosen said it continues to frustrate those involved.

“Now the reason we don’t have a deal, as I understand it, is parking garages,” Rosen said. “The league wanted a good owner and good stadium, and today you have Eli Broad and Ed Roski, two of this city’s leading citizens, who have the financial wherewithal to make the Coliseum a first-class facility.

“What’s interesting to me, is that’s still not enough for the NFL.”

And so maybe that’s it, a few more committee meetings, another owners meeting on Oct. 6, and then again on Nov. 2-3.

“No, I don’t think it’s ever going to be over,” Rosen said. “Not as long as this city’s marketplace sits open without a football team. It may be temporarily suspended, but never over.”