By admin 
It was dark on Jan. 11, 2017 when reports began spreading the news San Diego had spent years fearing: The Chargers were leaving for Los Angeles.
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Dan Wellington was already out filming a video when he heard it on the radio.
By then, Wellington had built a sizable internet following making public prank videos, a hobby he had turned into a full-time business. The Chargers had nothing to do with what he was filming that night.
Until they did.
Wellington knew where angry fans would gather – Chargers Park – and figured most would burn jerseys or dump memorabilia.
He wanted to do something different to show his displeasure.
So he stopped at a grocery store and bought a dozen eggs.
He arrived early enough that only a few people were outside the team headquarters. Security was there. So was a local television station.
Wellington started a Periscope broadcast in his car, showing the eggs before walking toward the glass doors of the building.
“You know what might happen, though?” he told viewers. “I’m going to throw these eggs, I’m going to hit my target, and these (expletives) are going to want to sign me.”
Before he threw anything, an NBC 7 reporter approached him.
Wellington called the relocation “a total kick in the stomach” and questioned why ownership would spend millions to leave San Diego rather than put that money toward staying.
Above all, he made one thing clear: He could never root for a team from Los Angeles.
Then the interview ended.
Wellington turned back toward the building.
He told viewers he might go to jail, and then he started throwing.
The first egg splattered against the building. Another followed.
Wellington expected security to stop him.
Nobody did.
“They were just like, whatever, like, have at it,” he remembers now. “They were probably pissed, too.”
So he kept throwing.
By morning, Wellington’s protest had gone national. Police had come and gone without arresting him. Television shows called. Memes circulated about his throwing arm.
Then the Chargers made it official.
By daylight, blue-and-gold gear had formed a heap outside Chargers Park. Fans dumped jerseys and shirts. One burned a team flag. The anger Wellington had hurled at the front doors the night before had become communal.
The Chargers’ departure from San Diego ended a 56-year relationship between a franchise and a community. As the 10th anniversary approaches, we’re examining how that relationship unraveled, what happened after the move and whether professional football could someday return.
Before examining stadium fights, politics and economics, we begin with the people who felt the loss most personally: the fans.
Nearly 10 years later, the most striking thing about Wellington has nothing to do with anger.
It’s how little he cares.
“Yeah, I just don’t have a team to root for,” he said recently.
Now 49, Wellington grew up in San Diego rooting for his hometown teams even though his father, Tom Wellington, had different loyalties. Tom loved the Raiders and Dodgers. Dan loved the Chargers and Padres.
As a young man, Wellington and his friends gathered at his parents’ house in Jamul for football on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. His father owned a massive 90-inch television long before screens approaching that size became common.
Wellington usually attended one or two Chargers games a season, often sitting at the club level at Qualcomm Stadium.
Football occupied space in his life and his family’s.
Then, suddenly, it didn’t.
Wellington and his wife, Christine, have four children, and nearly a decade without the Chargers has produced a family relationship with sports much different from the one he grew up with.
His oldest daughter, Jordyn, 27, inherited his devotion to the Padres. She is serving overseas in the Air Force and, because of the time difference, often wakes up to watch San Diego games live in the morning.
His 8-year-old son, Charles Xavier, went another direction entirely. Wellington tried getting him into sports, but none of them stuck. Instead, Charles plays piano and drums.
And that’s fine with his father.
As another NFL season arrives, football no longer dictates Wellington’s weekends.
“Sundays are definitely more cleared up for me,” he said.
A Sunday now might mean barbecuing by the pool, paddleboarding, going to SeaWorld with his family or watching a Padres game. He never adopted another NFL team and said he rarely watches the league.
At first, Wellington assumed he would at least root against the Chargers.
He couldn’t even summon that.
“I thought I would at least hate-watch, and I didn’t even hate-watch,” he said. “It was just like, ‘OK, not here. OK, well, I’ll do something else on Sunday.'”
The last Chargers game he remembers watching was their playoff collapse against Jacksonville after the 2022 season. Wellington happened to be at Padres fantasy camp, where former Padres players around him celebrated the meltdown.
A collapse that once might have ruined his night barely registered.
Oddly enough, Wellington found himself back at Chargers Park almost immediately after the franchise left.
His older brother, Tom Wellington Jr., owned a demolition company that had worked for the Spanos family and at Chargers facilities. After the team moved out, he was hired to help clear the place.
He asked Dan if he wanted to come along, and the man who had once egged the front entrance returned to help empty the building.
Inside, Wellington found the remnants of an NFL organization that had departed: pallets of Gatorade, cleats, new shoes, framed photographs and equipment.
There was a team-issued iPad that had belonged to Philip Rivers. Joey Bosa’s rookie playbook, complete with provocative doodles. Charlie Whitehurst’s pay stub, left behind in the quarterback room. And, behind one locker, a single diamond earring.
Pieces of team history mingled with personal belongings, all of it waiting to be discarded.
Wellington kept some and sold other items on Facebook Marketplace.
He still has an elaborate lightsaber he found in owner and chairman Dean Spanos’ office. More meaningfully, he kept a LaDainian Tomlinson game ball from the running back’s 2006 MVP season, with handwritten statistics commemorating the performance.
Tomlinson had rushed for 104 yards and scored four touchdowns in the Chargers’ 49-41 come-from-behind victory at Cincinnati.
Chargers Park had become something to sort through.
So had Wellington’s fandom.
Keep this. Sell that. Throw the rest away.
But some decisions carried more weight than others.
Wellington’s daughter Jaymie turned 20 this month. When she was an infant, her father began a birthday tradition. Every year, he slipped one of his oversized Tomlinson jerseys over her shoulders and took a picture.
One year became two, then five, then 10.
The jersey stayed the same size. His daughter kept growing into it.
Then the Chargers left.
“Nope,” Wellington remembers deciding. “No more.”
The pictures stopped.
To his youngest children, the San Diego Chargers will be more local history than living memory. Charles was born around the time the franchise left. Henry McCoy, Wellington’s youngest, is only 11 months old.
Wellington doesn’t describe himself as anti-NFL. He can attend a Super Bowl party, though he is more likely to socialize than track every possession. If professional football returned to San Diego, he says he would welcome it.
He might even welcome the Chargers.
Just not under the same ownership.
Wellington places the blame for the departure on the Spanos family and says he could consider embracing the franchise again if the family were no longer involved.
His final Chargers game in person, fittingly, was in Oakland.
A friend who loved the Raiders invited him north for one of the franchise’s final games there before its move to Las Vegas. Wellington’s father had died earlier that season.
So the lifelong Chargers fan walked into the Oakland Coliseum wearing one of Tom Wellington’s Raiders hats.
Final score: Raiders 26, Chargers 24.
Teams have a way of becoming part of family life. Loyalty is supposed to endure.
Then a team leaves.
Wellington grew up arguing Chargers-Raiders with his father and later dressed his daughter in a Tomlinson jersey every birthday. Now one of his children follows the Padres from overseas. Another has little use for sports at all.
And Wellington?
The man who once cared enough to egg Chargers Park became something he never expected to be: indifferent.
The team moved north.
His life moved on.
Editor’s note: Almost 10 years have passed since the Chargers ended their 56-year run in San Diego and moved to Los Angeles. Over the course of this NFL season, this series will trace the stadium fight and decisions that led to the move, revisit the fans and community left behind, assess the Chargers’ decade in Los Angeles and San Diego’s life without them, and explore whether the NFL could ever return.
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This story was originally published September 11, 2026 at 8:18 AM.