Counting Their Checks Before the Matches : World Cup: The Rose Bowl has reason to hope that it will be the site of the international soccer event in 1994.
There are 25 other cities competing to be the host city of the 1994 World Cup soccer championship, and New York, Chicago and Washington are among the big guns vying for the honor.
Pasadena and Rose Bowl officials figure they’ve got them just where they want them.
“It’s a pretty packed crowd, but we’ve got a proven attendance record for soccer matches,” says City Councilman William Thomson, the city’s point man in the bidding process. “No other city in the United States has that.”
A combined Pasadena-Los Angeles bid for the quadrennial event, probably the most widely followed series of games in the world, faces its first test today, as the World Cup Organizing Committee weeds out some of the 26 applicants and announces a select group of “priority cities.”
World Cup officials were under strict constraints about revealing the names and number of chosen cities ahead of time. But organizing committee Chairman Alan Rothenberg, a Los Angeles trial lawyer, seemed to tip his hand Tuesday.
“You can imagine (how the committee feels about the Los Angeles-Pasadena bid),” he said. “It represents one of the great cities in America, indeed the world. And the Rose Bowl is a living legend.”
City officials were not deterred in their optimism by circumstances which may have left the Rose Bowl as the only venue in the Los Angeles-area bid.
Last week, the managers of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum unveiled renovation plans that will remove the stadium from operation for at least 16 months, after the Los Angeles Raiders’ 1992 football season. Even with a speeded-up construction schedule, it is doubtful that the Coliseum could guarantee that it would be ready for the World Cup opening in June, 1994, officials said last week.
In the two cities’ bid last May, both the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl were proposed as locations for quarterfinal and semifinal matches, with the Rose Bowl getting the championship match. Los Angeles-area insiders close to the World Cup planners said last week that Pasadena now appears to be “in the driver’s seat” to secure World Cup matches for the region.
The World Cup games begin next March, with more than 130 national teams vying in regional and continental matches. By 1994, the number of teams will have been reduced to 22, which will compete in a 52-game round-robin elimination series in various American cities. It will be the first time since the competition began in 1930 that the United States serves as the host country.
By the end of this year, Rothenberg said, the organizing committee will further weed out applicants, selecting between eight and 12 cities to be host to the matches. The sites for the semifinal and final matches will be chosen in June, 1992.
Pasadena officials say a series of four or five games, including the final match, could mean more than $2 million worth of business for city hotels and restaurants and as much as $1 million to the Rose Bowl from ticket sales.
The Rose Bowl amply proved its soccer appeal during the 1984 Olympics, when it was the site for the soccer finals, Thomson said. Eleven Olympic soccer matches at the Rose Bowl drew 691,699 fans, an average of 62,881 per game. The final alone, between Brazil and France, drew 101,799.
“Southern California is the only region in the country with a natural soccer-playing population,” said Thomson, chairman of the City Council’s business committee. “It’s a heavily Latino population, with others who are very supportive of soccer. These people grew up playing soccer.”
Rothenberg, who served as the soccer commissioner during the 1984 Olympics, said the host cities will be chosen on the basis of community support for soccer, the ability of a stadium to handle a major international event, and support facilities such as hotels and restaurants.
Though the American organizing committee makes the final decision, he said, the Federation Internationale de Football Association, the international sponsor of the competition, investigates all of the applicant cities and consults with the organizing committee on its selections.
Construction on the Coliseum also leaves the Rose Bowl, which has already been designated as the site for the 1993 Super Bowl, as a possible venue for Raiders games in 1993. Thomson, council liaison to the Rose Bowl, said that Raiders officials had not yet contacted Rose Bowl officials about it, but that he and others would listen sympathetically to such a proposal.
“We’ve said in the past that we didn’t want to go after the Raiders on a permanent basis,” Thomson said. “But we’d certainly consider them on a temporary basis.”
Attention has been focused on Anaheim Stadium as a temporary home for the Raiders, but Thomson said he was doubtful about that prospect.
“I don’t see how they can possibly do that,” he said. “The Angels and the Rams play there, and now USC is talking about playing there. I think the Raiders could very well end up at the Rose Bowl.”
