So the author doesn't say that SAN was afraid of losing LA area fans, he says SAN was afraid of feeling they had to leave CA to get into a new stadium if STL and/or OAK ended up in LA. I wonder if you think that point of view is valid or not.
That is pretty much what the article's saying, though. The Chargers' plan B all along has been that, if San Diego won't agree to help build a stadium, they can get private money to build in LA. Basically "if you're going to make me build the stadium privately, I'll just build it 2 hours up the road in the metro that's 6x the size of this one". San Diego is only a bit bigger than St. Louis, and it's packed full of transplants and military folks--the type of people who tend not to support the local team. Historically--and I don't mean this as an insult to the city, I really like San Diego--it just isn't much of a sports city. They don't have a basketball team, they struggle to sell out football games even with 25% of their fans coming from LA/OC, and their baseball team, being unable to rely on LA/OC, is in the bottom third of the MLB in attendance (while both LA/OC teams are top 5).
If two teams move to LA, San Diego immediately drops down to the Jacksonville tier of unappealing NFL cities. It's possible to have a team in a metro with only 3 million people, but only if they support the hell out of the team and you can rely on surrounding metros for support. That's just not the case with San Diego if LA gets a team. It's a huge military base directly to the north cutting you off from the desirable parts of OC, desert directly to the east, Mexico directly to the south and the Pacific Ocean directly to the west. The best that they can hope for is getting southern Orange County, but they wouldn't get Anaheim, which is the part of OC that you really want. A stadium in Carson, after all, would be almost as close to Anaheim as it is to LA. And while Inglewood is a bit further away, the land that Kroenke is going to build on is still just 30 miles down the interstate from Anaheim (vs. 90 miles from Anaheim to Qualcomm stadium).
The Chargers have been taking it slow for the last 15 years because there's no particular urgency. The city is steadfast about not giving money for a new stadium--not when they got hosed on the Petco Park deal for the Padres and not when expanding the convention center is a higher priority for the city anyway. But the Chargers have been fine with just keeping the discussion ongoing and kicking the can down the road because, worst comes to worst, they've always had the option of packing up and moving 100 miles up the I-5 to LA. Spanos figured that he has the votes to block any other teams moving to LA, and somehow he failed to learn from Bob Irsay and Al Davis that if an owner wants to move he's moving, votes be damned.
Now that Kroenke has basically thrown the gauntlet down by buying a bunch of land in Inglewood, getting the necessary signatures, announcing that he's building, etc., Spanos has finally realized that it doesn't matter if he has the votes. At the end of the day, Kroenke is one of Goodell's bosses, and whatever the league says about how Kroenke 'can't' move... well, who's going to stop him? If Kroenke wants to move badly enough, it's going to happen, and it appears that he wants to. That's a nightmare scenario for the Chargers, because the Rams would come back with 50 years of established history in LA. The Chargers will lose LA and Anaheim overnight.
All along, I've thought that the ideal outcome involves the Rams and Chargers moving to LA, with the Raiders either staying put or moving elsewhere. The Rams have 50 years of history in LA and division rivals that are currently half a country away. They never should have left LA in the first place. And the Chargers make sense because once the NFL comes back to LA they'll need to bail on San Diego anyway. I could see the Chargers moving to LA and aggressively trying to spin this so that they can keep their existing fans (they'll still be the closest team to San Diego by a long shot) and establish themselves as the favorite team in Anaheim.
Basically, what you were quoting seems to me to be a different way of making pretty much the same point. If two teams come to LA, that's it for a football team in San Diego. And without the LA option, it would force the chargers into a situation where they'd have to start dumpster diving for NFL cities, since there aren't a whole lot of cities that can support an NFL team but don't already have one. The top candidates would probably end up being San Antonio (which Jerry Jones would fight tooth and nail) or St. Louis, both of which are a dramatic step down from LA obviously.
