Parenting & Family Quote by Leigh Steinberg

Steinberg frames Los Angeles not as a fickle fanbase but as a market with amnesia, and that distinction does real work. His point isn’t simply that L.A. went without a team; it’s that absence isn’t neutral. It educates people. When a city loses its Sunday ritual, it doesn’t just lose ticket sales, it loses the habit of caring. That’s the quiet menace in “self-perpetuating”: fandom isn’t a natural resource you can tap whenever an owner wants leverage, it’s a culture you either cultivate or let die off.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the league and team owners who treat cities like interchangeable revenue platforms. Steinberg, an agent and dealmaker, knows that sports loyalty is usually discussed as if it’s irrationally permanent. He flips it: loyalty is learned behavior, reinforced by family routines, local media saturation, and the civic identity that forms around shared wins and humiliations. Remove the team long enough and you don’t get pent-up demand; you get replacement attachments - to college sports, to other NFL franchises, to entertainment options that compete for attention in a city already overloaded with them.

There’s also a subtle indictment of nostalgia politics. “They don’t know what they’re missing” is less an insult to kids than a critique of adults selling a past that no longer has a living constituency. Steinberg is describing a clock you can’t rewind: once a generation grows up without the team, the league’s bargaining chip turns into a bargaining deficit.