It is interesting to be in southern California this week (hard, gruelling and inhumanely warm, but interesting nonetheless) as the city of San Diego continues its year-long debate about sports facilities.

Once upon a time the city was mighty proud of its splendid NFL facility, the mighty and daunting Jack Murphy Stadium, a lovely cookiecutter of an edifice planted in a sea of parking spaces and kissed by sunshine all year round. This wonder was named, quaintly, after a local sports editor who played an instrumental role in bringing the San Diego Chargers to the city in the 1960s.

Sports editors are likely to get little by way of good things in the next life so it is nice to see one of that unfortunate breed honoured in this life.

Sadly old Jack Murphy has been demobbed, defenestrated, disremembered. Last year Qualcomm, a local high tech communications company gave the city of San Diego a wad of money ($18 million) to help pay for reconstruction work on the stadium. As part of the deal the local council agreed to change the name of the stadium to Qualcomm Stadium, a name which has no history, no sentiment, no meaning or no story behind it. Heaven forefend of course that the two tenants who share the stadium should have chipped in the money and kept the name.

Until now the local baseball team, the San Diego Padres and the local football unit the aforementioned and aptly named Chargers have happily co-existed in the splendid stadium, taking the gate money, the TV receipts and the corporate sector loot.

Now though the baseballing Padres who hosted their half of the world series here in 1984 are itching to get a stadium of their own and the city is all a fluster to help provide one. San Diego knows the routine. In modern professional sports when your local team makes that call telling you that you'll never see your boys again unless . . . the first rule is to pay the ransom, just pay the ransom.

It's a cruel world and for empirical proof San Diegans have only to look up the coast to Los Angeles which despite being the second biggest market in the US was shorn of both of it's football teams in 1995. The Raiders returned to Oakland and the Rams scooted off to St Louis on a sweet deal involving a nice stadium and some tax breaks.

The difficulty, surprise surprise, is money. The NFL is still digesting the exquisite richness of a new TV deal which will bring it $17.6 billion (yes billion) over the next eight years. The figures just jumped straight past the chandeliers of the San Diego ballroom where NFL owners met this week and right through the roof of their dreams.

The Jacksonville Jaguars and the Carolina Panthers paid $140 million to get in through the front door of the League two seasons ago. The next expansion (giving a team back to Cleveland bereft since a greedy owner packed up) is expected to cost an admission fee of $500 million.

With that price tag dangling the spivs of the city of Los Angeles are casting about for a team amidst sensational rumours that the Raiders, are interested in moving back again.

The feeling in San Diego this week was that the NFL would move hell or high water to get a team into LA before the turn of the century. It will, said a spokesman with a good grasp of the obvious, either be an established franchise (deserting another city) or an entirely new operation who will pony up the $500 million.

"If it was an established team you'd see the New England Patriots out there," said Robert Kraft of the new England Patriots. Mr Kraft is currently putting the arm on the city of Boston to build him a new stadium.

The amusing thing about the situation is that according to polls most of the people in LA have had enough of the NFL by now and would happily live out the rest of their lives without having another team dipping into their wallets. Sixty per cent say, thanks, but no thanks.

It's too big a market for that, however, and the smart money in LA now is on sporting armageddon. The grim reaper is about to say G'day.

Rupert Murdoch, the worst thing to happen to sport since steroids were invented is in the process of purchasing the Los Angeles Dodgers (who began the whole process by selling out Brooklyn in 1957) baseball franchise and Rupert's plan is to move into LA and operate a football franchise in tandem with the Dodgers.

Thus would give Rupert the sort of integrated market position enjoyed by one Chuck Dolan in New York. Rupert has long envied Chuck.

Chuck owns Cablevision. He also owns Madison Square Gardens, the New York Rangers Hockey team, the New York Knicks basketball team, and cable rights for the New York Yankees baseball team. He also owns the rights to the New York Mets (baseball) New Jersey Nets (basketball, kind of) plus the New Jersey Devils and New York Islanders (hockey).

This is an ingeniously simple three-step integration plan. Step One: Buy the franchises or significant parts thereof. Step Two: Buy the broadcast rights, then make some agreements with yourself. Step Three: Get all those games of free TV. Stick the bulk of them onto your cable network. Stick the juicy ones onto pay per view.

In this business all the old threads of sport have been broken. There is no continuity, no loyalty, no point. Rupert will give gridiron football back to LA and there will be grumbling and sulking but eventually because the media will devour the personalities and because sport is always a gripping narrative LA will come around and people will buy the hats and wear the sweatshirts and purchase the pay per view. Not fans. Just customers. Sad.

Only in America? Not when you listen to Jean-Louis Dupont opining last week about the depressing prospect of the Dublin Dons.

"Wimbledon is a club without an audience," said Dupont who is Wimbledon's latest and most dangerous hired gun "and Dublin is the biggest city in Europe without a football club. They would be playing to a full stadium every week instead of a few thousand people. They would have the whole of Ireland behind them and every match would be like an international."

Well aren't we Irish a simple minded obliging bunch of suckers. And what will the Dublin Dons bring to Dublin?

The further tabloidisation of daily life, a dimunition of diversity and a discernible increase in the levels of demographic homogeneity between ourselves and the rest of the world. We have all the franchises and all the labels, how do we know we are ourselves anymore?

It's frightening. We in the media will send at least two reporters to each game, we will hang on every word and throw streamers from the best seats in the bandwagon.

Even in Lalaland, 60 per cent have come to understand that big time pro sport is a contradiction in terms.