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Sports Feb 09, 2022
SoFi Stadium. | Photo by Prayitno via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Wednesday hailed what he deemed a triumphant return of the league to the Los Angeles area, saying SoFi Stadium will likely be at the top of the list to land another Super Bowl when the next available locations are chosen.
“We don’t have a Super Bowl (available) until (Super Bowl) 60 (in 2026). That would be the earliest we would consider L.A.,” Goodell said outside SoFi Stadium during his pre-Super Bowl LVI, or 56, news conference.
“But I would be hard-pressed to think (Los Angeles is) not going to be at the top of everybody’s list every opportunity we get.”
After this Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI in Inglewood, next year’s Super Bowl LVII will be in Glendale, Arizona, followed by Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas and Super Bowl LVIX in New Orleans.
Goodell told reporters that returning the NFL to the Los Angeles area came “with a lot of ups and downs,” but the league “really wanted to find the right solution.”
“One of the things I’m really confident about sitting here and feeling it this week is that we really landed in the right spot,” Goodell said. “We have a state-of-the-art stadium, which I think reflects this great community and the entertainment capital of the world. It now has two NFL teams playing here, which I think has been extraordinarily successful in reestablishing two teams here.
“And we have what I think is really the ultimate event, which is a Super Bowl here,” he said. “To me, it’s sort of surreal that we’re here in many ways after all these years — 29 years since we had our last Super Bowl (in the L.A. area).”
Goodell said the success of SoFi Stadium was the perfect solution for the league, which struggled to reestablish a foothold in the Southland after both the Rams and Raiders left the region in the 1990s.
Various proposals surfaced over the years, but none materialized until an agreement was forged for Rams owner Stan Kroenke to build the $5 billion SoFi Stadium at the former Hollywood Park racetrack location, and share the stadium with the Chargers as a tenant.
“I think this is going to be a regular Super Bowl stop,” Goodell said. “… It really started with the stadium, we needed to have a state-of-the-art stadium that gave us the ‘wow’ factor. That gave us the ability to put on these big events, and frankly other events other than the Super Bowl.”
