The National Football League (NFL) has had a long and complicated history in Los Angeles, the second-largest media market in the United States, behind only New York City. Los Angeles became the first city on the West Coast to host an NFL team when the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946; they played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from 1946 until 1979. In 1960, a charter American Football League franchise, the Los Angeles Chargers, began playing in the Coliseum. The Chargers moved to San Diego after their inaugural season, where they eventually joined the NFL as part of the AFL–NFL merger. The Rams moved to suburban Anaheim, California, in 1980. A surprising move in 1982 brought the Oakland Raiders to the Coliseum to become the Los Angeles Raiders.
A combination of a split fan base and the 1994 Northridge earthquake damage prompted both teams to leave Los Angeles before the 1995 season. The Raiders returned to their original home of Oakland while the Rams moved to St. Louis, Missouri. This left Los Angeles as the largest media market in the country without an NFL team for over 20 years—and enabled owners of smaller-market teams to threaten to move there unless their home city gave them money to improve or replace their stadium.
The league's absence from Los Angeles ended in early 2016, when the Rams received approval to return to the area beginning at the start of the 2016 season.
Los Angeles is now the home of the NFL's Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers, who announced their intent to return to Los Angeles from San Diego in January 2017. The two teams now share SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which opened in 2020.
In addition to the NFL, Los Angeles has been represented by teams in almost every other high-level professional football league: the PCPFL's Los Angeles Bulldogs, the AAFC's Los Angeles Dons, the original 1960s AFL's Los Angeles Chargers (the same team that are currently in the NFL), the COFL's Orange County Ramblers, the WFL's Southern California Sun, the original USFL's Los Angeles Express, the Arena Football League's Anaheim Piranhas, Los Angeles Cobras, Los Angeles Avengers and LA KISS, and the Los Angeles Xtreme and LA Wildcats in both the original and second incarnations of the XFL.
Origins of football in Los Angeles The first NFL team to name itself after the city of Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Buccaneers in . However, this was a road team, based in Chicago, made up of Californians, primarily University of California and University of Southern California alumni. Historian Michael McCambridge said that the Buccaneers became a road team because the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had banned pro teams from its stadium. However, the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the era before modern air travel was likely also a major factor in the decision to base the team in the Midwest.Although train travel (and car travel along the newly-commissioned U.S. Route 66) took days to get from one coast to another, it might have been feasible for the league to schedule contests in California since football games are usually played once a week. However, it is unlikely that a new team would have been able to field the costs required for this. The upstart American Football League (the first league to bear that name) also featured a similar Midwest-based road team of West Coast players, the Los Angeles Wildcats. Both Los Angeles teams performed respectably on the field but folded after their sole seasons in 1926 amid league-wide overextension. The teams played each other in what would be both franchise's final games in an exhibition in San Francisco in January 1927.Schedules and scores of the teams in the 1926 American Football League – "Ghosts of the Gridiron"
The first major professional football team to operate in Los Angeles were the Los Angeles Bulldogs, formed for the fall 1937 season in the second AFL, taking the place of the Cleveland Rams. They operated both as an independent and as a member of several other leagues from about 1937 to 1948. The Bulldogs played most of their tenure at Gilmore Stadium, a stadium on the site of what is now (CBS) Television City. The NFL would hold its first two All-Star Games in Los Angeles following the 1938 and 1939 seasons.
In 1946, the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference started play, lasting four years before folding with the demise of the AAFC. In , the American Football League (AFL) was formed, with a franchise at the region, the Los Angeles Chargers. After the inaugural season, the team moved to San Diego to become the San Diego Chargers, who joined the NFL during the AFL–NFL merger in 1970. The Continental Football League, a second-tier professional league active in the late 1960s, included the Orange County Ramblers among its teams (as well as, for one game, the Long Beach Admirals).
NFL in Los Angeles: 1946–1994 Los Angeles Rams
In , the defending NFL champions, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles.DAN REEVES MOVES WEST The Coffin Corner Volume XX, 1998. Courtesy of The Pro Football Hall of Fame The other league owners were not pleased with the move, but the league relented due in large part to concern that Los Angeles could potentially become the nucleus of a rival league. The Rams played home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, at the time shared with two NCAA teams – the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins – and an AAFC franchise, the Los Angeles Dons. It was the establishment of the Rams in Los Angeles that prompted the league to lift its moratorium on African-American players that had been in place since the early 1930s: terms of the Rams' lease on the Coliseum required the team to integrate, and to do so, the Rams signed former UCLA stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. When the AAFC folded in 1950, the Dons went out of business, but the AAFC's San Francisco 49ers were admitted to the NFL. This provided the NFL with a workable pair of West Coast cities for travel.
Another AAFC franchise which moved over to the NFL in 1950 was the Cleveland Browns, who were based in the city the Rams had deserted. The Browns and the Rams met in three NFL championship games in six seasons—in Cleveland in 1950 (Browns won 30–28) and in Los Angeles in 1951 (Rams won 24–17) and 1955 (Browns won 38–14).
The Rams quickly became established as an NFL power, winning 7 straight NFC West titles from 1973 to 1979, with top quarterbacks like Roman Gabriel and the legendary Fearsome Foursome, consisting of Rosey Grier, Lamar Lundy, Merlin Olsen and Deacon Jones.
Rams move to Anaheim By 1979 the Rams were a successful franchise, and made it to their first Super Bowl that year. However, they had long been dissatisfied with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. For most of the Rams' tenure there, it was the largest stadium in the NFL, with over 90,000 seats. However, even in the Rams' best years, the cavernous venue sold out very infrequently, causing blackouts of Rams games on local TV. Additionally, it was located in South Central Los Angeles, which was perceived as being one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods, a sentiment that had begun in the 1960s and had since grown. The Coliseum also lacked adequate nearby parking. At various times they shared the stadium with both the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins football teams. Ownership (Carroll Rosenbloom, followed by his widow Georgia Frontiere) was unable to persuade the city to build a new stadium in Los Angeles, so they decided to move out of the Coliseum to Anaheim (28 miles southeast of downtown L.A.) in Orange County, which was then experiencing an enormous boom in population and construction.
Beginning in 1980, the Rams played in Anaheim Stadium, which already had a football press box built into the upper deck when it opened in 1966. Further renovations included enclosing the facility by extending the stadium's three decks (the stadium, built mostly with baseball in mind, had previously been open to the outside), and building luxury suites in the mezzanine "club" level.
Los Angeles Raiders
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum next received an NFL team in , when the Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles to become the Los Angeles Raiders. Team owner Al Davis moved there without the approval of his fellow owners or NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. One major factor for Davis in moving to the Coliseum—despite its flaws as a football stadium—was his assumption that the NFL would eventually approve pay-per-view telecasts for its games; such a move would potentially have given the Raiders a virtual TV monopoly in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest TV market. Davis also counted on being able to persuade the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission to renovate the facility, particularly by installing scores of luxury boxes. The UCLA Bruins moved their home to the Rose Bowl Stadium in response to the Raiders' arrival.
The Raiders continued the success they had in Oakland after the move south, winning Super Bowl XVIII in January 1984—which was the only Super Bowl-winning team under the city of Los Angeles until 2022—and reaching the AFC Championship Game in the season. Even with this on-field success, the team gained a controversial reputation off the field, as its silver and black colors became associated with L.A.'s notorious street gangs. More importantly, the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission never gave Davis the lucrative package of amenities he had been promised, and the NFL's broadcast contracts never instituted pay-per-view. Additionally, due to concerns about the area around Exposition Park and the Raiders' difficulty in selling out their home games (resulting in television blackouts in Los Angeles), the NFL scheduled all of the Raiders' appearances on Monday Night Football as road games after 1985, and would not even consider letting them play Monday night games in Anaheim. Eventually, Davis lost patience and entertained an offer from Irwindale, California (east of downtown L.A.) in , but did not move there.
1995: Both Los Angeles franchises leave Rams move to St. Louis In the early 1990s, Rams owner Georgia Frontiere began to shop around for a new home for her team, which was falling behind other NFL teams in luxury-box and other non-shared revenue. By the end of the season, talks had begun with St. Louis and Baltimore, two cities that had lost their original NFL franchises (the Cardinals and Colts, respectively), and had both been unsuccessful in efforts to obtain an expansion franchise the previous year; meanwhile, she was hoping that Anaheim and/or Orange County would also make an attractive offer. Anaheim, going through a recession, could not agree on a tax package to pay for the improvements that Frontiere insisted on, so they dropped out of the bidding. Rams fans, bothered by Frontiere talking to other cities about moving the franchise, voiced their anger by asking for her to sell the team, booing her and starting derogatory chants at games directed at her. Attendance began dwindling, due to frustration by the fans over ownership and the performance by the team on the field. Eventually, St. Louis gave Frontiere the offer she wanted, a brand-new $280 million domed stadium called the Trans World Dome (now known as the Dome at America's Center) with a long-term lease and over 100 luxury boxes. The move was announced in February 1995 and approved by NFL owners that April. The Rams played their last game in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve in 1994, losing 24–21 to the Washington Redskins in front of only 25,750 fans in attendance at Anaheim Stadium. During the 2009 offseason, following Frontiere's death, it was announced the Rams were for sale. It was considered possible that the next owner of the Rams could move the team back to Los Angeles; but this prospect was at the time thought to have become much less likely when then-minority owner Stan Kroenke, a Missouri native and resident, acquired complete control in August 2010.