WYATT: One, two or three NFL teams for Los Angeles?

If you’ve been following the latest NFL stadium news, you might think Los Angeles is about to get a new pro football team. Or two. Or maybe even three.

That’s because two new stadium proposals, both approved by their local governments and both to be completed without public funding, make this the closest LA has been to an NFL team in years.

But will it happen? Or will the status quo remain and leave Los Angeles bereft of professional football as it has been since 1995?

The NFL’s absence in LA, the USA’s second largest television market, is an oddity of American pro sports and a subject that frequently comes up when I talk with Australian fans.

At first glance it doesn’t seem to make sense, given that Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL all have two LA-area teams. When you look closely, however, you can see why the NFL has been a-ok with no franchise in Los Angeles.

LA of course, is full of distractions like the weather (hardly the frozen tundra) and showbiz and the beach – things that might keep fans away. It’s also a big college football town, with USC and UCLA both averaging NFL-type attendance figures.

There’s also the fact that LA is a transient place, and there are hundreds of thousands of transplanted New Englanders and Rust Belt migrants who would rather spend their Sundays in a bar cheering the Patriots, Bills and Browns than going to a stadium and supporting a local team.

More importantly, there’s no suitable stadium, with the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl sufficient for college football, but not the NFL on a long-term basis.

Still, even that pales in comparison with the main reason the Los Angeles market remains teamless. It’s all about leverage.

For years, NFL owners have consistently and effectively used the vacant LA market to legally blackmail their cities into financing new stadiums or improving existing ones.

In other words, unless you give us what we want, we’re heading to LA. That tactic has worked most recently in Minnesota, where the Vikings will soon have a brand-new stadium built with $500 million of taxpayers’ money.

If that goes away, 32 owners lose a big bargaining chip with their cities.

At the moment, there are three NFL franchises – the St. Louis Rams, the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers – who play in venues that are not up to NFL standard. All three are essentially on year-to-year leases, all three say they want to stay put in their home cities, but all three have threatened a move to LA.

Rams’ owner Stan Kroenke (who also owns the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Arsenal) is the NFL’s second-richest owner. He wants the Edward Jones Dome upgraded and says the city of St. Louis needs to come up with a lazy $700 million to make it happen.

Meanwhile, he has a deal in place to build his own stadium on the old Hollywood Park site not far from Los Angeles International Airport.

Not to be outdone, the Raiders and Chargers – both playing in stadiums worse than the Edward Jones Dome – have gone in on a joint venture to erect a new stadium that would be shared by both teams, in Carson, about 15 miles southeast of LAX.

So where does this leave the NFL? Like the air traffic around LAX, in a holding pattern.

It needs to wait for the city of St. Louis to come up with the money to appease Kroenke, a Missouri-raised billionaire whose first and middle names come from two St. Louis baseball legends, Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial.

You’d think if his home city coughs up the cash, he’d be tempted to stay put. Otherwise, his Hollywood Park plan, which unlike others includes ample room for parking, might be a goer.

San Diego is more problematic, since civic leaders and the Spanos family, who own the team, have been struggling to get a deal done for years. The family says the Chargers can’t exist if another team moves to Los Angeles, but ironically the team did quite well – and even made a Super Bowl – in 1994 when the Rams and Raiders were both in LA.

As for the city of Oakland, it’s already paying $20 million annually on payments for bringing the Raiders back from LA in the 90s, and while the logical move would be to share brand new Levi’s Stadium with the 49ers, Oakland owner Mark Davis says he’s adamantly opposed to being the “second tenant.”

Things get even more complicated when you start looking at divisions and re-alignment possibilities. A Rams’ move back to LA is easy, since they’d remain in the NFC West with Arizona, San Francisco and Seattle.

But for the two-team Oakland and San Diego plan to work, you’d have to think the NFL would need to re-shuffle, since two AFC West teams sharing the same stadium makes little sense.

So to summarise, there’s no doubt a team (or teams) in LA would be successful. But it has to be the perfect scenario and it has to make sense for the majority of NFL owners, three-quarters of whom have to approve a franchise relocation.

In other words, don’t hold your breath.

Ed Wyatt is generally considered Australia’s foremost expert on US sport, although as he points out, it’s a bit like being the best rapper in Zurich. His Australian TV career includes stints with SBS, where he hosted the Super Bowl for seven years, Network Ten (Super Bowl, Winter Olympics) and ESPN (Australian Baseball League championships).

Ed is currently heard on 1116 SEN radio in Melbourne where he calls A-League and ABL games. A graduate of Stanford University, Ed began his media career in Seattle where he was an Emmy award-winning writer for the Almost Live! comedy show.