U.S. World Cup Team to Play in Rose Bowl : Soccer: After the ’94 team opens at Silverdome, it will have next two matches at Pasadena.

The U.S. soccer team will be based in Los Angeles for the 1994 World Cup, playing its opening game at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich., and the next two first-round matches at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

A World Cup official confirmed the tentative schedule, which will be announced formally on Tuesday. Under the proposed schedule, the U.S. team will play at the Silverdome on June 18 then play at the Rose Bowl on June 22 and 26.

First-round opponents will be determined after the World Cup draw in December of 1993, when the groupings for the 24-team tournament is announced.

The Rose Bowl will play host to eight World Cup matches, including the semifinal and the final. However, until this schedule proposal, there had been no indication where the U.S. team would play.

The nine U.S. venues will be arranged in groups of three. Los Angeles will be grouped with Detroit and Palo Alto, site of Stanford Stadium. While the pairing of Los Angeles and Palo Alto makes sense geographically, the inclusion of Detroit was primarily to accommodate television.

According to a World Cup official, who asked not to be named, the World Cup’s television contract required that the opening U.S. game be played on a Saturday during prime time. Because Detroit is in the Eastern time zone, the starting time would also be more favorable to viewers in Europe and Africa.

Further, the U.S. first-round schedule will have Saturday, Wednesday and Sunday games. The two weekend games will be televised when sports viewership is at its highest.

Detroit is also an intriguing venue because it is there where, for the first time in World Cup history, matches will be played indoors. A method has been perfected to grow grass indoors and this has piqued international interest.

“It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to play its first game here,” said Roger Faulkner, chairman of World Cup/Michigan. “We are a part of Americana. We’ll have 80,000 very excited fans in the Silverdome, screaming for the U.S. team.”

Alan Rothenberg, president of the World Cup ’94 Organizing Committee and the U.S. Soccer Federation, would not confirm the schedule but said the decision on where to base the U.S. team was made with heavy input from national team coach Bora Milutinovic. Milutinovic had been said to prefer Detroit because of the controlled temperature inside the arena and the tactical possibilities of the slightly smaller venue.

Los Angeles is a logical choice because of its proximity to the national team’s training center at Mission Viejo.

As the host country, the United States is an automatic qualifier and one of the tournament’s six seeded teams. Germany, the 1990 World Cup champion, is also seeded. Germany will play in the World Cup’s opening match June 17 at Chicago.

The tournament is organized into six groups of four teams each for the first round. The top two from each group advance to the round of 16, along with the two third-place teams with the best records.

The format then changes to single elimination. The final is July 17 at the Rose Bowl.

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A women’s Olympic soccer tournament appears to be moving closer to reality, perhaps by the 1996 Atlanta Games, a prospect that Rothenberg welcomes.

The USSF has lobbied FIFA and the IOC to include the women’s tournament, which would showcase the U.S. team that won the first women’s World Cup, held in 1991. Rothenberg said an Olympic tournament for women has been one of the USSF’s priorities, particularly because of the large number of females who play soccer in the United States.

Negotiations on the matter have already begun between Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, and Joao Havelange, president of FIFA. Samaranch has said he wants the world’s best professional players to be eligible for the Olympics. Current rules allow only players ages 23 and under. Havelange might be willing to lift the age restriction if the IOC will add a women’s tournament.

“The tea leaves read well on this,” Rothenberg said.

He said that the USSF has offered to organize the women’s tournament for the Atlanta organizers, suggesting that the women use the Olympic soccer venues on the men’s off-days.

It had been planned that women’s soccer would be added to the Olympic program in the year 2000, but Rothenberg said that part of the acceleration of the process is to capitalize on the whatever residual appeal soccer might gain from the 1994 World Cup.

World Cup ’94 has named Elizabeth Primrose-Smith as its chief administrative officer, who will be in charge of the organizing committee’s day-to-day operations. Primrose-Smith was the executive director of the 1991 U.S. Olympic Festival held in Los Angeles.