The NFL's Search for El Dorado

· A sense that the NFL is disingenuous in its dealings with the region's various cities.

· Fan apathy.

· A soft corporate base that has already spread its money around six other professional sports teams and two major colleges and might not be willing to spend big on luxury suites and season tickets for a football team.

The NFL has considered sites all over this region called the Southland and it has never suffered each one's shortcomings for long. A major complaint among everyone in Los Angeles who has done business with the league is that it has often secretly turned its attention to a different site while still smiling at the one it had been negotiating with. For instance, even as the NFL worked deals to finalize a lease with the coliseum and a possible land purchase agreement with Anaheim this spring, it had talks with Dodgers owner Frank McCourt about building a football field next to Dodger Stadium atop Chavez Ravine, a hillside near downtown.

"I've never been involved in a deal like this," said Mark Ridley-Thomas, a member of the state assembly from Los Angeles who used to represent Parks's district and is a longtime advocate of bringing football back to the coliseum. "Periodically they create competition -- Carson one day and Pasadena the next. They tell us Carson is the first choice and then it's Pasadena, They're constantly moving the ball on us. They're always trying to leverage one venue against the next. There's something about Los Angeles that makes them drive up the price and that impedes the deal."

Then again, with so many political entities, there's a lot about Los Angeles that makes cutting a deal with one place very difficult.

As Neil Glat, the league's vice president for strategic planning and its point man on Los Angeles, says: "The reality is when you are dealing with a project of this scale you have to wade through a lot of complications. I think we're at a point where we understand how difficult it is" to build a stadium in Southern California.

A Very Expensive Lure

So what's in this for the NFL?

To buy a franchise in Los Angeles or Anaheim will cost a potential owner at least $1.5 billion. That's $800 million for the stadium -- which the league will pay for until it is bought back by the new owner -- and $700 million for the franchise. Both might be conservative figures. Construction costs have a way of climbing, and $700 million was what McNair paid seven years ago for the Texans. With five teams already worth more than $1 billion, according to the latest Forbes magazine estimates, who's to say the team's price this time, should it be an expansion team or otherwise, might not be more like $900 million?

Added to the stadium costs, it could become a $2 billion purchase.

And is anything -- even a state-of-the art stadium in Los Angeles or Anaheim -- worth that kind of money?

Apparently so, because there seem to be several willing buyers, among them the billionaire Larry Ellison or Philip Anschutz, who owns pieces of several sports teams including Major League Soccer's D.C. United and the Staples Center in Los Angeles, or Casey Wasserman, the grandson of the late movie mogul Lew Wasserman. And all of them understand the stakes are very different this time than in 1999 when they were outbid by McNair and Houston. For the league, this could be a perfect storm. It got an unexpected windfall from Houston's overwhelming bid seven years ago and still gets to put the Los Angeles market up for auction with a beautiful new stadium as the bait.