The Los Angeles Chargers, also nicknamed the Bolts or Super Chargers, are a professional football team based in Inglewood, California. They are members of the National Football League (NFL) as part of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the AFC West division. Established in 1960, the Chargers currently play in SoFi Stadium, with which they share with the NFC's Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California.
The club began play in 1960 as a charter member of the American Football League (AFL), spending its first season in Los Angeles then moving to San Diego in 1961. The Chargers won one AFL Championship in 1963 before joining the NFL in 1970 as part of the AFL-NFL Merger. The Chargers appeared in Super Bowl XXIX in 1994, losing to the San Francisco 49ers. The Chargers played in San Diego up until 2016 when they opted to relocate to Los Angeles to join the Rams in their Inglewood stadium.
Since 1970 when the Chargers joined the NFL, the Green Bay Packers have defeated the Chargers in ten out of twelve head-to-head regular season games, one the highest winning percentage (83%) the Packers hold against all current NFL teams. The Chargers two victories came during the 1984 and 2019 seasons.
The San Diego Chargers were established with seven other American Football League (AFL) teams in 1959. As owner, Barron Hilton agreed after his general manager, Frank Ready picked the "Chargers" name when he purchased an AFL franchise for Los Angeles, naming it the Los Angeles Chargers.
“I liked it because they were yelling ‘charge’ and sounding the bugle at Dodgers Stadium and at USC games.”
Despite Hilton's appreciation for the Los Angeles chant, the Chargers only played one season in Los Angeles. In 1961, the franchise moved 120 miles south to San Diego, renaming themselves the San Diego Chargers.
On January 12, 2017, the Chargers opted to leave San Diego to move back to the Los Angeles area after more than half a century away, planning to join the Los Angeles Rams in their new Inglewood stadium once completed in 2020. The decision came from current owner Dean Spanos as Qualcomm Stadium was becoming severely outdated and the team could not find any funding help from the city to build a new one.
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Team history[]
San Diego Chargers
