<i> Futbol </i> Is the Ticket for the Coliseum : Sports: L.A. shouldn’t waste time and energy looking for a pro football tenant when soccer is already a big draw.

There was a big game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last Sunday, but you didn’t see one word about it in the sports pages of English-language newspapers.

You didn’t see any taped highlights on English-language TV, either, although an estimated 35,000 fans showed up to watch soccer teams from Mexico and El Salvador play.

That is almost as many people (38,017) as showed up at Dodger Stadium the same day for a big game in which the Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates to move into first place. It may even be more people than actually paid to attend a football game last Saturday in Oakland between two former Los Angeles teams, the St. Louis Rams and Oakland Raiders.

Several local news outlets sent reporters north to cover that event. That’s understandable. It was the first game the Raiders played in Oakland after spending the last 13 years in Los Angeles, where the Rams also played for 34 years before moving to Anaheim in 1980 and then St. Louis this year. But in spite of all the hoopla surrounding the Raiders’ return, Oakland’s stadium did not sell out. The announced attendance was 50,000, but that number was padded with many tickets sold at discount or on a 2-for-1 basis.

But my purpose is not to revisit the recent departure of the Rams and Raiders. It is to point out that their former home stadium, the Los Angeles Coliseum, does have a future in spite of being more than 70 years old. It could even be a prosperous future, and not just because of college football--although the six games that USC plays in the Coliseum every fall do help keep the publicly owned stadium afloat.

The Coliseum should become a venue for the fast-moving game we call soccer, known in Latin America and the rest of the world as football.

Sunday’s match was an exhibition between one of Mexico’s most popular and historic teams, Club America of Mexico City, against the team that was last season’s national champion in El Salvador, Club Deportivo FAS. Despite ending in a scoreless tie, it was more interesting than many Raiders and Rams games I saw at the Coliseum.

And it was as much fun. As anyone who attended the World Cup matches held in the United States last year can attest, soccer fans have an infectious enthusiasm more akin to the crowd at a college football game than at a pro football contest. And, no, the crowd was no more troublesome than a similar-sized crowd at a baseball or American football game. There were only two arrests at Sunday’s match, according to the Los Angeles police. There were several Raider games in recent years where the arrest count was higher.

But despite the obvious success of Sunday’s soccer match, conventional wisdom hereabouts is that the Coliseum is a good-for-nothing white elephant. A perfect example was the recent front-page headline in a local newspaper (not The Times): “Losses Multiplying at Empty Coliseum.”

Empty? It wasn’t empty Sunday. Nor at a Latino music concert two weeks earlier that drew 35,000 people. And it won’t be empty this coming Sunday when another soccer match is played between a popular Salvadoran team, Aguila, and Mexico’s City’s Atlante team.

Still, that article went on to quote local politicians like Mayor Richard Riordan and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky bemoaning the lack of a pro football tenant for the Coliseum. Yaroslavsky said that without football, the Coliseum may wind up with “soccer and some religious revivals.” What’s wrong with soccer and religious events? The biggest Coliseum crowd ever (more than 130,000) was drawn to a revival featuring the Rev. Billy Graham in 1963.

This week, Riordan appointed a 28-member task force to help bring pro football back to Los Angeles, if not to the Coliseum. It is called Football LA and includes civic leaders, some former athletes and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Why not appoint a task force to bring more big soccer matches to the Coliseum? I have seen many soccer stadiums in Latin America and Europe, and the Coliseum compares quite favorably. And even the biggest foreign soccer stars would jump at the chance to play matches a few miles from Hollywood, the world capital of glitz and glamour.

Despite its age and location--not nearly so bad a neighborhood as suburbanites think, but that’s another subject--the Coliseum could have a bright future. But this city’s leaders must focus on its potential as a venue not for the bloated corporate entity American pro football has become. Let’s go for a whole new ball game: futbol.