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Throughout the years, a number of teams in the National Football League (NFL) have either moved or merged.
Contents
- Timeline
- Teams that have moved
- Quasi-moves: movement of intact teams from one city to another
- Franchise mergers
- Teams moving between cities/boroughs within same metropolitan area
- Temporary moves
- Ultimate disposition of the 15 charter franchises
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
In its early years, the NFL was not stable and teams moved frequently to survive, or folded only to be resurrected in a different city with the same players and owners. The Great Depression era saw most small-town NFL teams move to larger cities. Several franchises merged during World War II because many players were in the military. Few, if any, of these moves and mergers drew much controversy.
Franchise moves became far more controversial in the late 20th century when a vastly more popular NFL, free from financial instability, allowed many teams to leave to abandon long-held strongholds for perceived financially greener pastures.
In 1966, Pete Rozelle promised Congress that franchises would not move, a promise made to secure a law exempting the league from certain aspects of antitrust laws, thus making possible the AFL–NFL merger. Despite Rozelle's promise, several franchises have moved since the merger and the passage of the law (Public Law 89-800) that sanctioned it. While owners invariably cited financial difficulties as the primary factor in such moves, many fans bitterly disputed these contentions, especially in Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cleveland, each of which eventually received teams some years after their original franchises moved.
Los Angeles, the second-largest media market in the United States, did not have an NFL team from 1995 to 2015. The league had started promoting a return to Los Angeles no later than 2006, [1] and in January 2016, the NFL gave the St. Louis Rams approval to move back to Los Angeles. A year later, the Chargers also moved to the city, while the Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020.
The San Diego–Tijuana market is currently the largest U.S. metropolitan area (and only one with over 3.2 million residents) without an NFL franchise. The only other city to be seriously considered in the country in recent times was San Antonio, Texas, which was examined by the Raiders in 2014 before they chose Las Vegas.
Speculation on future moves has mainly been centered around two cities outside the United States: Toronto, Canada (q.v. National Football League in Toronto) and London, England, United Kingdom (q.v. Potential London NFL franchise), the latter of which would be the first attempt by one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada to place a team outside North America.
In the 1970s, the suburbanization of the U.S. saw the construction of stadiums and other team facilities in the suburbs instead of the central city.