The NFL and St. Louis Rams have reached a settlement on the team’s lawsuit over relocation to Los Angeles for $790 million, according to multiple reports. The suit was filed in January by St. Louis mayor Francis Slay after the franchise announced plans to move from Missouri following the 2014 season
The “when did the rams move to la” is a question that many Rams fans have been asking. The NFL and the Rams have settled their lawsuit over the franchise’s relocation to Los Angeles for $790 million.
ST. LOUIS (KMOX) — According to a joint statement from St. Louis city and county, the NFL and Rams owner Stan Kroenke will pay $790 million to resolve a lawsuit launched by St. Louis interests over the team’s move to Los Angeles.
According to ESPN, the settlement does not contain a pledge from the NFL to offer St. Louis an expansion team in the future, corroborating a report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to ESPN, the notion was not really considered.
It wasn’t immediately apparent how much Kroenke would pay and how much would be covered by the league’s other 31 clubs’ owners.
“This historic deal brings a lengthy chapter to a conclusion for our area, securing hundreds of millions of dollars for our communities while avoiding the uncertainty of the trial and appeal process,” said St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page in a joint statement.
Officials in the St. Louis region have yet to decide how the settlement cash will be spent, according to the statement.
In a short statement, an NFL spokesperson stated the league and the St. Louis interests had “completely resolved the disagreement.”
The agreement, agreed via mediation, puts an end to a 412-year-old lawsuit that was launched in the aftermath of the Rams’ departure. Kroenke and the NFL had failed in their attempts to have the case dismissed or at the very least relocated out of St. Louis, and judges had been sympathetic to the St. Louis side’s efforts to divulge financial information about club owners — verdicts that expedited the settlement drive.
The case was supposed to go to trial on January 10th. More than $1 billion was requested in the complaint. The team’s relocation was said to have lost the St. Louis area millions in entertainment, ticket, and earnings tax income.
Georgia Frontiere, the team’s then-owner, relocated the Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995, where they resided for 21 seasons until being re-acquired by Kroenke.
When the club initially arrived in St. Louis, Kroenke, a Missouri real estate tycoon married to a Walmart fortune heir, became a minority owner. Frontiere passed away in 2008, leaving the Rams to her children, who sold them to Kroenke in 2010.
Soon after, the Rams started lobbying for hundreds of millions of dollars in modifications to the downtown domed stadium, which had been constructed with government money to entice an NFL club in the early 1990s.
Initially, St. Louis groups offered a more modest improvement, but then proposed a new $1 billion stadium near the Mississippi River, which would be paid equally by taxpayers, the club, and the NFL. The league and the club both turned down the opportunity.
Kroenke instead bought property in Inglewood, California. The Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers, who relocated from San Diego in 2017, currently play in SoFi Stadium, which opens in September 2020.
Apart from losing an NFL club, St. Louis citizens were outraged by Kroenke’s 29-page relocation proposal, which was accepted at the January 2016 owners meeting. The study criticized St. Louis for its demographic reduction, questioned the region’s economic future, and questioned if it could sustain an NFL club as well as baseball’s Cardinals and hockey’s Blues.
According to a 2017 lawsuit filed on behalf of St. Louis, St. Louis County, and the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority, Kroenke, other club executives, and the NFL knew the Rams were planning to move as early as 2013, but lied about it. In permitting the transfer, the league allegedly disregarded its own relocation restrictions, according to the complaint.
The NFL, the Rams, and Kroenke all claimed that the rules aren’t set in stone and that the league had the authority to authorize a transaction that was plainly in the best interests of the league and its 32 owners. Kroenke and the NFL, America’s most popular and richest sports organization, have suffered a succession of in-court setbacks.
In July, St. Louis Circuit Judge Christopher McGraugh determined that there was enough evidence that Kroenke and others had committed fraud, and he ordered NFL owners to turn over financial data. If Kroenke and the NFL lost the case, the goal was to enable a jury to consider punitive damages.
The request for documents was labeled “intrusive” by NFL lawyers, but the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling in September.
The NFL and Kroenke also wanted the trial to be moved out of St. Louis, alleging “undue influence” on potential jurors. McGraugh, though, turned down the motion in August, a decision that was subsequently upheld by a Missouri appeals court.
Kroenke and the NFL also attempted, but failed, to have the matter handled in arbitration instead of in court.
The Associated Press and ESPN’s Seth Wickersham contributed to this story.
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