The Vikings owner Ziggy Wilf is playing his hand just as the NFL has instructed him to.
The NFL is the worlds most profitable professional sports league and they did not get that way by playing by the same rules as everyone else. After Robert Kraft financed and built his own stadium for his New England Patriots, the NFL has made sure that all new owners follow league procedures by "crying poverty" and demanding public funding for;
- tax brakes
- free land
- new stadiums
- lax regulations
- job subsidies
- unsold ticket buy-outs
- black-outs of public broadcasts, etc.
The NFL has carefully controlled league expansion so as to always have a few cities hungry for an NFL team. The problem is, LA is not one of them. Here are a few reasons why the Vikings Will not move to LA;
- most NFL fans in LA are transplants... They follow their home teams
- the Vikings are not well liked in LA (they knocked the best Ram teams of the 70s out of the playoffs)
- there is very little interest in a new NFL team in LA (voters in Pasadena have already turned down the NFL twice by voting "No" to allowing the NFL to put a team in The Rose Bowl)
- LA has already had, and lost three NFL teams... They all left due to lack of fan support.
- the Vikings are "fully branded" in Minnesota. They have a rabid multi-state fan base and the "Viking" image is perfect for the heavily Scandinavian population... "branding" is worth million$
Finally, it should be noted that Ziggy Wilf made his billions in the construction business, meaning that he could easily build his own stadium with his own construction firm "at cost" and then watch the value of his franchise increase by the retail value of the new stadium...
People in Minnesota love their Vikings, NFL owners love public funding... Thus, the "shakedown"
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