Well shit. The Chargers actually moved to LA. That came out of nowhere on Wednesday night. And it sucks.

I guess I never thought it would actually happen. The Rams? I thought the Rams would happen. I can even see the Raiders moving easily happening. But I really thought the Chargers would stay in SD after last year put the move on hold. It’s just so easy to forget how much owners like money.

This is the strangest team move I’ve ever been witness to. It feels like the only person happy about it is Dean Spanos himself. When other teams have moved, the recipient city is normally excited about it. Baltimore was happy to get the Browns. Indy was happy to get the Colts. Usually moves are full of heartbreak but the new city is at least happy. LA doesn’t seem to want the Chargers. LA got a team. It’s a bad team, but it got a team. A team it knew. A team it had history with. A team the people were happy to get. They don’t want the Chargers. They have no meaningful history with the Chargers. The Chargers are already second fiddle. They are going to play ball in a small soccer stadium then be the weirdo cheap roommate to the Rams. They moved, purely for money. It’s incredibly depressing. The team gave up the city that wanted them but couldn’t really afford them to move to a city that doesn’t want them to be second fiddle, and the owner doesn’t care because the net worth will likely go up a little.

The best article I’ve found about all this, and possibly the most depressing, is this article on Fox Sports (I highly recommend the read), which basically goes into what the Chargers really moved for and why the fans who cry out and go to games honestly don’t matter much anymore.Even though nobody in LA really wanted the Chargers, they will still likely go up in value, which gives Spanos what he wants. I’ve read a few stories (mostly unsubstantiated) that might indicate the other owners didn’t even want this to happen and were trying to convince Spanos to stay put. When the other owners, who would benefit from an increased team value for the Chargers thanks to revenue sharing, are trying to keep that from happening, I think it’s a damning sign on Spanos.

The best thing to come out of it so far is the logo mess. The morning after the news was swiftly announced, sending fans into a state of shock, they immediately release a new logo for the changed brand, and they got promptly torn to shreds by the internet. I haven’t seen this many slam dunks (By official sports accounts too!) on a team in my time on the web, ever. There are minor league baseball teams dunking on the Chargers for this. The mocking is relentless. They are taking the piss out of every part. The fact that it looks like the Dodgers logo, the 90’s EXTREME sorta font, the little lightning bolt. Honestly, I don’t hate the logo taken on it’s own merits. It’s bland and not particularly inspired, but I think most of the hate is coming from a place of “Fuck the Chargers” and less “This logo sucks”. Also, to those folks who want to shit on the designer, don’t. As any designer in history will tell you, it’s the client who usually doesn’t know what they want and demand you make changes from actual good ideas. I highly doubt the designer of this logo was passionate about this one. He probably went through a whole slew of ideas and Spanos/Whoever forced this one into existence. I bet they knew full well they were ripping off the Dodgers logo. In fact, I bet that was part of the point, and I would place a lot of money that some executive said “Los Angeles Brand Synergy”.

Soon after the backlash hit the logo tweet was deleted (still used for the avatar) and some official spokesman claimed “This isn’t the new logo, just something for marketing purposes” which REEKS of “Oh shit we messed up backpedal everyone kill the designer nobody will know we worked on this for a year”. So the Chargers changed the logo. How? They changed the colors to powder blue and yellow, because that’s what people were mocking. Dear god this franchise is a mess, I can’t stop laughing.

San Diegoans, you deserved better.

Here were my logo mocks, by the way

Alladin

LACharge