CRUNCH TIME FOR SOCCER. <i> World Cup gives sport its best chance for national prominence</i> : Spectator Interest Determines Where the Games Are Played : Sports: Cal State Fullerton, home of Salsa team, holds promise as a venue for international matches in O.C.

With the expansion Salsa of the American Professional Soccer League making its home at Cal State Fullerton, soccer fans in Orange County won’t need to travel far to see quality matches.

But the truth is they never really had to.

For years, international soccer teams have played at Santa Ana Stadium, sometimes in important matches with plenty at stake.

In January, Mexico’s Club America defeated Costa Rica’s Club Alajuelense, 1 to 0, before a capacity crowd at the stadium to win the club championship of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Football.

The problem is, few outside the county’s large Latino community knew about that match or any previous ones.

That’s because the matchmakers--usually Latino promoters--traditionally have focused their promotional campaigns on the Spanish-language media in the Southland, with little or no effort to reach any other market.

Their reasons, however, have nothing to do with wanting to exclude non-Latinos. It boils down, they say, to money.

“For the market we are after, it’s more cost-effective,” said Vicqui Lara, who with husband Guillermo owns L.A. Promotions, one of the companies that specializes in setting up soccer matches in the Los Angeles area. “We try to target soccer enthusiasts in general. But we have noticed that the majority of the people who go to the games read Spanish-language newspapers or watch Spanish-language TV.”

The Laras joined forces with Hugo Bandi of Sudmex Promotions Inc., another longtime soccer promoter, to stage the America-Alajuelense match. It was Bandi who first promoted an international soccer match in the county.

That was on Dec. 2, 1987, when about 11,000 people jammed Santa Ana Stadium to see Mexico crush Guyana, 9 to 0, in a qualifying match for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The match was played in Santa Ana because the Guyanese, playing as the home team, could not afford to travel to Mexico and still host their own match in the home-and-home series. Bandi solved the problem by paying the expenses for the teams to play in Santa Ana.

The match was financially successful for Bandi and it helped him gauge county interest in international soccer. However, what Bandi saw was numerous Mexican flags waving in the overflow crowd at the 9,052-capacity facility and he quickly realized the direction his promotional efforts needed to go.

“In reality, American fans are not interested in seeing Guadalajara against El Salvador,” Bandi said. “And our (promotional) budget is just big enough to target the people who we think are going to show up. In a smaller stadium such as Santa Ana’s, people fill the place without practically any publicity.”

Lara said her company arranges about 15 international matches a year, mostly at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, and tries to reach non-Latino fans by sending press releases to the English-language media. She said they seldom get much mention.

“We send out the information, but whether they print it is out of our control,” she said.

Both promoters say they might set up future international matches, even with a broader interest base, but probably not at Santa Ana Stadium. Bandi, who said he has promoted as many as five international matches in one year at the stadium, cites the $15,000 to $17,000 rental fee for a soccer match as a major deterrent. That’s a sizable increase over the $3,500 he paid the city for the Mexico-Guyana match six years ago.

Lara said: “Santa Ana is a very small facility, and for the money you have to put into it, it gets pretty expensive. So it’s not a great facility in that sense.”

Where, then, will the next big international soccer matches be played in Orange County? It might depend on how the local fans, regardless of their ethnic background, respond to the Salsa.

Cal State Fullerton “could be an alternative,” Bandi said. “We would have to get people used to going to Fullerton, but that can be done.”