Report: AEG Throws In The Towel On Downtown L.A.'s Farmers Field

Sports and entertainment behemoth AEG has admitted defeat for one of its signature projects—Farmers Field, the proposed downtown Los Angeles NFL stadium—with the Los Angeles Times reporting that AEG “has informed city officials that it will not seek an extension of an April 17 deadline to secure a team.” AEG first announced the project in 2010, and the LA Times reports that the company sunk $50 million into the project in the succeeding five years, but to no avail.

Two other groups are competing to build stadiums in the Los Angeles area—one in Carson that would house the Raiders and Chargers, and one in Inglewood that would house the Rams—and they are much further along than AEG’s proposal. The Inglewood stadium has already been approved (in a shady-ass maneuver that bypassed a vote by the citizens of Inglewood) by the Inglewood City Council, while the LA Times reports that the Carson project will begin gathering signatures to get an initiative regarding the stadium on the ballot soon.

It became clear just how desperate AEG’s stadium bid was the other week, when the LA Times revealed the existence of a report assessing the security of the rival Inglewood stadium proposal that AEG had commissioned former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to write. The report was a joke, a grab bag of every baseless terrorism “threat” Ridge could come up with that would make the Inglewood project look bad. The report seems to be too little, too late, as the Inglewood project is now the favorite to be built, and AEG’s is no more.

[ Los Angeles Times]

Photo via Nick Ut/AP