Soccer King in Carson
The soccer landscape is getting crowded.
Barely six weeks after the Galaxy celebrated its 2005 Major League Soccer championship with a bash at the Home Depot Center, the stadium once again is echoing to the clatter of muddy cleats on locker room floors.
No fewer than eight U.S. national teams will be training at the center this month, but the first meaningful games will involve Mexico’s top clubs.
The Interliga tournament, an eight-team, 14-game event, begins today in Houston and also has stops in La Joya, Texas, and Frisco, Texas, before moving to California.
The tournament will qualify two teams from among Chivas de Guadalajara, Necaxa, Cruz Azul, Tigres de UANL, Veracruz, Morelia, Monterrey and Pachuca, for the Copa Libertadores in South America this year.
Doubleheaders will be played at the Home Depot Center on Jan. 10, 11 and 15.
Put on by MLS and its Soccer United Marketing offshoot, the Interliga is something of a stepchild among tournaments, but that could change. Eventually, MLS wants its own teams to compete with Mexico’s best for spots in the highly regarded Copa Libertadores.
“I think we’re exploring all options,” Doug Hamilton, the Galaxy’s president and general manager, said Tuesday. “We would like to be a part of this type of tournament, and we’d like to develop some sort of meaningful competition with the Mexican league.
“Interliga ... establishes a track record of success with the Mexican league -- that we know how to put on meaningful events and can make them successful from the fan and TV perspective.”
The timing of the tournament, in the MLS off-season, now precludes MLS participation, however. Then, too, Mexico would have to see some benefit in dropping four of its teams in favor of four MLS teams.
“The calendar is 12 months long,” Hamilton said. “I’m sure we can find a time that works for everybody.
“The more opportunities that we get to put our players in competitive environments with something at stake makes it more compelling for our fans, more compelling for our sponsors and more compelling for our players.
“Any time we can do that, it sure beats having a friendly. We need to get more meaningful competition on the books.”
Incidentally, the first Galaxy friendly of the year, against South Korea’s national team at the Home Depot Center on Feb. 8, will be officially announced today.
Meanwhile, the U.S. women’s national team arrived in town Tuesday, ready to spend a couple of weeks preparing for the Four Nations Tournament in China this month.
The under-20 women’s national team arrived Monday to train for two weeks before heading for Mexico and the CONCACAF regional qualifying tournament for the 2006 FIFA Under-20 Women’s World Championship, which will be played in Russia in August.
Four other women’s national teams will be coming in -- starting with the under-17s next week, followed by the under-21s, preparing to defend their title at the Nordic Cup in Norway in July, the under-15s and the under-16s.
In addition, the U.S. men’s national team arrives today to open a six-week training camp intended to establish which MLS players probably will join their European-based teammates at the Germany ’06 World Cup in June.
