Days after news broke that Rams owner Stan Kroenke plans to build a stadium in Los Angeles, St. Louis has unveiled a plan to build a new stadium of its own, either to entice the Rams to stay or to bring in another NFL team down the road if the Rams leave.
The plan, unveiled at an event in St. Louis today, acknowledges that the Edward Jones Dome is obsolete by NFL stadium standards and proposes that a new, 64,000-seat stadium be built in its place.
According to Jim Thomas of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the proposal calls for the stadium to open by 2020 and cost about $900 million. The idea is for about half of the stadium cost to be publicly financed and the rest to come from the NFL and Kroenke.
St. Louis may be serious about trying to keep the Rams, but that doesn’t mean Kroenke wants to stay. It’s telling that Kroenke hasn’t been talking to St. Louis civic leaders about his plans, and no one from the Rams attended today’s unveiling of the St. Louis stadium plan. If St. Louis does build a new stadium, it may be a stadium that another team moves into, after the Rams move away.
