Over the 20-year absence of the National Football League from Los Angeles many proposals were made for stadiums that would attract an NFL team to the Los Angeles Area. The trend began in 1995 when a stadium planned to be built in Hollywood Park was rejected by Los Angeles Raiders owner Al Davis in favor of relocating back to Oakland, California due to a stipulation that he would have had to share the stadium with a future second team.

It was SoFi Stadium in Inglewood that the league ultimately accepted in a January 2016 meeting ending the league's absence in the market and the absence of a suitable long term stadium for NFL football. After five years of construction the stadium became the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers in 2020. This article covers the numerous stadium proposals for Los Angeles between 1995 and 2016.

In 1996, Ken Behring, the then-owner of the Seattle Seahawks, expressed unhappiness with his team's facility, the Kingdome, and moved the team's offices to Anaheim, California, where the Rams had played from 1980 until they moved to St. Louis in 1995. However, the move was never completed, and the Seahawks eventually were sold to Paul Allen, who was instrumental in getting a new deal done with Seattle to build what is now Lumen Field. The Seahawks moved into the new stadium for the 2002 season.

In early May 1998, entertainment guru Michael Ovitz announced he would lead a largely privately financed $750 million project to build a stadium and shopping center called "The Hacienda" in Carson, California in hopes of landing the expansion team.

In late October 1998, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced that the NFL owners would indeed expand the league to 32 teams, and would decide by April 1999 which city would be awarded the NFL expansion franchise. Meanwhile, Ovitz now had competition coming from his own market, as real estate developer Ed Roski announced a rival bid for a future Los Angeles team; his proposal centered around putting a 68,000-seat stadium inside the shell of the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

On March 16, 1999, the NFL owners, by a 29–2 vote, approved a resolution to award Los Angeles the expansion 32nd franchise. However, the award was contingent on the city's putting together an acceptable ownership team and stadium deal by September 15. If the parties could not reach an agreement or be reasonably close to doing so, the committee would then turn its recommendation to Houston, who had put in an expansion team bid to replace the Houston Oilers, who had relocated to Nashville and subsequently rebranded as the Tennessee Titans.

A month later, NFL executives flew to Los Angeles, and were shocked at the lack of progress: Los Angeles would not allow tax dollars to be used for a new stadium, the competing groups were locked in a standoff as neither would concede its bid to the other nor would the groups agree to combine their efforts in attempts to put together a deal, and neither group was prepared to build a state-of-the-art facility, which rival expansion team bidder Houston had promised since 1997.

A return visit in late May yielded little change: Ovitz and Roski were still locked in a standoff; Roski's bid remained unchanged since the onset, while Ovitz unveiled plans to turn the area around the Coliseum into a 60-acre (240,000 m²) complex of parks, parking garages, shopping areas and a brand-new stadium. Though Tagliabue and the NFL officials were pleased with the concept, they were daunted by the costs which included $225 million for parking garages, especially since neither Los Angeles nor the State of California was willing to commit the necessary funds.