One of the runts of the Los Angeles pro sports litter is making one of its biggest moves in franchise history, altering the shape of the local sports scene and the NFL in the process. 

On Wednesday night, the L.A. Chargers completed a five-year agreement to bring on Jim Harbaugh—fresh off his College Football Playoff championship run at Michigan—as its head coach, giving the Bolts a major jolt of energy aimed at resetting the team’s prospects both on and off the field.

The Chargers have struggled mightily in their seven seasons since relocating north from San Diego, reaching the playoffs just twice and perpetually existing in the long shadow of the much-more-popular L.A. Rams. That already-uneven dynamic—based in no small part on the teams’ sharing of SoFi Stadium, which is controlled by Rams owner Stan Kroenke—only grew further with the Rams’ triumph in Super Bowl LVI, two years ago. 

In each of the six non-COVID seasons the Rams and Chargers have played together in L.A., the Rams have surpassed the Chargers in average attendance. Team valuations tell a similar story, with the Rams’ $6.9 billion ranking third in the league, compared to the Chargers’ 25th-place ranking at $4.15 billion. The Rams’ annual revenue of $686 million and operating income of $125 million, according to Forbes estimates, also easily outdistance comparable figures of $518 million and $65 million for the Chargers.

But the Chargers now look to make all that ancient history with Harbaugh. “Who has it better than us?” team owner Dean Spanos asked in announcing the hiring, echoing Harbaugh’s recent catchphrase.

Mark Your Calendars

The hire immediately isolates an upcoming 2024 game between the Chargers and Baltimore Ravens as one of the biggest on the NFL’s schedule for next season. The Ravens—coached by Harbaugh’s older brother, John—will play the Chargers at SoFi Stadium, and the matchup will be highly coveted by each of the league’s rights holders as the NFL completes its schedule construction process this spring. That game will be a rematch of sorts of Super Bowl XLVII, in 2013, when the John-led Ravens beat a San Francisco 49ers team coached by Jim. 

The arrival of Harbaugh additionally extends Los Angeles’s status as a hub for many of the most prominent figures in sports, with the title-winning coach joining local luminaries such as Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Matthew Stafford, and Anze Kopitar. Many of those stars, however, will not have coverage on the road from the city’s newspaper of record, The Los Angeles Times, after a massive bloodletting at the outlet earlier this week. 

First came the boom for Peacock and parent company Comcast from a history-making exclusive live stream of an NFL playoff game. Now comes the much harder task of keeping new subscribers. 

The streaming platform’s coverage of the Kansas City Chiefs-Miami Dolphins wild-card game on Jan. 13 indeed generated a series of unprecedented results, including an average audience of 23 million that was the largest online in U.S. history, and the addition of 2.8 million subscribers in the days leading up to the game, according to Antenna, representing the “single-biggest subscriber acquisition event” measured by the industry research firm. 

Comcast furthered that optimism on Tuesday with quarterly results detailing an 11% rise in Peacock subscribers, to 31 million as of the end of 2023, compared to the prior quarter. Peacock revenues reached $1 billion, up 52% from the comparable period a year ago, while adjusted losses improved by 16% to $825 million. 

Please Don’t Go

But for company officials, a key priority is reducing churn among both those new customers and existing ones.

“At the scale we’ve gotten to, what’s important is to keep people engaged with the platform and all the content that’s there, not the wild-card game unto itself,” said Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s president. “So the job always is to get more people in the door and get everybody that’s already in the door re-engaged.”

Early results suggest some progress there, as Cavanagh said there were “record levels” of hours viewed in the days immediately following the Chiefs-Dolphins game. Promotion is also beginning to ramp up for the upcoming Paris Olympics, which will be streamed extensively on Peacock and which are being eyed by Comcast as another key tool to increase subscribers and consumption on the platform.

MLS clubs aren’t accustomed to the $100 million-plus transfer fees that are commonplace in Europe. But every now and then an MLS side will sell a promising player for a substantial monetary prize.

With less than a month to go before the 2024 season, FC Dallas was reportedly closing in on what would have been one of the 10 most expensive outgoing transfers in MLS history—but the league stepped in. According to The Athletic, Dallas received a $13 million bid from the Russian Premier League club FC Spartak Moscow for Jesus Ferreira, and both the club and player were ready to move forward. MLS blocked the deal due to “risks for American business entities doing business with Russian entities,” per the report. (MLS is a single-entity league and can therefore prevent transfers.)

Ferreira, 23, has been a member of the USMNT since 2020, and he has been part of the FC Dallas organization since 2016. Last season, he scored 12 goals for Dallas in 27 appearances. 

Sporting Politics

The hesitancy from MLS to allow one of its homegrown players to move to Russia comes in the aftermath of several complicated sporting situations involving a country that is still at war with Ukraine. Former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich’s status as a Russian oligarch led the English Premier League to force his eventual $5.4 billion sale of the team in 2022 to a group led by American investor Todd Boehly, who is also a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

That same year, WNBA star Brittney Griner spent nearly 10 months in a Russian prison for possession of medical marijuana before being released as part of a prisoner swap. Since Griner’s release, very few WNBA players have participated in Russia.