LOS ANGELES – Now that the Los Angeles Football Club has a stadium plan in place, they can move on to other business. For example, what they'll call themselves, the colors they'll wear, and the details of their crest.
According to the club's executives, all of that was contingent on securing the plan to construct a 22,000-seat stadium on the site of the Los Angeles Sports Arena as part of a $250 million complex in Exposition Park, just south of downtown.
“For us, the challenge was always finding a home,” said managing partner Henry Nguyen, who heads an ownership group that includes Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Hollywood mogul Peter Guber, Cardiff City owner Vincent Tan, Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra. “Until you establish that, you really can't establish anything about your identity.
“And I know a lot of our supporters and fans, they're really champing at the bit. They want to hear news about our kit and our colors and our logo. They want to hear about players and academy, but all of those have to come after this was done. Now that this has happened, those processes will start happening in earnest, and we're very excited again to get all of our future and current supporters behind us and engaged in this process.”
What follows on the agenda?
“Next will be our team name, our colors and our crest,” club President Tom Penn said. “We're already talking to our supporters, our true fans, about what they want. We want to engage them. And now that we know where we are, we're going to name ourselves soon. Very soon.”
Nguyen also hinted that they might just stay with LAFC.
“We are in Hollywood and the movie-making business down here,” he said. “Working titles tend to stick, but it's a process we want to get fans involved in. ... It'll be a fun part of the engagement. This is a journey we want to take together with our supporters.”
Penn said the timeline on such an announcement was “within weeks or a couple of months. Soon.”
After that, they'll look to start building an academy system and finding a place to house it.
“We didn't want to just do it fast, we wanted to do it great. We want to do it as perfectly as you can for the future,” Penn said. “Now that we know where the senior team plays and where our home is, we've got a lot of ideas about what we want to do with the academy, and we're going to really try to explore that process. We had to do this first, though.”
A first-team training facility also needs to be determined, and it could be off-site or as part of the complex at Exposition Park.
Hiring a technical staff will probably occur from 18 months to a year before the team's planned March 2018 debut, and then they'll start acquiring players.
“We wanted to come up with a stadium worthy of any player in the world, and we feel we've done that,” Penn said. “I mean any player in the world would want to be on these grounds, on this pitch, in this city.” Penn added that they “have some idea” of players they'd like to bring to the club but that they haven't spoken to anyone.
Once all that's in place, the next goal is simple: an MLS Cup championship.
“Of course, we want to be a champion,” said Magic Johnson, who won five NBA titles during his career with the Los Angeles Lakers and also is part of the Los Angeles Dodgers' ownership group. “We want to win the championship and field an exciting and great team.
“That's my DNA from high school to college to the Lakers, and now we want to do the same thing with the Dodgers. We built a really good team with the Dodgers, and we want to carry that over with our soccer team. This ownership group wants to win, so we will invest money, and we will try to get the best players possible to play for our team.”
