☘️SULLi ☘️

These posts about Chargers attendance in San Diego being poor completely ignore the Spanos family destroying the goodwill between the team and the public in the 90s. In 1995 they got the City to add 10,000+ seats and suites to the stadium and build them a practice facility. A $78M renovation, with Qualcomm covering $18M for the naming rights. They also got a guarantee that taxpayers would buy every unsold ticket. Then they had 4, 5, 8, 1, and 5 win seasons following the expansion opening. The seats THEY demanded sat empty while they trotted out an awful product, and the City had to pay $36M for them. Roughly $100M in public money. Three years after the expansion opened, Alex Spanos said publicly they needed a new stadium. Two years after that, Dean Spanos told the mayor the stadium wasn't viable and started pushing for a new one. Here's even better context: the Chargers played 28 seasons in that stadium before the 1995 lease negotiation. Every stadium renovation I can find came from public money. Petco has been played in for 23 seasons. It is 5 years away from being as old as the stadium was when the Spanos family demanded the City dump money into it. Years later, when games didn't sell out, they declined the NFL's option to lower the sellout threshold and wouldn't pay $238K to lift the blackout on their own 2010 home opener. Teams like the Jaguars bought back unsold tickets at about a third of face value to keep games on local TV. Some reports suggest teams that did ticket buy-backs actually ran a profit on the move from concessions/parking from the donated tickets. Now look at Petco. It was mostly publicly funded too. Taxpayers covered $301M of 474M. Both teams played in buildings the City majority-owned (the Padres hold a 30% stake they forfeit to the City when their tenancy ends). The difference is what the tenant did next. Per the team, the Padres have put over $100M of their own money into the park since it opened. The same offseason they borrowed $50M to cover cash flow, they still spent $20M on Gallagher Square. Think of it like a rental history. The Chargers spent 50 years in a City-owned stadium with every renovation on record paid by the public. A practice facility the City built for them. They left for a leased office building in Costa Mesa where, by 2023, their own players graded the training room an F-, called the tubs "gross," and only half believed Spanos would pay to fix it. And if you think that's ancient history: when Jim Harbaugh was hired in 2024, one of his first stops with his new strength coach was HOME DEPOT. They bought a Shop-Vac and Magic Erasers and cleaned the weight room themselves. That's from the Chargers' own website. Would you rent to that tenant? Would you award with another city-funded stadium and trust they would handle the upkeep? And calling Padres fans bandwagoners is a JOKE. Bandwagon for what? The Padres have ZERO division titles under A.J. Preller. The Dodgers just won the West for the 13th time in 14 years. No pennant since 1998. They set the franchise attendance record in 2023, an 82-80 season with no playoffs. Nobody is showing up for trophies, though that’s the shared goal and vision. They're showing up for owners who invested. That's the difference in fan support between the current Padres and the San Diego Chargers. The Spanos family NEVER invested as a decent business owner would, trusting that profits would flow from smart spending into their own product and fan experience. Instead, they routinely leveraged themselves against the City to get as much public investment into the team while personally spending as little as possible. The Padres ownership groups haven't always been the best actors, but the recent groups have become beloved and supported in the stands because of their personal and financial investment into the team, and into us.