How long has it been — 10 years, 20, 30, 40 years? — that the NFL has been dealing with the (in)stability of its franchise(s) in Los Angeles?

They are at it again. Or still.

Yes, that’s right. If you just woke from a nap, or even a sleep longer than Rip Van Winkle, you would have thought nothing had changed in the NFL.

Los Angeles is still an issue.

Somehow, the league has managed to become a multi-billion dollar giant even without Los Angeles in the mix, but hey, there is even more money to be made and now the fight is going to begin anew, finally, over how that money will be divided.

And this is likely to be an even nastier fight than it would have been 10 or 20 or more years ago.

That’s because Stan Kroenke, the owner of the St. Louis Rams, has had his eye on LA since long before he bought into the NFL as a partner of the late Georgia Frontiere in St. Louis. And that’s because Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, sees little beyond dollar signs, much more focused on the bottom line than his predecessors, Paul Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle, ever were.

For all of Tagliabue’s faults, many of which can simply be attributed to poor public relations skills, he really was interested in the game. The dollars just came along with it.

Goodell, although he grew up with the NFL from his start as a lowly league office intern, seems to have it the other way around. And that’s where this really is going to get interesting.

There is so much money to be made from a Los Angeles franchise that the league will have to hire extra accountants to count it all.

There has been talk of a new stadium in LA since before the Raiders and Rams abandoned the area in 1995 … heck, since before the Rams high-tailed it to the suburbs in Anaheim 15 years before that. But political realities in LA have stalled every plan. Los Angeles felt it could get along just fine without the NFL, and indeed it seems to have survived. Now, however, Kroenke has his own plan to build a stadium on land he bought himself and with little public help, and so the politics of southern California will not be an issue.

Of course, the politics of southern California are always an issue. But they are nothing compared to the politics of the NFL.

It surely did not escape the notice of Goodell and the league’s owners that the Los Angeles Clippers, for years the second NBA team in the market, sold recently for $2 billion. Consider that the last NFL team sale, the Cleveland Browns, went for a piddling $1 billion in 2012. Now, compare the Cleveland market with LA, compare the NBA with the NFL, and what do you think a team in the Los Angeles market is worth to the NFL?

Three billion? Four? Five?

Even if we say it is worth “just” $3 billion, and yes, it feels silly to type that word in quotation marks, that’s nearly $100 million to each current NFL owner for a franchise there. Consider that NFL owners all have helpers around them to scrape up every loose nickel, and you think they want Kroenke to get that all for himself by moving from St. Louis?

Do you think the Raiders, who feel trapped by their outdated stadium in Oakland, or the Chargers, a hundred or so miles down the freeway, want to let Kroenke take over LA without a fight? Do you think the Raiders want to leverage LA into either a new Bay Area stadium or move themselves? Do you think the Chargers believe that 20 years as the only NFL team in southern California has earned them the right to claim the territory in perpetuity?

If you think some of the recent fights between the league and the players association (see Peterson, Adrian, or Rice, Ray) were nasty, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The rest of the league wants to control the Los Angeles market.

It does not want a team getting that rich all by itself.

L.A. has been a great stalking horse for teams that wanted new stadiums — see Minneapolis and Jacksonville for example — and if that avenue is going to be foreclosed, well, the other 31 owners want a piece of the pie.

You have to feel sorry for St. Louis, except that city’s lords made one of the dumbest deals in history when they originally gave the Rams a deal that not only gave the team essentially a new stadium for free but promised that it would remain in “the top 25 percent of NFL stadiums,” which surely has to rank among the most idiotic municipal giveaways of all time.

Yes, Dallas against Green Bay in a reprise of the Ice Bowl is a great attraction, and we’ll all be able to watch that one on television. But for NFL owners, the real action is about to take place behind closed doors. Oh, and one more thing. If the Rams leave, how long do you think it will be before St. Louis offers to build a new stadium to poach another team, and rain more dollars down on NFL owners?

Well, they do call it “professional” football.

Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than three decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.