At his Super Bowl press conference in 2014, Roger Goodell told reporters that he had no knowledge of the Rams’ plan to move to Los Angeles. That turned out to be a lie.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch acquired documents from the city’s lawsuit against the Rams and NFL, and it proves Goodell lied when he said he didn’t know about the team’s plans. The Rams began discussing buying land in Los Angeles way back in the summer of 2013, with Kevin Demoff and Stan Kroenke talking about the possibility.
In October of 2013, Kroenke met privately with Goodell to discuss the Rams’ plan to move to L.A. And after the Rams bought the land in Hollywood Park, which is where SoFi Stadium was built, Kroenke told Goodell they were going to keep things under wraps, and the NFL obliged by not making that purchase publicly known.
“We’re going to try very hard to stay under the radar screen and nobody will know we bought it,” Kroenke told Goodell. “We’ll stay hidden, which is what we want, for as long as we can.”
The Rams eventually moved to Los Angeles in 2016 and played four years at the Coliseum before SoFi Stadium opened in 2020. The move has obviously been very profitable for the Rams, becoming the fourth-most valuable team in the NFL at $4.8 billion, as of 2021.
But the City of St. Louis was hurt badly by the team leaving, and was understandably furious by the development. The uncovering of the Rams’ (and NFL’s lies) won’t make things any better, either.
