National Football League in Los Angeles: Professional American football, especially its established top level, the National Football League, has had a long history in Los Angeles, the center of the second-largest media market in the United States and the largest without a team since 1995. The NFL and other professional leagues have had multiple teams in Los Angeles between 1946 and 1994, all of which originally played home games in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
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. Also in 1946, the Cleveland Rams became the first National Football League (NFL) franchise to locate in Los Angeles. The Rams moved to Anaheim Stadium for 1980, and left southern California altogether in 1995 for St. Louis. The AFL founded the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960 but moved to San Diego the next year. The Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982, only to return to Oakland after the 1994 season.There were problems with the filling all of the 90,000-plus seats in the Coliseum to avoid a television blackout in the Los Angeles area.
The lack of an NFL team in Los Angeles is an issue the league and the city have been working on to resolve since the Raiders left.One key sticking point had been whether the Coliseum should be the primary venue for a new team, or whether a lower capacity NFL-specific stadium should be built in the area.In November 2007, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that the policy of requiring the NFL to relocate to the Coliseum will change and other options will be explored.
There have been other professional football teams in the city, including PCPFL teams during World War II, XFL, AFL, USFL, and WFL.
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