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The 2018 NFL schedule isn’t out yet — we have to wait a few more months before we can start making our fall plans — but one Raiders game has already been scheduled.
The NFL announced on Thursday that the Raiders will be hosting the Seattle Seahawks at Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium in London in Week Six of the 2018 season.
The Raiders spun Thursday’s news as a positive, expressing how exciting it is to host one of the first games at the new stadium, which is set to open this summer.
The key word in all of this is “host” — the Raiders, who will play the next two seasons in Oakland before moving to Las Vegas — are sacrificing a home game in California to play it in London.
Why?
Well, because it’s all part of the deal.
The Tottenham game will mark the third-straight season and the fourth time in the last five years that the Raiders have played a “home” game outside of the United States.
The past two years, the Raiders have played “home” games in Mexico City. In 2014, the Raiders “hosted” the Miami Dolphins at London’s Wembley Stadium.
This year, it’s the new Tottenham stadium, a facility the NFL committed $12 million help build.
The Raiders are the only team the NFL asks to sacrifice home games on an annual basis — the Jaguars, who play a home game in London every year, do so by choice — but i† makes sense why that’s the case: no other team owes the league as much as the Raiders.
If the NFL says the Raiders need to host a home game in Siberia, Mark Davis might mutter something bad under his breath, but then he’s going to buy a parka. After all, the Raiders owner has taken out hundreds of millions of dollars loans and received more than a bit of help from the NFL to help build his new stadium in Las Vegas.
Davis took a $200 million loan from the NFL as a repayment for the Raiders being passed over for relocation to Los Angeles twice. The league has loaned nine figures to teams before — the 49ers received such a loan to help build Levi’s Stadium — as part of the NFL’s “G-4 stadium fund”.
But the G-4 stadium fund (and the G-3 stadium fund before it) cannot be used to fund stadiums for teams that are relocating — as the Raiders are.
Perhaps the NFL changed the rules without telling anyone, but it’s more likely that instead of using a G-4 loan, the league came up with a new deal, with new rules, for the Raiders. They are no doubt favorable terms to the team, but it also provides the NFL incredible leverage over Davis.
Leverage that can be used to force the team to give up a home game every year.
It should also be noted that the NFL’s leverage over the Raiders isn’t limited to the $200 million loan — the league is also believed to have stepped in to help the Raiders secure financing for the Las Vegas stadium from Bank of America. That loan is worth $650 million.
You might recall that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was Davis’ initial partner in the Las Vegas relocation. The Vegas-based multibillionaire has been open about his dream of owning an NFL team, and its my understanding that the arrangement he set up with the Raiders and the NFL — remember, Adelson used his incredible clout over the city and state of Nevada to spearhead everything — created a booby trap for Davis which would have put the Raiders owner in a position where he would have to hand over control of the team to Adelson.
The NFL had no interest in Adelson being a team owner and Davis has no interest in selling the family business, when the trap was noticed and both of the aforementioned points were relayed back to Adelson, he pulled out of the deal with the Raiders and told Goldman Sachs — which is the bank of choice for his Las Vegas Sands Corp. — to leave too.
Left with a massive financing shortfall, the Raiders turned to their longtime bank — Bank of America — to secure funding.
It should be noted that Bank of America is also the NFL’s bank.
The $650 million loan is set to be paid back over 30 years — think of it as a mortgage — and with interest rates around 4 percent, such a deal will cost the Raiders more than $45 million per season. According to Forbes, the Raiders had the NFL’s lowest revenue and operating income ($41 million) last year.
While Bank of America no doubt did its due diligence when studying the Raiders’ stadium plans, the bank is betting on the Raiders to become a money-making machine once it moves to Nevada — most stadiums run a deficit the first few years of operation and the team’s PSL windfall and the stadium’s naming rights, estimated to bring in $500 million, is committed to construction costs.
I don’t know too many people who could get a mortgage where the annual payments are more than the person’s paycheck at the time the loan is written, but that’s what the just Raiders did.
And that makes me think that the NFL co-signed the loan in some way.
If they did, then there’s even more leverage over the Raiders to play a home game somewhere other than Oakland.
And yes, this all seems very on-brand with Las Vegas. The NFL is the Raiders’ loan shark, and the sacrificed home games are periodic but unannounced shakedowns. (I’m not sure what the NFL equivalent of a suddenly broken leg is, but I can’t imagine it’s good — the Raiders better pay up…)
The worst part of the Raiders playing a “home” game in London next season is that the only people hurt by this are the fans in Oakland. (Well… and this organization’s travel budget — I need to submit a request now…)
Davis continues to get cash for his new stadium, the NFL continues to expand its footprint and make good on its London investment, and the league’s TV partners will be gifted another window to show the game in this process — no one is complaining.
But Raiders fans in the Bay Area, who only have two more seasons with the Raiders before they leave the city of Oakland, the region, and the state high-and-dry, will miss out on one of the team’s final 16 regular-season games in the Coliseum — and against a marquee opponent, no less.
So now there are 15 regular-season games left to attend at home.
Scratch that — there are 14. The NFL is, no doubt, going to make the Raiders give up another home game in 2019, too.
And the Raiders won’t say a thing — it’s just part of the deal.
