Big time developer Ed Roski Jr. has plans to bring professional football, and by that I mean American smash mouth football, not soccer, back to the Los Angeles area.  He’s got a lot of, er, yardage to cover given the cost of such an endeavor (he says he can do it all with private monies), the players and owners may be locked in a money dispute come 2011 and other factors are at play.

Fans of Dr. Pop might not know this or care much, but the last team to wear with pride the title of “Los Angeles” in front of a franchise’s name was the former and current Oakland Raiders.  They played here in the Coliseum in South Central from 1982 to 1994.  Back then, the Raiders were actually a good team and had won Super Bowls 11, 15 and 18, the last one in L.A.  They suck mightily now, but such is not the point of this post.

Roski, CEO and chairman of Majestic Realty Company, a massive commercial developer and one of the individuals who had a hand in the building of the Staples Center, would like to construct his proposed Los Angeles Stadium (including retail shops and office space) on 600 some odd acres of land near the intersections of the Pomona (60) and Orange (57) Freeways in the City of Industry.

I’m not sure what Mr. Roski has promised the sons and daughters of Industry (for more about this interesting enclave southeast of downtown Los Angeles incorporated in 1957, read Victor Valle’s recent hard-hitting book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California) in terms of what he projects the stadium would generate insofar as taxes and local revenues are concerned.

For as detailed in books like Field of Schemes by Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan and Public Dollars, Private Stadiums by Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein, pro sports stadiums don’t exactly return what municipalities put into them in economic terms.  Certainly there’s some local employment in the concession and parking booths of the stadium, and there can be spill over to local restaurants and bars in an area, but it’s the players and owners getting the beaucoup bucks off the gate and swag like T-shirts and caps.

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This month Dr. Pop is all about sports and politics, about the ways that the love of the game gets mixed up with the love of money and power. Celine examines the “rules of the games” in the upcoming London Olympics, Gary comments on a recent drive for professional football in LA spearheaded by a local power broker, and Andrea turns her eye to the collateral consequences of the 2010 African Cup of Nations. Each story deals with the tension between sports for the sake of enjoyment, and sports for the sake of enhancing market values or securing political futures. They address the ways that athletic competitions have become a key fixture in the contemporary global political economy.

This unique mixture, between the politics of sports and the economic game of politics, comes into play every time a city faces a decision about building a new stadium or a country attempts to host a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup.  At stake in these decisions is the deployment of scarce public dollars and vital urban lands. As the future of these resource get decided, a broad collection of stakeholders must debate:  What kinds of benefits might an expanded sports infrastructure bring to our city?  Who will get to enjoy these benefits and for how long? And because these are tough questions, these debates can set off fierce competitions between opposing groups, competitions which make many championship games seem like little-league. To read more about how these questions are being answered in South Africa, check out this recent NY Times article: “Cost of Stadium Reveals Tensions in South Africa.”

At the heart of these debates is the issue of who has the right to access and to enjoy the city. This often becomes a clash between the use value and the exchange value of urban space, between the ways that city dwellers make the most of city lands and the ways these same lands are controlled by outside investors, as well as commercial and government interests.  The 2008 Beijing Olympics offer a clear example of what happens when the concern with building a new sports infrastructure becomes more important than the human rights of urban dwellers. In addition to the seven gold medals won by swimmer Michael Phelps, the Beijing Olympics also featured the displacement of roughly 1.5. million people from their homes.

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