This Could Be Even Bigger Than Olympics : California coup: Soccer World Cup slated for Rose Bowl

Get ready, Los Angeles. The world is coming for another visit.

Local organizers should get the official word today, when the international body that governs soccer convenes in Switzerland, but it has already been reported that the grand finale of the 1994 World Cup tournament, and seven other games, will be played in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl.

It is a noteworthy achievement when a city is awarded only the tournament’s final game; but the Rose Bowl will also get the third-place contest, one semifinal game, a second-round game and four first-round games of the 52-game tournament. Other games will be in Palo Alto, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Orlando, Foxboro, Mass., and Washington, D.C.

Getting eight games in the tournament is a coup for the Los Angeles area--not to mention a billion-dollar shot in the arm for the local economy and, perhaps most important in these troubled times, a real boost for civic pride.

Credit goes to a handful of true believers who, for the last several years, have been working to bring the World Cup tournament to the United States for the first time. The tournament is held every four years; 1994’s will be the 15th since the first World Cup was awarded in 1930.

It is no coincidence that the chairman of the planning committee, U.S. Soccer Federation President Alan Rothenberg, and several of his top aides are Los Angeles-area residents.

Rothenberg, an attorney, was also the chairman of the soccer competition for the Olympics’ 1984 Summer Games. The Olympic soccer finals drew sellout crowds to the Rose Bowl. The size of those crowds, and their enthusiasm, helped persuade soccer’s directors to return to Pasadena in 1994 despite serious attempts by Miami, Washington and New York to lure the finale to newer stadiums.

It also helps that the Los Angeles area is known for its multicultural, sports-happy population. Not only do Angelenos turn out in record numbers for baseball and American football, but stadiums such as the Coliseum have held soccer games drawing crowds of up to 40,000.

If you don’t know much about soccer--which, by the way, the rest of the world refers to as football--a good place to start might be your local American Youth Soccer Organization. AYSO leagues are where thousands of American youngsters learn what kids across the rest of the world know--that soccer is an accessible and fun sport. All a handful of kids need to get a game going is a ball and an open field where they can kick it around.

On a far more sophisticated level comes the fun of watching how teams from different nations--there will be 26 in the ’94 tournament, including a host team from the United States--play the game.

The 1990 World Cup final game, played in Rome between West Germany and Argentina, was watched on television by more than a billion people around the world. That number of viewers is said to be unmatched for any single sports event, and that’s one reason soccer fans argue that the World Cup is even bigger than the Olympics.

We Angelenos are about to get a chance to find out for ourselves.