Dean Spanos made a mistake uprooting his team from San Diego, where he had a chance to make the Bolts a truly international franchise
Amid the sound and fury of the Brian Flores lawsuit, you may have forgotten that the Super Bowl kicks off on Sunday at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium. As challenging as it is to pick a winner between the Cincinnati Bengals and the hometown Rams – barely a field-goal favourite, by Vegas’ reckoning—one team has already lost: the Chargers.
You remember the Chargers. They’re the other NFL team that calls Los Angeles home, the one with the cute yellow lightning bolt on the sides of their helmets. Of course for 55 years they were the San Diego Chargers, the pro sports standard bearer for a sleepy SoCal idyll famous for sun and fun (they actually started life in LA before heading south in 1961 after a single season). In San Diego, they were one of the league’s heritage teams, in that group of pioneering AFL franchises with the Raiders and the Chiefs. Among other things, the Chargers were the team where Al Davis got started in pro football and where the vertical passing game was laboratory tested and perfected. They played at Jack Murphy Stadium, an architectural marvel that played host to three Super Bowls and two World Series – handling one of each in 1998.
