RAIDERS RETURN TO OAKLAND : L.A. Wants Team to Call Its Own : Coliseum: Officials say not any team will do, but they want one in a hurry.

Officials long involved with the Coliseum vowed Friday to seek another professional football team in quick order, but there was also immediate disagreement as to what kind of team it should be.

Charging departing Raider owner Al Davis with never making a full commitment to Los Angeles, John Ferraro, the Coliseum Commission president, said the top priority now ought to be to replace the Raiders with an expansion team, locally owned, that would make such a commitment.

But the former commissioner who had most to do with bringing the Raiders to Los Angeles in the first place, labor leader Bill Robertson, said an expansion team is not the solution.

“The fans here want a winning team from day one,” Robertson said.

Mayor Richard Riordan’s representative on the Coliseum Commission, Steve Soboroff, said, “I can promise that the team we seek will be a team that will more understand the importance of community involvement and reaching out to the community. There are a number of irons in thefire.”

Riordan, appearing on television, said he remains committed to having a professional football team in Los Angeles, but added, “particularly one that is committed to Los Angeles.”

Among “several” teams Coliseum officials have been talking to, the officials said, are the Arizona Cardinals, who have said they do not rule out a move to Los Angeles.

“I’ve been contacted by three separate groups, one a major company capable of buying five franchises, and two other groups led by prominent local businessmen, who want to either purchase an existing team or form an expansion team to play in the Coliseum,” Commissioner Sheldon Sloan said.

But Coliseum officials warned they are not eager to talk to other teams that may simply be using Los Angeles as a ploy to get a better deal at home, and some said the Cardinals are not a good enough team to appeal to Los Angeles. They mentioned the Cleveland Browns as a more suitable tenant.

Don C. Webb, a frequent negotiator for the commission, and Sloan both emphasized that even if plans go forward to construct a new stadium in Los Angeles, it will not be ready for at least two or three years, and a new team will probably have to play in the Coliseum.

They insisted that such adjectives to describe the Coliseum as “decayed” or “crumbled,” are inaccurate and are not enhancing Los Angeles’ chances of attracting a new team.

“Seismically, after the repairs of last year, we’re the strongest, safest stadium in America,” Sloan said.

“The Coliseum is certainly a much better facility than it was when the Raiders moved to Los Angeles years ago,” Webb added.

“It has vastly improved sight lines and seating as a result of a major renovation in 1993. . . . Every restroom facility throughout the stadium complex has been replaced within the last two years, and more than two-thirds of the concession stands have been replaced and re-equipped in the last 12 months.”

Still, Ferraro acknowledged, the Coliseum does not have the luxury boxes that the Raiders were assured would be built. “I know there were a lot of promises made to the Raiders when they came down here and they were never fulfilled,” he said. “I think we both could have done better. . . . It’s time to move forward and we will.”

Some bitterness was expressed toward Davis and the Raiders.

“As a season ticket-holder with the Raiders since the day they came here, good riddance,” said Commissioner Zev Yaroslavsky, also a county supervisor.

“I think the Raider ownership has treated this community shabbily, and I don’t think you’ll see a lot of people shedding a lot of tears over this. My 12-year-old son would not go to a Raider game with me because he didn’t like the atmosphere. Compare that with the Dodgers and the way they treat the public. Davis was a bad influence.”

But a spokesman for another commissioner, Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, said Burke was “saddened and disappointed” that the Raiders are leaving.

At USC, sports information director Tim Tessalone said the Trojans will “certainly be playing in the Coliseum this fall” and that talks are under way for a new long-term contract.

The stadium’s general manager, Patrick Lynch, however, said that while new events to replace Raider games this fall will be solicited, Coliseum projections of a $1.2-million profit in the fiscal year that begins July 1 will have to be revised downward by a “fairly substantial” amount.

In this fiscal year, with the Raiders playing rent-free, the Coliseum lost money, and the new projections had counted on the team paying $788,000 to play there.