For the third time in little more than a year, an American football team is packing its bags and moving away. The Oakland Raiders are relocating to Las Vegas, where they await $650 million from Bank of America and $750 million from taxpayers in order to finance a new stadium, according to a March 27 MarketWatch article. The team has the blessings of the National Football League, an organization that is willing to overlook its aversion to sports gambling and small television markets if it can partake in the extortion of yet another community. In the NFL, teams are forever on the prowl for new markets and fancier stadiums, and whatever city is foolish enough to waste public funds on courting a professional football team can part ways with their money with great ease.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Fans of the San Diego Chargers went through the same grief two months ago when the team’s billionaire owner, Dean Spanos, failed to get public funding for a new stadium for which he could have easily footed the bill. So after the citizens of San Diego refused to pay for something they should have been getting for free, Spanos announced to fans in a Jan. 12 statement on NFL.com that the Chargers would be better off in Los Angeles, where they can play second fiddle to the Los Angeles Rams, who relocated just a year ago. At least the Rams had once been the hometown team of Los Angeles before they returned there last year after a 21-year stint in St. Louis. Yet the Rams, too, forsook genuine negotiations with their former city to pursue the open coffers of Orange County. And while the Rams struggled to fill the stands in their temporary home of the L.A. Coliseum, their own billionaire owner, Stan Kroenke, at least had a more valuable team.

The fans are inconsequential. The NFL is not really about them, after all. Its owners are actually getting quite creative in finding ways to cut them out of the game. When the San Francisco 49ers opened their new stadium some 40 miles away from the city, owner Jed York instituted personal seat licenses for season tickets. Diehard 49er fans now have to pay a fee anywhere between $2,000 and $80,000 merely for the right to purchase season tickets, which cost another $850 to $3,750 per year, according to an Aug. 12, 2016 Mercury News article. It hardly mattered when the 49ers went 2-14 last season and attendance plummeted; Jed York got his payday.

Money, not deflated footballs, is what the NFL really cares about. While New Englanders would love to pin all the ills of the league on Commissioner Roger Goodell, the greed belongs to a 32-man club of one-percenters that somehow manage to avoid blame from their fans. The owners, in fact, must be ecstatic that they get the spoils of three relocation fees totaling $1.65 billion in such a short amount of time. Business is booming, even if television ratings are not. Major media networks paid the NFL roughly $7 billion in broadcasting rights, and those networks themselves made a record $3.5 billion in ad revenue in spite of the 8 percent decline in ratings, according to a March 1 Forbes article. It has proved to be a truly great time to be an NFL mogul, especially with two teams now part of the esteemed Los Angeles television market and another entering America’s most infamous tourist trap.

There is little wonder that professional football is considered to have its own national holiday each February. If it were not for Sunday religious services, the NFL might also be the exclusive owners of a day of the week for five months out of the year. They provide a good product, too: football is particularly notorious for the “any given Sunday” spirit where anything is possible — just ask fans of the Atlanta Falcons. So in many ways, the NFL has nothing to worry about. Whether it be falling ratings, relocation outrage or concerns over the propensity of concussions, the money will keep coming in. There’s little else to watch on a Sunday afternoon, and the American addiction to gridiron action is too widespread. And those fans that lost their team? They can just follow another one! All they need is a $281.94 annual subscription to NFL Sunday Ticket, a more than 9 percent increase in price from last year according to a Feb. 7 Fierce Cable article, all so they can watch all those games no longer being broadcast in their market.

Of course, that’s no consolation to football fans in Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis. What has happened over the last year has been a reminder that the NFL is a business that only pretends to care about fostering a community, with cutesy slogans on their official website like “Football is family.” Apparently, that means the kind of family that leaves their longtime home to chase after monied men.