With the recent death of long-time team owner Ralph Wilson and the impending sale of the organization, there's been heavy speculation that a new owner could relocate the Bills out of Buffalo and into greener pastures. According to the Buffalo News, however, the makeup of the stadium lease and the local ties of the lead suitors could keep the franchise at home.
Bills could stay in Buffalo thanks to stadium lease, local interest
Rumblings of a move to Los Angeles could be premature, as an airtight stadium lease and the emergence of a powerful Buffalo-based suitor could ensure the Bills stay in western New York.
Timothy T. Ludwig-USA TODAY Spor
Sources tell the Buffalo News that the Jacobs family, the owner of the Buffalo-based Delaware North Companies, is currently the leading local candidate to purchase the team. Jeremy M. Jacobs Sr., the paternal head of the family and CEO of the company, is worth a reported $3.1 billion.
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The most significant hangup in Jacobs purchasing the Bills is the fact that he already owns the Boston Bruins of the NHL. NFL rules prevent a team from being owned by someone who owns a team in another sports league unless that team is based in the same city as the NFL franchise. A potential workaround could be one of Jacobs’s three sons divesting themselves of any holdings and connections with the Bruins in order to buy the Bills.
Jacobs’s son, Jeremy Jr., was quoted by the Buffalo News in 2012 as saying the family “will do what we can to ensure that the Bills stay in [Buffalo].”
Even if an outsider purchases the Bills with the intent to move them to a larger market like Los Angeles, the team’s lease on Ralph Wilson Stadium could prevent them from doing so. The Bills lease with New York State and Erie County has them locked into Buffalo until at least 2019. Any chance at relocation opens up during a one-year window in 2020, when the team can terminate the lease at the cost of $28.3 million.
“The lease’s structure and the non-relocation agreement structure is a major inhibitor for someone to come in and buy the team with the speculative expectation of relocating the team to a different market,” Marc Ganis of SportsCorp Ltd. told the Buffalo News.
"It's not an assurance, but it certainly adds to the probability that the team will stay somewhere in the region," added Amy Trask, a former executive with the Oakland Raiders familiar with the lease agreement.
As is the case any time NFL relocation is discussed, Los Angeles has been the most frequently rumored landing spot for a potential Bills move. But Ganis, an expert on the So Cal market, believes the lease will scare off even the most enthusiastic L.A. suitors.
An L.A. buyer would have to fork up the purchase amount knowing that there was no chance to move the team in the next five years and without a guarantee that the league would clear the move when the opportunity did arrive.
“The problem with that is you don’t control your own destiny on at least two levels, but actually it’s more than two levels,” Ganis said. “One is whether the NFL will permit the Bills to relocate to another market. A corollary to that is whether the NFL would permit the team to relocate to Los Angeles itself. The next issue is whether another team will have relocated into Los Angeles in the intervening years.”
Other prominent candidates to buy the team include New York entrepreneur Donald Trump, Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula and former Sabres owner B. Thomas Golisano.
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