Galaxy’s Hamilton Is Ready to Campaign

Doug Hamilton thinks he knows the answer.

According to the Galaxy’s new vice president and general manager, it’s all about kissing babies and shaking hands.

Hamilton is the team’s fourth general manager in seven Major League Soccer seasons, and each of his three predecessors--Danny Villanueva, Sergio Del Prado and Tim Luce--struggled to find ways to boost turnout at the Rose Bowl.

All three failed.

The Galaxy has averaged 21,245 fans a game during the first six years of its existence. The high came in 1996, when it attracted 28,918 to the Arroyo Seco. The low was in 2001, when only 17,387 made the trip to Pasadena.

Now, 11 days before the team starts its seventh and final season at the Rose Bowl before moving into its new 27,000-seat home at Carson, the Galaxy is trying to increase attendance by at least 15% this season.

That’s Hamilton’s job. A former soccer player at North Carolina Greensboro who went on to become coach at Greensboro College and later an assistant at Duke, he joined the Galaxy in mid-January after the demise of the Miami Fusion.

“We can’t just open up the doors and expect people to come,” Hamilton said. “We have a very clear picture of our target market. It’s those people who are already financially and emotionally committed to the game. I don’t think it’s our duty to try to sell the game at this point to other [non-soccer] people. Eventually, that will happen, and we have to take every opportunity we can to convert people.”

For now, however, the Galaxy will try to reach soccer fans “who don’t know enough about us, don’t follow us, don’t go to our games and don’t have any understanding of what we hope to be in this market.”

What the Galaxy hopes to be, in the long term, and especially once its own stadium is in place, is a team recognized worldwide. Perhaps not in the same sense as Bayern Munich or Real Madrid or Liverpool, but recognized nonetheless.

That means becoming an even better team and playing international teams regularly outside MLS play.

“At the end of the day, we have a responsibility to the Southern California soccer community to be a resource for them. That’s a responsibility we take very seriously.”

First, though, the Galaxy has to get the attention of the fans who turn out in the tens of thousands to see, say, Chivas of Guadalajara or Club America of Mexico City or Comunicaciones of Guatemala or El Firpo of El Salvador, when they play in Los Angeles, but who so far have largely resisted the Galaxy.

“In a market this sophisticated, with this much access to the global game at the highest level, you need players who are very exciting,” Hamilton said. “It’s not enough in this market to win. Winning isn’t enough. It may be enough in other U.S. markets, but here you have to do it with a flair and an excitement and a passion and a skill level that’s the best this country has to offer at this time.”

Complicating matters is the fact that, unlike baseball, basketball, football and hockey, which have the field to themselves, American soccer faces global competition.

“Any one of us on any day can find our favorite [soccer] team, club, country somewhere on satellite and watch them, for pretty much the cost of admission to one of our games,” Hamilton said. “And we can do that in the comfort of our own home.

FC Barcelona--and all the other top clubs worldwide--are the Galaxy’s competition. Rivaldo is a better draw on TV than, say, Cobi Jones is in person.

“We have to find a way to overcome that,” Hamilton said. “It has to be with the quality of play and it has to be with game-day environment. We have to convince people that we’re a part of their soccer lives.”

So the Galaxy will be reaching out to soccer fans of all ages and all languages, everyone from fresh-faced AYSO youngsters to hardened players in the Southland’s hundreds of ethnic-league teams who have been largely ignored previously.

“We want to talk to soccer people about soccer,” Hamilton said. “That includes everybody from soccer moms to little kids playing in leagues to people who pay $20 to go in a crowded bar to watch their country play during World Cup qualifying. It’s a pretty broad market for us to get to....

“We’re going to run this like a political campaign. We’re going to go out and shake hands and kiss babies. We’re going to become a part of their soccer lives.”