NFL’s New Playbook Has Role for L.A.

Like a wandering husband begging to be let back in the house, the National Football League finds itself wooing Los Angeles.

Once standoffish and demanding that the city put up a bunch of money to attract one of its teams, the league suddenly is willing to help finance a stadium to get back into Tinseltown.

So what changed?

The answer, plain and simple, is economic reality.

“Los Angeles is worth more to the NFL than an NFL team is worth to Los Angeles,” explains Bruce Johnson, a sports economist at Centre College in Danville, Ky.

Television is a big part of the equation. As for all sports, TV ratings for NFL games have been declining -- about 12% since 1995, despite a very slight uptick last year. And though Los Angeles metropolitan-area viewers watch numerous football telecasts, the country’s second-largest TV market has not been delivering audiences up to its vast potential.

That’s a real problem for league Commissioner Paul Tagliabue as he begins the bare-knuckles process of negotiating new agreements next year with broadcasters that apparently have lost money on their existing contracts. Clearly, Tagliabue needs to have a team at least scheduled to play in L.A. because TV and cable system operators are demanding it.

Without L.A. in his pocket, he lacks a lot of leverage at the bargaining table he could otherwise have.

The NFL’s existing TV and cable accord, which runs through 2006, provides each of its 32 teams with close to $80 million a year in revenue. And a deal last year with Hughes Electronics Corp.’s DirecTV satellite service hands each team an additional $10 million annually, says Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College.

But DirecTV was forced to bid high in the face of competition from EchoStar Communications Corp. and the cable industry, and sources say it isn’t a profitable arrangement. The satellite service may well regret the terms if the league doesn’t deliver the audience it wants.

Above all, the NFL recognizes that it needs to attract a younger, hipper fan base. The average age of those watching NFL games on TV is 45 -- hardly the demographic that advertisers salivate over.

Hoping to spark interest among a younger set, the NFL even opened the season last fall with a Bon Jovi concert in New York’s Times Square. But a team in L.A. -- the capital of glitz -- would be far better than Bon Jovi for attracting young trendsetters to the league’s telecasts and games.

Today, 18- to 25-year-old men watch more wrestling than NFL football, Johnson notes. Yet “tastes change,” he says, and that could flip-flop again.

Meanwhile, broader forces also are at work on the NFL. The economy has changed considerably since the league walked out of Los Angeles in a huff four years ago. At that time, though Tagliabue had promised this area a new team, the NFL opted to take a $700-million offer from a Houston bidder. On top of that, the Texas city chipped in about $200 million in public financing for a new stadium.

It was a heady time for the NFL. The league had moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, thanks to an opening of the public trough there. Public funding, in turn, helped the league organize a new Browns team back in Cleveland.

But for its part, Los Angeles in 1999 refused to put up a dime. It had been hurt by the Rams’ and Raiders’ departures several years earlier, and officials were skeptical after league promises to deliver a new team to L.A.

Two offers for teams eventually emerged, one to play in the Coliseum and the other at a new stadium in Carson. But these plans never materialized. Public money was needed, Tagliabue insisted, to demonstrate the city’s support for a team.

This week, as owners of the NFL’s teams meet in Philadelphia, there is no talk of public assistance. Most states and cities are in a severe cash crunch, if not outright financial crisis. In this environment, it’s the NFL itself -- not the taxpayer -- that must find the funds for new stadiums.

Thus, the proposal put forward for the Rose Bowl specifies that the league help finance about $500 million in new structures to be erected inside the stadium’s historic walls. Similarly, the league would finance renovations to the Coliseum if that site were chosen for a new L.A. team. The league also has bought a $10-million option on land in Carson where it would help to build a stadium, if that location winds up as the winner.

The notion of the NFL’s ponying up its own dough isn’t new. While Tagliabue blustered in 1999 about L.A.’s needing to come through with public financing, he evidently recognized that a backlash was building to the idea of coddling millionaire sports owners.

That very same year, he led the league to float a bond issue to underwrite stadium financing. The result: The NFL now can make low-interest loans to finance 50% of the cost of a new stadium in a big city. The money is repaid by taking a portion of the visiting teams’ revenue, plus $1 million of TV money from each franchise.

In recent years, the league says, it has put up $650 million in financing for stadiums in, among other places, Foxboro, Mass., for the New England Patriots, Philadelphia for the Eagles and Chicago for the Bears.

The investment has paid off. Thanks to new parks with luxury boxes, seat licenses and shopping concessions that are a far cry from the old hot dog counter, the NFL now gets about $1 billion a year in stadium revenue -- an average of more than $30 million to each team.

Numbers like that, on top of TV money, underscore that the NFL is not in need of public aid. Now that the league concedes this point, maybe Jack Nicholson can be persuaded to sit on the sidelines.

James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com