It is possible Major League Soccer could wait for San Diego to get its act together.

But it’s not likely, and it certainly isn’t something that should be counted on by those of us who live here and believe that not only does the sun set just off our shore but rises just beyond Boulevard.

“We think very highly of the market, we think very highly of the stadium location, and we think very highly of the ownership group,” said MLS Deputy Commissioner Mark Abbott, who is spearheading the league’s expansion quest. “We would hate to see this opportunity be lost over the timing of the vote.”

It wasn’t a threat, Abbott stressed repeatedly in a Friday afternoon conversation. It was an expression of the reality that, given the circumstances, MLS likely would not wait for San Diego.


The league will choose two expansion sites by the end of this year and plans to choose its final two well before November of next year.

“There is a very significant risk that San Diego would lose the opportunity if the vote is postponed to 2018,” Abbott said. “… We haven’t set the timetable for (the final two), but there is a significant chance it is before any public vote would take place and, as a result, a significant risk San Diego would lose the opportunity.”

Professional sports leagues sometimes change their minds. A collection of team owners can make up their own rules regarding just about anything, especially where to place a franchise. We are among the cities that recently learned that the hard way.

And I promise you, considering how San Diego’s leaders are derailing more potential progress, showing the nation that nothing can get done here, I sure hope MLS is open to altering its expansion plans.


But it is irresponsible to state – as many in favor of putting off an election on SoccerCity have – that MLS’ prerogative to change its mind essentially equates to a fact that it will.

“(The timeline) is driven by the needs of the league to make its decisions,” Abbott said. “We’re thinking about what is happening in all these other markets. … There will be more than two ready to go at the end of this year. Because there are other markets that are also under consideration, we will likely (choose the final two) earlier in ’18.”

Really, why would MLS hold off as many as nine other markets vying for franchises in order to wait to get into a city that didn’t approve a tax hike for its beloved NFL team and less than a year later wouldn’t even hold a vote on another stadium project?

Yeah. That is what might be about to happen.


San Diego’s city council will vote Monday on the 2018 budget submitted by Mayor Kevin Faulconer. Included in that budget is $5 million for a special election in November 2017 that is intended for a public vote on convention center expansion and/or the proposed SoccerCity development in Mission Valley.

As of Friday, it appears five council members could be poised to vote to reallocate that $5 million designated for a special election.

If that is how it plays out Monday, Faulconer can exercise a rare mayoral line-item veto and send the budget back to the council. In that case, it would take six votes to overturn the veto. Of course, should the vote be to smartly allocate said millions to, say, police and/or fire, that’ll be difficult for Faulconer to veto.

So the possibility of getting an MLS franchise and expeditiously building a stadium that could also be home to San Diego State football could conceivably die Monday.


This is unbelievable. Or it would be if it weren’t San Diego politics and business as usual.

And how has business as usual in San Diego worked out?

Acknowledging there is plenty of blame to go around over the course of many years and many stalled and mothballed projects around town, let’s focus our memory on the period from 2004-06, when the Chargers had a plan to develop Mission Valley that was ultimately scuttled. Whether Dean Spanos’ inability to find a development partner willing to agree to his terms or Mike Aguirre’s opposition or the city politicians’ indecision were most to blame, that proposal has long been considered the one that got away.

There at least seems a chance we could be saying similar things about SoccerCity before too long.


Absent another plan already being in the works, it is difficult to imagine anything getting done on the Qualcomm Stadium land for at least four years. And that might be too hopeful a timeline considering the bureaucratic, environmental and legal hurdles inherent in these parts.

As mentioned previously, that could mean trouble for SDSU football. The school has said it could build its own stadium for $150 million. But as for those prospects, I reference a November 2015 e-mail — obtained by the Union-Tribune — between Jim Sterk, then SDSU’s athletic director, and a representative of the Populous architectural firm, in which Sterk asked how much a 30,000-seat stadium would cost in Mission Valley.

Using the cost of $6,000 per seat, the architect estimated $180 million (not including land acquisition). That estimate was based on the cost of a 36,000-seat stadium at Colorado State that Populous designed. That stadium will open this summer after two years of construction that followed two years of political and financial wrangling.

Assuming an 11 percent cost increase for a project in San Diego versus Fort Collins, Colo., and a conservative inflation rate of 3.5 percent (both figures provided by industry sources and available online), the cost for State to build the 35,000-seat stadium it says it wants with a construction start date of late 2019 or ’20 would seem to be around $240 million.


Or $90 million more than university officials have consistently contended of late. Again, without land acquisition or mitigation costs.

Further, the university or the city (or both) would have to come up with the money to keep Qualcomm Stadium open. Let’s just say that number is far south of the $12.8 million in this year’s budget. Some people in the know have estimated the yearly cost would be around $5 million with substantial changes/cuts.

Maybe you have heard about a lease extension agreement SDSU maintains it had with the city in January. But many in the city familiar with the talks maintain there was no agreement, that discussions about an extension were tabled when it became evident the Chargers might leave. And even if there were some sort of agreement, multiple city officials say the offer from SDSU at the time was that the school would pay $1.50 a ticket, up from $1. That’s about $300,000 total, a little short of covering a nut of even $5 mil.

That’s a lot for the city to cover while it figures out what happens in Mission Valley.


However long that takes.

As one of SoccerCity’s most vociferous critics acknowledged this week, “The public needs FS to be the rabbit. There has to be somebody nipping at the city and SDSU’s heels (or) they won’t do (anything). … If FS is out of the equation, some of the pressure is off. We need pressure on the politicians to get (something) done. “

Those were the words of Cory Briggs, the attorney who has major problems with the SoccerCity initiative.

We spent a couple hours talking about those problems, and if the city council does the right thing and puts this initiative on a special election ballot in November, I will give prominent space to Briggs’ concerns. He is a smart dude, and I am a seeker of truth.


San Diegans deserve the chance to consider this.

kevin.acee@sduniontribune.com