Los Angeles isn’t getting behind the Rams the way cities usually get behind winning football teams.
In fact, the L.A. market actually had a lower television rating for the Super Bowl than the country as a whole. According to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, the Los Angeles market had a 44.6 overnight rating, which is actually lower than the 44.9 overnight rating for the country as a whole.
It’s just about unheard of, not only for the Super Bowl but for any sporting event, for the market of one of the two teams in the game to get a lower rating than the country as a whole. (For comparison, Boston had a 57.4 overnight rating.)
The good news for the NFL is, that 44.6 overnight rating was the highest in Los Angeles for a Super Bowl since 1996. And the NFL badly wants to see interest in football increase in Los Angeles, because it’s the second-biggest market in America. Los Angeles has 5.3 million television households while St. Louis has 1.2 million, and that’s why the Rams moved back to Los Angeles from St. Louis. Even if the people who live in St. Louis, on average, care more about football than the people who live in Los Angeles.