San Diego taxpayers are still paying off a stadium that no longer physically exists. Qualcomm — later SDCCU — Stadium was demolished in 2021, yet the city carries roughly $11.5 million in outstanding bond principal on it, costing taxpayers close to $5 million a year for a building that’s now a parking lot. That fact alone should frame any conversation about bringing professional football back to San Diego. Here is a scenario worth game-planning before it becomes a real proposal, not after — because the financial skeleton of one is already sitting in plain sight.
The real thread already connecting these two franchises
This isn’t built from nothing. Tom Gores, the Detroit Pistons owner, purchased a 27% stake in the Los Angeles Chargers from the Spanos family in 2024, and this year he was one of four groups that toured Padres facilities and submitted bids in the team’s roughly $3.9 billion sale process — a sale MLB owners have since approved, with buyers Marc Feliciano and John Jones taking control. Gores didn’t win the Padres bid. But the fact that a sitting Chargers part-owner was seriously circling San Diego’s other major franchise in the same year the Padres changed hands is the kind of overlap that makes a “what if” worth running the numbers on: what would it actually take, financially, for San Diego’s new baseball ownership circle — or any well-capitalized local group — to pry the Chargers loose from the Spanos family and bring them home to a remodeled Snapdragon Stadium?
The stadium is already built for exactly this question
Unlike most “bring the team home” fantasies, this one doesn’t require building a stadium from scratch. Snapdragon Stadium, which opened in 2022 on the old Qualcomm site, was designed from the start with football expansion in mind. Its current capacity of 35,000 is expandable to 55,000, and the original architectural plans explicitly left room to grow to the NFL-desired 65,000 seats “should there be actual need for it.” That is a remarkably specific detail to have designed into a college stadium — evidence that someone, at some point, was hedging on exactly this scenario.
But “designed for expansion” and “affordably expandable” are different claims. Snapdragon’s own construction history is the first warning sign: initial cost estimates of $150 million more than doubled to a final $310 million by the time the stadium opened — before a single seat was added for NFL capacity. If a 35,000-to-65,000-seat expansion — adding roughly 85% more seating, plus the premium suites, sightline reconfiguration, broadcast infrastructure, and NFL-grade security and concourse requirements a league franchise demands — followed anything like that same cost trajectory, taxpayers and ownership groups should expect final numbers well north of whatever the opening bid promises. San Diego has now watched this exact pattern play out twice: once with Qualcomm-turned-Snapdragon, and once with the still-stalled Convention Center expansion, where a modernization plan meant to use 2020-approved hotel-tax revenue has been delayed by land disputes and cost estimates approaching $1 billion for the fuller build-out originally promised to voters.
Who actually pays, and the phantom-debt lesson that applies here
Any realistic remodel scenario has to answer a question San Diego has answered before, badly: who is on the hook if costs balloon or the deal falls through? SDSU owns Snapdragon Stadium outright, having bought the 135-acre Mission Valley site from the city for $88 million in 2020. That ownership structure matters — it means a Chargers-to-Snapdragon deal would run through a public university, not a private landlord, which puts public financing questions on the table by default. San Diego’s own recent history offers the clearest warning against assuming the team’s arrival, if it happened, would just be free money: the city is still paying $5 million a year for a stadium that was torn down four years ago. A publicly financed piece of a $500 million-plus NFL-grade renovation — even a modest one — could easily outlive both the ownership group that proposed it and the fans celebrating the return.
What would actually need to happen
For this scenario to move from hypothetical to real, several pieces would need to align that currently don’t: the Spanos family would need to be a willing seller of a controlling interest, not just additional minority stakes like the one Gores already holds; the new Padres ownership group — or another sufficiently capitalized local buyer — would need appetite for a second major-league acquisition immediately after closing a $3.9 billion baseball deal; SDSU would need to negotiate lease and expansion terms that don’t simply shift construction risk onto the city the way the original Qualcomm bonds did; and the NFL itself would need to sign off on relocating a franchise back to a market it left in 2017, precisely the kind of decision the league has historically been reluctant to reverse. Each of those is a real negotiation with real leverage on both sides, not a formality — and any one of them stalling would be enough to keep this in the realm of speculation indefinitely.
The accountability bottom line
None of that makes the scenario impossible — the ownership overlap between the Chargers and this year’s Padres sale process is real, and the stadium’s expansion capacity was quite literally built into its bones. But San Diego doesn’t have to wait for a formal proposal to start asking the right questions. The city is currently paying for a stadium that doesn’t exist. Before it entertains paying for a new one that might, taxpayers deserve a public accounting of who bears construction risk, who backstops cost overruns, and whether the last two “modernization” projects — Snapdragon and the Convention Center — are the model anyone should want to repeat.
Jose Navarro is a Certified Public Accountant candidate and financial analyst with more than 20 years of experience in nonprofit, healthcare, and government finance. He publishes The Navarro Report, an independent outlet focused on fiscal accountability and government spending.
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