National Football League franchise moves and mergers


'Throughout the years, a number of teams in the National Football League have either moved or merged.
In the early years, the NFL was not stable and teams moved frequently to survive, or were folded only to be resurrected in a different city with the same players and owners. The Great Depression era saw the movement of most surviving small-town NFL teams to the large cities to ensure survival. Franchise mergers were popular during World War II in response to the scarcity of players. Few of these relocations and mergers were accompanied with widespread controversy.
Franchise moves became far more controversial in the late 20th century when a vastly more popular NFL, free from financial instability, allowed many franchises to abandon long-held strongholds for perceived financially greener pastures. Despite a Pete Rozelle promise to Congress not to relocate franchises in return for a law exempting the league from certain aspects of antitrust laws, making possible the AFL–NFL merger, several franchises have relocated in the years since the merger and the passage of the law which sanctioned it.
While owners invariably cited financial difficulties as the primary factor in such moves, many fans bitterly disputed these contentions, especially in Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cleveland, each of which eventually received teams some years after their original franchises left. However, Los Angeles, the second-largest media market in the United States, did not have an NFL team from 1995 to 2015. The league had started actively promoting a return to Los Angeles no later than 2006, and in January 2016, the NFL gave the St. Louis Rams approval to move back to Los Angeles. A year later, the San Diego Chargers also relocated to the city, while the Oakland Raiders relocated to Las Vegas in 2020.
Within the United States, the San Diego–Tijuana market is currently the largest metropolitan area without an NFL franchise. The only other city to be seriously considered in the country in recent times was San Antonio, Texas, which the Raiders seriously considered as a relocation candidate in 2014 before choosing Las Vegas instead. Speculation on future relocation has mainly been centered around two larger cities outside the United States: Toronto, Canada ' and London, England, United Kingdom , the latter of which would be the first attempt by one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada to place a team outside North America.
Additionally, with the increasing suburbanization of the U.S., the building of new stadiums and other team facilities in the suburbs instead of the central city became popular from the 1970s.

Timeline

Teams making more significant moves, in chronological order

The NFL considers these continuous franchises that relocated to different metropolitan areas.
The list also includes franchises from the 1960s American Football League that moved during that league's existence. The NFL and AFL agreed to merge in 1966, with the merger taking effect in 1970. All AFL franchises were accepted into the NFL, and the NFL incorporated the AFL's history, records, and statistics.
The NFL considers these separate franchises but there is significant continuity from one to the other
The following are not actually relocations, but temporary moves because these teams' home stadiums were either under construction or otherwise adversely affected:
By the start of the 1920 APFA season, the nascent National Football League was composed of 15 franchises. Of those teams, only two are still in operation :