league research co-opting of team apparel by gangs

L.A. has always been a Lakers town. On a cool September evening in Chavez Ravine, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a Dodgers town. When Wayne Gretzky arrived in 1988, the Kings joined the mix, and when USC was hot under Pete Carroll more than a decade ago, the city became a college football capital. Was it ever an NFL town? If so, can it still be? Something strange happened in the 21 seasons between when the Rams and Raiders left after the 1994 season, and when the Rams returned in 2016. Angelenos, burned by a league that seemed to view the city more as a focus-grouped market than a layered and complicated region, showed little desire for a team of their own.

Jerry Jones thought he could win them over. Now 77, the Dallas Cowboys' owner and Hall of Famer is the NFL's most powerful person and maybe the most influential power broker in American sports. He has been the most passionate evangelist for the NFL to make a splashy return to Los Angeles, the city where he was born, envisioning a near-future with more money in it for everybody. In 2015, the Rams' Inglewood project, then estimated to cost $1.86 billion, was competing against a Chargers-Raiders $1.8 billion option in Carson. Few outside the NFL knew it, but Jones positioned himself to profit from either proposal. Concessions for either project -- and the construction, in the case of Inglewood -- would be managed by Legends, the company co-owned by Jones and the Steinbrenner family. The competition between the proposals was bloody and toxic given the high stakes, pitting owners against one another. Ultimately, Jones sided with Kroenke because his stadium and project proposal had what Jones called the wow factor. "We had good insight on its vision," Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan says. "It was spectacular."

At an owners meeting in a posh Houston hotel in January 2016, Jones helped to resolve the L.A. relocation scrum by persuading fellow owners to endorse a compromise that he had sold as a blueprint for success. Two teams would return to Los Angeles: the Rams -- and, if they chose, the Chargers. The red flags that are obvious now were visible then. League research indicated neither the Rams nor the Chargers had an overwhelming reservoir of support in the L.A. region, with fewer local fans than the Patriots, Steelers, Packers, Cowboys and even the Raiders, according to some team and league studies. What's more, the accommodation wouldn't make the Rams and Chargers equal partners, like the Jets and Giants at MetLife Stadium, which the teams jointly built with private funds. Kroenke -- one of the NFL's wealthiest team owners, worth an estimated $9.7 billion -- would pay to build the stadium, perhaps the only option in California, whose legislators and voters rarely approve a single public dollar for new stadiums. Spanos, a long-respected owner with a reputation for putting the league first, would be given the first option to be Kroenke's tenant, for $1 a year, and if the Chargers decided to remain in San Diego, the Raiders could join the Rams in L.A. -- an outcome nobody around the league wanted, owing to Al Davis' burned bridges and the co-opting of team apparel by gangs.

Almost all owners believed Jones' resolution to be the best business decision among the available options, and most supported it under the cover of a secret ballot, which allowed them to vote for Inglewood without Spanos knowing who had turned on him.

Spanos felt burned and betrayed by the vote and the entire L.A. decision process, and therefore few expected him to exercise the tenancy option. But he did, and now these unequal partners are locked in a bitter fight, stoked by Kroenke's fury over cost overruns exceeding $3 billion, questions over the Chargers' long-term viability in the market, a lawsuit seeking billions over Kroenke's departure from St. Louis that has engulfed the entire league, and an increasingly fractious and sometimes petty civil war between Rams and Chargers officials, according to documents and nearly two dozen interviews with owners, league and team executives, and lawyers.