When It Comes to a Stadium, Galaxy May Want to Downsize
The pleasing thing about Sergio del Prado, who on Monday starts his new job as the Galaxy’s general manager, is that he is young enough to dream of what might be, yet old enough to be a realist.
At 39, he can look ahead a few years and envision the Galaxy playing in its own 40,000-seat soccer-specific stadium, one that he says could be built perhaps where the Forum stands today, or perhaps where the Sports Arena is located, or perhaps somewhere else in the Southland altogether.
But Del Prado can also look at the present and recognize that Major League Soccer will have to become a lot more stable than it is today for such a dream to become reality.
And the public’s perception of the 3-year-old league will have to change too.
“Unlike the other sports, where the best basketball players in the world are playing in the NBA or the best baseball players in the world are playing in major league baseball, and so forth, I don’t think that the public feels that about MLS,” he said.
“So what we have to do is try to make it a very attractive buy for the fans as far as getting their money’s worth for their entertainment dollar, and I think we will provide that. We need to play attractive soccer, and I think the Galaxy, of all the teams in the league, probably does that better than any of them.”
But playing attractive soccer--by which Del Prado means the all-out attacking style favored by Coach Octavio Zambrano--is not enough by itself. There is also the matter of atmosphere, and the Galaxy’s average crowd of about 20,000 gets lost in the cavernous Rose Bowl.
A smaller stadium, then, is the answer.
“People kind of want to be where they can’t be,” Del Prado said. “It’s like the old Yogi Berra joke about the restaurant that nobody goes to anymore because it’s too crowded. I think in Los Angeles especially, if it’s a hard ticket, fans in Los Angeles eat that up. They enjoy being seen where it’s a tough ticket to get.
“Also, being packed in next to people, I think the crowd noise is much higher, it just raises the excitement on the field and the players kind of feed off that as well. And when you’re selling out, that makes season-ticket sales that much easier.”
Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Wizards and the Columbus Crew, is providing the blueprint this season in Ohio. On May 15, the Crew will open the league’s first soccer-only stadium, a $17-million, 22,500-seat structure where the luxury suites sold out immediately (causing more to be added) and where season-ticket sales already have topped 7,000, up 50% from a year ago.
“What happens in Columbus is going to be very important,” Del Prado said. “New stadiums, soccer-specific venues with 20,000 to 40,000 seats, I think bodes very well for the game. Something like that definitely improves season tickets. It has kind of a buzz about it. So I think that’s going to be a very key thing to look at for this league. So far, they [the Crew] seem to be having tremendous success.
“It’s one of the things we’re definitely taking a look at. And right now, going through revenue projections and seeing if it makes sense for L.A., we think it does. The Rose Bowl’s been great to play at and right now our attention is at the Rose Bowl, but that [smaller stadiums] seems to be the trend for the league and we’re very anxious to explore that.”
Owner Philip Anschutz unquestionably has the resources to give Los Angeles its first soccer-only stadium. But the Galaxy has a lease with the Rose Bowl and any such move is a few years distant. In any case, MLS as a whole will have to prove its viability before there is any groundbreaking.
“I’ve been in L.A. sports for a long time,” Del Prado said when asked about potential stadium sites. “I was in Inglewood [with the Lakers and Kings] for 12 years, I know there’s a good piece of property right there that would be centrally located. But it’s hard to say. We’re just starting to look at [locations] right now. There are a lot of places in L.A. that would make a great fit. You need a large enough site, you need a lot of acres, especially if we’re going to have everything else that we want to go along with this [training fields, weight rooms, offices, and so on].
“I’m working closely with [Galaxy president] Tim Leiweke on revenue projections, figuring out everything from naming rights to suite sales to polling our fans and figuring out where [such a stadium might be built].
“You’re never going to make everyone happy no matter where you build a stadium, but [the likely site is] where we would, I guess, inconvenience the least amount of people at whatever site has the most potential.”
Even so, the best players in the world will remain in England and Italy and Germany and Spain and will continue to do so unless Hunt and Anschutz and Robert Kraft and the rest of the league’s deep-pocket set want to go toe to financial toe against the top clubs in the world in the quest for players. And that is an extremely remote possibility.
“I can honestly say that we do have the resources to do the job that we need to do,” Del Prado said. “The budget’s not the same as the Kings’ budget, but I don’t think he [Anschutz] wants to lose the amount of money that he’s losing with the Kings.”
So, is having an admittedly second-rate league in terms of players an insurmountable hurdle?
“I don’t know if it’s insurmountable,” Del Prado said. “We have some great stories, some heroes of our own, maybe not in the international sense, but if they’re properly marketed and if people find out they make attractive role models, the fans will be interested in following them.”
There is also the question of competition from within.
If local promoters continue to bring games such as the recent Argentina-Mexico match to Los Angeles and attract 91,000 fans to the Coliseum, where does that leave the Galaxy?
“I don’t know if it really hurts us,” Del Prado said. “I mean if we can draw some of those fans to come and watch the Galaxy, that’s our job. Whether that will ever happen or not, I’m not sure. But it doesn’t hurt in the sense that when people see 91,000 plus 5,000 overflow having to watch the game on closed circuit, whether in the Hispanic community or the Anglo community, it just sets a good precedent for soccer.
“We’d like to have closer relationships with those matches and maybe even work with those some way, but it’s not necessarily negative. It is good for soccer.”
ON THE ROAD
All three U.S. women’s national teams will be in Europe this week, faced with varying assignments.
The Under-18 and Under-21 teams will play doubleheaders, first against Germany in Munich on Wednesday and then against Denmark in Copenhagen on Saturday.
Southern California players on the U-18 side are defenders Alyson Marquand of Irvine, Lauren Orlandos of Lake Forest and Natalie Spilger of El Cajon and forward Veronica Zepeda of Riverside.
The U-21 team, preparing for the Nordic Cup in Iceland in October, includes forward Mandy Clemens of San Diego.
Meanwhile, the full national team heads for Portugal on Tuesday to compete in the Algarve Cup, an eight-nation tournament featuring six teams that will compete in the third Women’s World Cup this summer in the U.S.
Coach Tony DiCicco’s squad will play Sweden on March 14, Finland on March 16, world champion Norway on March 18 and a medal game, possibly against China, on March 20.
NIGERIA ’99
UCLA Coach Sigi Schmid’s U.S. Under-20 men’s national team on Friday was drawn to play England, Japan and Cameroon in the first round of the FIFA World Youth Championship in Nigeria next month.
