Opinion Piece | San Diego Can Be The Greatest Footballing City In America, It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet

Photo Credit

By the end of reading this article I will have convinced you that the city of San Diego is a football sleeping giant & has all the potential to become a powerhouse in US domestic football.

My first point of discussion is that San Diego, as a city, is hungry for another fully professional team competing at the highest level of its sport.

With the greatest of respect to the San Diego Padres (baseball), while they do compete in MLB which is the highest level of the sport, they have never won a world series, have just 5 playoff appearances in their entire history & the average attendance at Petco Park during the 2019 season ranked tenth out of fifteen in their standings. Safe to say San Diego is not a baseball-crazy city. 

The crowd in attendance for a Thursday Padres game at Petco Park | Photo Credit

Does San Diego have an NFL team? No. (Let’s not talk about the San Diego Chargers……) 

Does San Diego have an NBA team? No. 

Does San Diego have an NHL team? No.

So of America’s traditional four “major” sports, San Diego has just one competing at the highest level. A brand new, fully professional team entering into the MLS to compete at the highest level, with an entire city behind it? Makes sense to me.

My second argument is based purely on the geography & demographics of the city. 

Look at where San Diego is. You can hop in a car in downtown San Diego & be at the San Ysidro border crossing into Mexico in 20 minutes. It is common knowledge that Mexico as a nation is absolutely football crazy & the city of Tijuana is just over the border.

Thousands of Americans, Mexicans, American-Mexicans & Mexican-Americans travel over the border from San Diego to see Club Tijuana, more commonly known as the Xolos, play every season. Why? Because they do not have a team that plays close to that level in their own city, so they hop over the border for the atmosphere, the footballing spectacle & the day out.

A sample of the atmosphere at the Estadio Caliente in Tijuana Photo Credit

San Diego is the 8th largest city in the US, San Diego County has a population of over 3.3million people, about 1.4million of those living within the city limit. So in terms of a potential fan-base, there’s more than enough & certainly a lot more than some of the other cities that are home to MLS teams.

While granted, an awful lot of these people may not be at all interested in football, but people of Hispanic / Latin American heritage make up about one-third of the San Diego County population (around one million people) & what is the number one sport across all Hispanic / Latin American countries? El Fútbol.

The next area of discussion focuses on the existing football in the city, is there something there that could be built on?

The 2020 season saw San Diego Loyal begin life in the USL for the first time ever. The USL is essentially the tier below the MLS. San Diego Loyal’s current manager? Landon Donovan, the most famous & arguably the greatest American to have ever played the game. Loyal played their first ever game in early March 2020 & it was watched by a sell-out crowd of around 6100 at the Torero Stadium in San Diego.

You may have seen San Diego Loyal & Landon Donovan making headlines recently, following the Loyal players’ walk-off following a homophobic slur aimed at one of their players during a recent USL game. Donovan came out after the game & gave his players his full backing, even though the walk-off meant Loyal had to forefit the game & the three points despite being 3-1 up.

Even putting San Diego Loyal to one side, what else is there to work off?

There is also San Diego 1904 FC who play in the NISA, essentially the third tier of the US footballing pyramid. While that may not seem like a big deal, when the club was formed some of the founding members certainly gave the club’s formation a little more attention; Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabeye, Moussa Sow & Demba Ba.

Yes they are two different teams operating in two different leagues, but why not reach an agreement for a proposal to be brought to the MLS for a San Diego based team with either Loyal or 1904 applying for MLS membership & the other maybe acting as a reserves / feeder team? They already have the footballing infrastructure in place.

Demba Ba meeting some young 1904 FC fans Photo Credit

Meanwhile from a marketing & promotional standpoint you have many different ploys to grow the city’s appetite an MLS team.

Why not play on the fact that the Chargers left the city & this new team is here to fill that void? Drum-up interest by building a rivalry with LA Galaxy & LAFC in newly formed ‘SoCal Derbies’. Organise pre-season friendlies with Club Tijuana & try to get some of their supporters onside, by having the new San Diego-based team as their ‘second team’ or their MLS team to support by embracing the cultural imprint that Mexico has left on the city.

Decide on a marketing plan to promote the team & then use people with the footballing stature of Landon Donovan, Eden Hazard, Demba Ba, etc, to amplify it to the rest of the world, similarly to what David Beckham has done with Inter Miami.

While the final point to be made for an MLS team in San Diego is just looking at the general expansion the MLS has undertaken in the last 10 years.

They have expanded the reach of the MLS to every corner of America, with teams popping up in cities all across the country. New York City FC, Orlando City FC, Atlanta United, Minnesota United, Los Angeles FC, FC Cincinnati, Inter Miami & Nashville FC have all been added to the MLS since 2015, a huge acceleration plan.

The addition of Atlanta United has been a roaring success & has done wonders for the city | Photo Credit

By the start of the 2022 season you can add teams based out of Austin, St. Louis, Charlotte & Sacramento to the list of teams in the MLS family. If all of these cities can get the right financial backing, city planning, club organisation & be successfully added to the MLS, there should be no reason San Diego can’t do the same.

In doing my research for this article there was one glaring issue with the San Diego bid that kept on creeping up; a stadium.

The NFL side the San Diego Chargers upped & moved to Los Angeles to start the 2017 season, leaving behind the 71,000 seater SDCCU Stadium. Why not just move a new San Diego MLS team in there to play their home games? It has become very apparent that the MLS prefer & prioritise purpose-built stadiums when choosing their expansion cities. Using an NFL specific stadium for a MLS team is not what the MLS commission are keen on.

While in the intervening years since the Chargers left the city the stadium was left empty for the vast majority of the year & demolition of the SDCCU Stadium actually began in August 2020. The city plans on building a brand new stadium in its place that will serve as the home of the San Diego State University American Football team the “Aztecs”.

There were discussions of a purpose-built stadium being located in Oceanside to house San Diego 1904 FC, about 60km north of Downtown San Diego, but it seems discussions have totally broken down.

Some of the early ideas for a football-specific stadium in Oceanside, San Diego | Photo Credit

Regardless of stadium issues, the copious amount of red-tape & the politics involved in building a professional team & getting to the promise land of the MLS, I am optimistic & confident San Diego will get over the line sooner rather than later & take their seat at America’s premier football organisation.

There is too much going in favour of the city for it not to work.

And when the paperwork gets over the line & they are officially in, sit back & watch San Diego grow into a fantastic footballing city, rivalling all others across the country.

You heard it here first.