AFP/Los Angeles

As the National Football League prepares to kick off a new season, American football fans in Los Angeles are finally beginning to believe their long wait for a team of their own may be over.
The most popular sport in America has been a baffling absentee from the nation’s second biggest media market ever since 1994, when the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Raiders played their last games in the city.  
The Rams, lured by the offer of a sparkling new stadium, upped sticks and moved to St Louis months later. The Raiders headed back to Oakland, leaving Los Angeles without a professional gridiron team for the first time since the early 1930s.  
Since then there have been repeated false dawns regarding the possibility of the NFL’s return to Los Angeles.  Often, the Damoclean threat of a move to Los Angeles has been wielded by hard-nosed franchise owners as a bargaining chip to extract better terms and conditions from their current host cities.  
“They can say, ‘If you don’t do what I want, I’m going to move the team, and by the way, Los Angeles is available,’” Smith College professor and sports economist Andrew Zimbalist told Rolling Stone magazine.  

Feverish speculation
The present feverish speculation surrounding the return of the NFL feels different, however.  
Not one but three teams are reported to be mulling relocation to the City of Angels, and experts are talking about the NFL’s return as a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.  
“I think you’re going to see one - if not two - teams in LA next season (2016),” says Jed York, chief executive of the San Francisco 49ers.  
“The teams will begin construction, but also play in a temporary venue.”  Former Oakland Raiders coach Jon Gruden, now an analyst on ESPN’s Monday Night Football, says a Los Angeles team in 2016 is “inevitable.”  
Asked on a recent conference call to give a mark out of 10 on the probability scale of an Los Angeles franchise, Gruden replied: “10”.  
“It’s gonna happen,” Gruden said, citing the land purchase and stadium plans at the site of the now demolished Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood by Stan Kroenke, the owner of the St Louis Rams.  
“There is just too much going on in that Hollywood Park area,” said Gruden.  “Hopefully it works out, and they get some real enthusiasm for football in Southern California. It’s a great place for football down there.”  

Temporary home
If Kroenke’s group can secure support from 23 of the NFL’s 31 other owners, the Rams could well be heading back to Los Angeles in 2016, with the only issue being finding a temporary home for them to play in.  
The historic Los Angeles Coliseum, the centerpiece of the 1932 and 1984 Olympics and the Rams’ former home, is the most likely frontrunner to house the newly relocated team.  
Yet while the Rams appear to be in pole position for a return, two other teams are also in the running.  
The Oakland Raiders, desperate to find a new home after co-habiting with the Oakland Athletics baseball team, are also mulling a return to Los Angeles from northern California.
It would be the second time the Raiders have relocated to Los Angeles having moved there once before in the 1980s before playing there for the last time, like the Rams, at the end of the 1994 season.  
The Raiders are looking at the possibility of moving to a new state-of-the-art $1.7 billion stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson, which they would share with the San Diego Chargers, who are also mulling a move.  
A meeting of NFL team owners in Los Angeles heard presentations from all teams planning a move, with a decision from the NFL expected early in 2016.