The NFL Is Not Returning.
It appears that it is almost the end of the line for San Diego’s 52-year-old stadium. That building was named for a local newspaper sports editor, Jack Murphy, who convinced Barron Hilton to move his American Football League Los Angeles Chargers to San Diego in 1961. In November 2018, San Diego voters said no to developing a soccer stadium village and yes to an expansion of the San Diego State University campus using the stadium grounds. As part of that expansion, a new, much smaller stadium will be built by the university to replace the old one and would seat about 35,000 people. There is an environment impact study being conducted of the area. Academic buildings and student residences will also be part of the overall stadium project. The new stadium, which could cost a quarter of a billion dollars, could also be used for a Major League Soccer team and concerts but it will not be built to National Football League standards.
It appears that San Diego has given up on getting a replacement team for the Chargers, a franchise that left San Diego in January 2017. The Spanos family owned San Diego Chargers spent nearly 17 years trying to build an NFL state of the art stadium in town. The Spanos family abandoned San Diego in search of more gold in the Los Angeles area with their first stop at a soccer stadium in Carson and then an eventual permanent home in Inglewood sharing the facility with another relocated franchise owner, Stan Kroenke’s Rams, which went to Los Angeles after playing out a St. Louis stadium lease in 2015. San Diego did get a franchise in the Alliance of American Football but the league folded and that could very well be the end of professional football in San Diego. The XFL is not putting a team into the city.
