Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis spoke out against the Oakland Athletics potential move to Las Vegas, accusing the A's of preventing the team from making improvements to the Oakland Coliseum and of not giving the Raiders a better chance to stay in Oakland. Davis' comments were made to the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the A's reportedly seek to follow the Raiders in moving out of the Oakland Coliseum and to Las Vegas.
The Raiders and the A's shared the Oakland Coliseum for many years, but the relationship between the two franchises was not a particularly cozy one. Specifically, the Raiders felt that the A's had undercut their efforts to either improve or replace the badly-outdated Coliseum, which eventually led to the Raiders moving out at the end of the 2019 NFL season.
"I won't forget what they did to us in Oakland. They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium," Davis claimed. "They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn't want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, 'We're the base team.'"
Due to the Athletics' lease on the Coliseum, the Raiders were unable to keep their home stadium up with the times for their purposes, leading to ownership eventually exploring other opportunities. Davis accused the Athletics of trying to keep the Bay Area market all to themselves, pointing out the betrayal of their "Rooted in Oakland" mantra that the A's potential move to Vegas now represents.
"The slogans they've been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well all they did was f--- the Bay Area," Davis said. "For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty (screwed) up."
The state of the Coliseum left the A's as the only tenant of the stadium following the 2019 season, as the Raiders left for Las Vegas despite an extensive heritage in the city. The Silver and Black became one of the NFL's pre-eminent franchises as the Oakland Raiders in the 1960s and 1970s, then returned to Oakland in 1995 after a dozen years in Los Angeles.
