The National Football League (NFL) has had a long and complicated history in Los Angeles, the second-largest media market in the United States. Los Angeles was the first city on the West Coast to host an NFL team, when the Cleveland Rams relocated to Los Angeles in 1946 and played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from 1946 until 1979. In 1960, a charter American Football League franchise, the Los Angeles Chargers began playing in the Coliseum. The Chargers moved to San Diego after their inaugural season, where they eventually joined the NFL as part of the AFL-NFL merger. The Rams moved to suburban Anaheim, California in 1980. A surprising move in 1982 brought the Oakland Raiders to the Coliseum to become Los Angeles Raiders.
A combination of a split fan base and 1994 Northridge earthquake damage prompted both teams to leave Los Angeles before the 1995 season. The Raiders returned to their original home, Oakland, while the Rams relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. This left Los Angeles as the largest media market in the country without an NFL team. The absence of a team in Los Angeles became an effective bargaining chip for teams in smaller markets, as they could issue an ultimatum that unless their home city contributed financing for the construction of a new stadium or renovation of an existing one, they would relocate there.
The league's absence from Los Angeles ended in early 2016, when the Rams received approval to return to the area beginning at the start of the 2016 season.
Los Angeles is now the home of the NFL's Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers, who announced their intent to return to Los Angeles from San Diego in January 2017. The two teams now share SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which opened in 2020.
In addition to the NFL, Los Angeles has been represented by almost every other high-level professional football league: the PCPFL's Los Angeles Bulldogs, the AAFC's Los Angeles Dons, the original 1960s AFL's Los Angeles Chargers (the same team that are currently in the NFL), the COFL's Orange County Ramblers, the WFL's Southern California Sun, the original USFL's Los Angeles Express, the Arena Football League's Anaheim Piranhas, Los Angeles Cobras, Los Angeles Avengers and LA KISS, and the Los Angeles Xtreme and LA Wildcats in both the original and current incarnations of the XFL.
Origins of football in Los Angeles
The first NFL team to name itself after the city of Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Buccaneers in . However, this was a road team, based in Chicago, made up of Californians, primarily University of California and University of Southern California alumni. Historian Michael McCambridge said that the Buccaneers became a road team because the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had banned pro teams from its stadium. However, the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the era before modern air travel must have also been a factor in the decision to base the team in the Midwest. The upstart American Football League (the first league to bear that name) also featured a similar Midwest-based road team of West Coast players, the Los Angeles Wildcats. Both Los Angeles teams performed respectably on the field but folded after its sole season in 1926 amid league-wide overextension. The Wildcats' final game was an exhibition in San Francisco against the Buccaneers in January 1927.
The first major professional football team to reside in Los Angeles were the Los Angeles Bulldogs, formed for the fall 1937 season in the AFL, taking the place of the Cleveland Rams. They operated both as an independent and as a member of several other leagues from approximately 1937 to 1948. The Bulldogs played most of their tenure at Gilmore Stadium, a stadium on the site of what is now (CBS) Television City. The NFL would hold its first two All-Star Games in Los Angeles following the 1938 and 1939 seasons.
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. In , the American Football League (AFL) was formed, with a franchise at the region, the Los Angeles Chargers. After the inaugural season, the team moved to San Diego to become the San Diego Chargers, who joined the NFL during the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. The Continental Football League, a second-tier professional league active in the late 1960s, included the Orange County Ramblers among its teams (as well as, for one game, the Long Beach Admirals).