Industry News

San Diego 1904 FC details stadium plans

San Diego 1904 FC, a recently-formed team which hopes to compete in the North American Soccer League (NASL) from next year, has identified a site for a stadium.

The team, which has received backing from footballers Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabaye, Demba Ba and Moussa Sow, hopes to move into a 10,000-seat stadium on the El Corazon site in Oceanside, where the SoCal Sports Complex is currently located, by 2019.

The stadium has been designed by architecture firm Populous. Construction work is slated to begin in September 2018, with the venue to take a total of four months to build.

San Diego 1904 FC will play at the 6,000-seat Torero Stadium, home of the University of San Diego’s college football team, while its own stadium is being built.

Team president Bob Watkins said, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper: “We started by looking at the county as a whole. We started out in Imperial Beach and Chula Vista and the Olympic Training Center. We moved up to Balboa Stadium, and we decided with all that was going on with SoccerCity we needed to go beyond that.

“We went to Del Mar, and while that was nice, it was a bit crowded and not much of an opportunity to build something. We went over to Poway. Then we went up to Escondido … Then we were introduced to the Oceanside area, and there already was a soccer facility that has the specific attributes important to us.”

The future of the NASL is up in the air at present. Last month, the league filed an antitrust lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation after the body denied the competition Division 2 status for 2018. NASL shares second-tier status with the United Soccer League. The two leagues sit below Major League Soccer.