CARSON, Calif. – Southern California's existing Major League Soccer club is impressed, for the most part, with the stadium plans Los Angeles Football Club unveiled Monday, but it's not going to have have much impact on what the LA Galaxy are doing.
Head coach Bruce Arena says he read about LAFC's intentions to build a 22,000-seat stadium as part of a privately financed $250-million complex on the site of the Los Angeles Sports Arena, next door to the Coliseum, and that it's “absolutely fabulous” that the city will have two teams again come 2018.
“It certainly looks good," Arena said Tuesday of the renderings of plans drawn up by Los Angeles-based architectural firm Gensler. "I think it's great we're going to have another team in Los Angeles.”
Club president Chris Klein said Monday on the Galaxy's website that he was “happy for them and happy for the league,” but LAFC's arrival won't affect what he's working on.
“We don't change,” Klein said on LAGalaxy.com. “The things that we do as we build our team and we build our club in this city and community, we've had a specific goal. We want to win first, and win a certain way, with a certain group of players, and we’re going to continue to do that. We're as aggressive as we've ever been in LA. The ideals that we hold are ones that we've built over a long period of time, and those aren't changing. ... We're going full steam ahead.”
The Sports Arena site is about 12 miles north, along the Harbor Freeway, from StubHub Center. Defender Oscar Sorto grew up across the street from the Coliseum, near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, and he was excited to see what LAFC have planned – and has hopes the club's outreach to the community will include inviting top local talent into their academy.
“It means a lot,” said Sorto, a US Under-23 international. “I grew up watching [games at the] Coliseum, and having a soccer club there is going to be fun. It's a good program for the city because there's a lot of good players around where I grew up, but they get into gangs and they start doing bad habits.
“Now there's a club that's going to be right across the street from everyone. It's going to help them out, and, hopefully, a lot of kids from my neighborhood can [be involved].”
The stadium itself, Sorto said, “looks like a stadium from Germany. If it's how the pictures describe, it's going to be amazing, and it's going to be something special to our neighborhood.”
The renderings of how the stadium will appear are eye-opening, but they're not reality. Not yet, at least.
“Renderings are renderings,” associate head coach Dave Sarachan said. "Everything looks good in color, and the renderings look great. It's like the old example of the sizzle and the steak. It's still about what its tastes like."
LAFC, scheduled to start play in 2018, are looking to build a real rivalry with the Galaxy. At the club's event Monday in Los Angeles, club president Tom Penn said the new club, which purchased Chivas USA's MLS rights last year, wanted “to be shoulder to shoulder with [the Galaxy] in the boardroom and nose to nose on the pitch.”
“They're pretty darn good, and that's a high bar for us to meet on the pitch,” Penn added. “But we're not shying away from that.”
The Galaxy say bring it on.
“It's on them,” forward Alan Gordon said. “We're here. We're champions. It's on them to create a rivalry. They're going to have to try to take what we have.”
