NFL franchise moves and mergers

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL franchise moves and mergers tell a story that begins not in gleaming stadiums but in small Midwestern towns, where teams like the Decatur Staleys and the Pottsville Maroons struggled to survive from one season to the next. The National Football League's early years were defined by instability. Teams folded, relocated, and re-emerged under new names in new cities, often with the same players and owners in tow. The Great Depression pushed most small-town franchises toward larger markets. World War II drained rosters so badly that the Pittsburgh Steelers merged with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1943, then merged again with the Chicago Cardinals in 1944. These early upheavals drew little controversy. Nobody was burning jerseys.

  The calculus changed dramatically in the late 20th century. A far more popular and financially stable NFL gave owners something they had never quite possessed before: real leverage. Teams began leaving cities that had supported them for decades, chasing better stadium deals and larger media markets. In 1966, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had promised Congress that franchises would not move. That promise was made to secure an antitrust exemption allowing the AFL and NFL to merge. The law that resulted, Public Law 89-800, passed with Rozelle's assurance intact. But teams moved anyway, and the cities left behind did not forget. Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cleveland each lost their franchises to relocation, and each city eventually received a replacement team years later. The question of what a franchise actually owes its hometown has never been fully settled.

• 2. War, Depression, and Survival

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  Before any stadium deal or television contract existed, the NFL was trying not to disappear entirely. The Dayton Triangles moved to Brooklyn as the Dodgers in 1930, a direct consequence of the economic collapse that made small-city football unsustainable. The Toledo Maroons left for Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1924. The Pottsville Maroons departed for Boston in 1929. These were not controversial moves. They were survival decisions made by teams that could not fill stands in their home towns.

  World War II created a different kind of crisis. With so many players entering military service, several franchises could not field full rosters on their own. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles merged for the 1943 season, forming the "Phil-Pitt" team that fans quickly nicknamed the Steagles. Home games were split between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The arrangement lasted one season, but the following year brought another unusual pairing: the Steelers merged with the Chicago Cardinals to form Card-Pitt for the 1944 season, again dividing home games between two cities. The Brooklyn Tigers and Boston Yanks merged in 1945, playing simply as "The Yanks," with home games split between Brooklyn and Boston. The Brooklyn franchise never returned as an independent team after 1945. None of these wartime mergers survived past their immediate necessity, but they demonstrated how fluid franchise identity could be when circumstances forced the issue.

  Of the 15 charter franchises that made up the nascent league at the start of the 1920 season, only two remained in operation when those early decades closed. The Muncie Flyers folded after 1921. The Hammond Pros lasted until 1926. The Rock Island Independents left the NFL entirely to become independent, then joined the first American Football League in 1926 before folding before the season ended. The story of those 15 original teams is largely a story of attrition.

• 3. The Promise Rozelle Broke

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  In 1966, Pete Rozelle stood before Congress and offered a commitment: NFL franchises would stay put. The assurance was not goodwill. It was the price of a law. Congress was being asked to exempt the AFL-NFL merger from certain antitrust restrictions, and lawmakers wanted something in return. Rozelle provided it. Public Law 89-800 passed, the merger was sanctioned, and the AFL and NFL combined operations in 1970, absorbing all AFL franchises along with their history, records, and statistics.

  Within two decades, the promise had been broken repeatedly. The Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982. The Baltimore Colts relocated to Indianapolis in 1984, leaving in the middle of the night in moving vans, a departure that became one of the most bitter relocations in professional sports history. The St. Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix in 1988. Each time, owners cited financial difficulties. Each time, many fans disputed those claims. Baltimore lost the Colts but eventually received the Cleveland Browns, reborn as the Ravens in 1996. St. Louis received the Los Angeles Rams in 1995, then watched them leave again for Los Angeles in 2016. Cleveland's experience was particularly complicated: owner Art Modell announced in 1995 that he was moving the Browns to Baltimore. The NFL, the city, and Modell reached an agreement allowing the Browns' franchise and history to remain in Cleveland, with a new Browns team promised by 1999. Modell received a new franchise built from the 1995 Browns roster, which became the Ravens. The legal and emotional arguments about what constitutes a franchise, and who owns its history, have never been fully resolved.

• 4. Los Angeles: Market Without a Team

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  Los Angeles is the second-largest media market in the United States. For twenty years, from 1995 to 2015, it had no NFL team. The Los Angeles Rams had moved to St. Louis in 1995, and the Raiders had returned to Oakland the same year. The NFL began promoting a return to Los Angeles no later than 2006, but the process stretched on for nearly another decade.

  In January 2016, the NFL gave the St. Louis Rams approval to move back to Los Angeles. A year later, the San Diego Chargers also relocated to the city. The Raiders, meanwhile, explored other options. In 2014, the Raiders examined San Antonio, Texas, as a possible destination. They ultimately chose Las Vegas instead, completing the move in 2020. San Diego, left without the Chargers, now sits within what the source describes as the San Diego-Tijuana market, currently the largest U.S. metropolitan area with over 3.2 million residents to lack an NFL franchise. The Rams and Chargers now both play at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, having each begun their Los Angeles returns at other venues before moving there in 2020.

• 5. Displaced by Baseball, Weather, and Fire

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  Not every relocation was a franchise decision. Dozens of times across NFL history, teams have been displaced temporarily by events entirely outside their control, and the resulting arrangements reveal how much shared infrastructure professional sports leagues actually depend on.

  On the 12th of October 1964, the St. Louis Cardinals' scheduled home game against the Baltimore Colts was moved to Baltimore's Memorial Stadium because the baseball Cardinals were using Busch Stadium for the World Series. The same kind of conflict displaced the Atlanta Falcons on the 5th of October 1969, when their home game against the Colts was shifted to Grant Field at Georgia Tech because the Atlanta Braves were hosting a National League Championship Series game. The New York Jets experienced a stranger version of this problem: their the 21st of October 1973, home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers was moved to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh because the New York Mets were in the World Series. Game 7 of that series was played on October 21 at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, but the contract between New York City, the Mets, and Jets required the stadium to remain available to the Mets until the conclusion of their season regardless.

  Natural disasters created their own displacements. The Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California forced the San Francisco 49ers to play their the 22nd of October 1989, home game against the New England Patriots at Stanford Stadium. Hurricane Katrina left the Louisiana Superdome so severely damaged that the New Orleans Saints played three home games of the 2005 season in the Alamodome in San Antonio and four at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. The roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis collapsed from heavy snowfall and high winds on the 12th of December 2010, forcing the Vikings to play their next home game at Ford Field in Detroit. And as recently as 2025, the Los Angeles Rams played their first playoff game in the 2024-25 NFL playoffs at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, after the January wildfires in Southern California made their home venue unavailable.

• 6. Charter Franchises and What Became of Them

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  The 15 franchises that formed the league at the start of the 1920 APFA season would be nearly unrecognizable to a modern fan. The Akron Pros changed their name to the Akron Indians in 1926 and shut down entirely in 1927. The Buffalo All-Americans cycled through three different names before folding after the 1929 season. The Massillon Tigers were represented at the founding meeting on the 17th of September 1920, by Ralph Hay, but never actually played in the league; they are counted as charter members only on a technicality.

  One persistent story about the early Chicago football scene turned out to be a myth. The claim that the Chicago Tigers lost a winner-take-all game to the Cardinals for the "rights" to Chicago is no longer considered credible. The Tigers simply folded after the 1920 season. The Cardinals themselves had a longer journey: they merged with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1944, returned as an independent team in 1945, moved to St. Louis in 1960, relocated to Phoenix in 1988, and became the Arizona Cardinals in 1994.

  Some lineages stretch across multiple franchise identities. The current Indianapolis Colts can trace their lineage through successor franchises back to the Dayton Triangles, who moved to Brooklyn as the Dodgers in 1930, became the Tigers in 1944, merged with the Boston Yanks in 1945, and eventually passed through further transformations before producing the franchise that now plays in Indianapolis. Of all 15 charter franchises, only two remain in continuous operation today: the direct institutional descendants that survived more than a century of moves, mergers, Depression-era collapses, and wartime combinations. The Decatur Staleys, who moved to Chicago in 1921 and were renamed the Bears in 1922, count as one of them.