Stadium Backers Remain Confident Of Landing NFL Team For 2011

INDUSTRY – Investors who want to bring a professional football team back to Los Angeles said they are undeterred about a possible impasse between team owners and the players’ union that could lead to an NFL lockout or strike in 2011, it was reported Sunday.

Ed Roski, chief executive and chairman of Majestic Realty Co., has been trying for a decade to being a team to Los Angeles, which has been without an NFL franchise since the Raiders and Rams left after the 1994 season.

Roski has proposed building a 600-acre facility near the Pomona (60) and Orange (57) freeways.

Despite the NFL’s potential labor impasse, John Semcken, vice president of Majestic, reiterated his optimism about an NFL team playing in Los Angeles in 2011.

“We can’t control the labor situation,” Semcken told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “We can’t do anything about it. We’re just gonna move forward.”

In a Feb. 5 news conference, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he could not guarantee that Los Angeles would get a team.

“I think we are working hard to get a team back into the Los Angeles market because we know there are millions of fans that would love to see NFL football as part of their community,” Goodell said in his annual Super Bowl State of the League news conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“The good news I think is that at least clearance has been given to getting a stadium built, but you point out the key issue, which is the challenge of financing a facility in this kind of an environment.”

The team’s owner would have to pay almost all of the cost of building the stadium under the league’s collective bargaining agreement, Goodell said.

Roski and Semcken have long said they won’t build the 75,000-seat stadium until they buy an existing team.

NFL team owners want players to take less revenue than they do under their current labor agreement. Owners say they have borne the costs of state-of-the-art stadiums, missed out on new revenue and even lost money in recent years.

Players get 60 percent of total revenue now. Union leaders have said the league’s new labor proposal amounts to an 18 percent pay cut. They want the owners to open their books to prove their financial strife.

The debate has been ongoing for months and could last past the end of the current labor deal, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

The deal owners and the players’ union agreed to is set to expire in March 2011. Teams in the upcoming 2010 season will not have a salary cap, a key part of the current deal.