Call it the summer of love. Americans shattered TV viewing records for the World Cup; the national team returned home front-page heroes; and on 2 August in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 109,318 fans saw Manchester United and Real Madrid set a new domestic attendance record for the sport.

Such have been the long-awaited strides over football’s final frontier. But beyond such excitements one question, among others, remains: does US football have a spiritual or cultural epicentre?

New York City will soon have two MLS teams, to go with a proud history and many famous football bars. Los Angeles has a university, UCLA, that is an assembly line for national-team players, the highest number of Mexicans outside Mexico City and a dynastic club, the Galaxy. Fans in Seattle fill an NFL stadium, march to games and mimic the accoutrements of ultras culture from Europe and South America.

The heart of US football, however, beats just as strongly in a city that doesn’t have a top-flight team. Network execs know it: as a TV market, if San Diego isn’t No1 in the nation for the World Cup and other tournaments it’s No2 or 3. And for years, since long before the advent of the Premier League, San Diegans have been packing local pubs to watch English top-flight games.

Thanks to British expats who came seeking the sun, a healthy football-viewing culture is long established in southern California; places like the Shakespeare Pub & Grille have been broadcasting English top-flight matches since 1990. Now, in such bars, the British are outnumbered – if not quite overrun – by Americans supporting Premier League teams.

“Some of these games start at 4.45 in the morning, but if Liverpool were playing Manchester United I could guarantee you that we could fill the place,” said the Shakespeare’s general manager, Ruth Thomas, an expat from Dorset who has worked at the pub for close on 25 years.

The city has form on the pitch, too. Until this year, San Diegans had appeared on every US World Cup roster since 1990. Andat the grass roots, an intricate array of local youth leagues run over with talent – so much so that some scouts consider the region the most fertile in the US. Even though it can’t get an MLS team, San Diego could be US football heaven.

However, it’s tempting to ask whether now, in the second decade of the 21st century, that even matters. When Americans will pack a stadium to watch a globalized array of stars playing a meaningless friendly; when a city like San Diego produces so many football stars whose exploits are immediately available on television … who needs a local team?

‘I grew up playing beach soccer with my buddies’

The city has produced a steady stream of national team players, from Eric Wynalda (who attended San Diego State University) to Frankie Hejduk, Steve Cherundolo and most recently Joe Corona, who just missed Jürgen Klinsmann’s final cut for Brazil. The former US captain Carlos Bocanegra played youth football in the region too.

“I grew up playing beach soccer with all my buddies,” said Hejduk, a midfielder with 85 US caps who grew up nearby in Cardiff-by-the-Sea and has the southern Californian aura and vocabulary of Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s imperishable character from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Frankie Hejduk in 2006. Photograph: Donald Miralle/Getty Images Photograph: Donald Miralle/Getty Images

“If we weren’t surfing we were outside juggling a soccer ball in between surf sessions. The passion for soccer there is incredible. The connection with all the people there is starting to be seen, and it’s been there for a while.”

Asked whether anyone has tried to bring a MLS team to San Diego, MLS executive vice-president Dan Courtemanche says: “Multiple times”.

“There’s no doubt that San Diego could be a tremendous market for Major League Soccer,” he says. “And we believe that the market could certainly support a team.”

But no potential ownership group has yet stepped forward. After all, the one hard and fast requisite for MLS – a place to play – is tricky for San Diego. While most entrants to MLS start by building a committed fan base with a local team in the lower tiers, San Diego’s lower-tier teams have no proper stadium to use. There’s no way they can pay the rent for the 70,000-seat NFL stadium that is home to the Chargers; the Astroturf high-school fields flanked by aluminium bleachers such clubs do play on don’t exactly radiate a contagious, promotable atmosphere.

This is where football always seems to find itself in San Diego, as it once did throughout America: as a sport proclaimed to have a promising future after a colourful and traumatic past, but facing an uncertain present. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, San Diego was home to a number of teams who left town or went bust along with the professional league du jour: the Toros, the Jaws, the Sockers – who, in their heyday, won more trophies than the city’s star-crossed baseball and football teams combined. Out of these defunct franchises only the Sockers live on, by way of several reincarnations, currently as an indoor team in a niche league that can still draw crowds of as many as 5,000.

Ominously, the Chargers’ new gridiron stadium has been stuck in bureaucratic gridlock for nearly a decade. But there remains one possibility for that 20,000–25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium needed for MLS, one that is the stuff of dreams for urban planners: the renovation of the 100-year-old Balboa Stadium, inside the 1,200-acre Balboa Park in the centre of the city. In its heydey, Balboa Stadium was home to the Chargers and hosted The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Babe Ruth and Pelé. But its decaying Spanish Revival architecture and double-column arcade were torn down in the ’70s, due to earthquake concerns. Now surrounded by a freeway and the brutalist architecture of a public high school and community college, it exists as another Astroturfed high-school field, fenced up and padlocked from most public use.

‘Give me a couple of owners and I’ve got some great ideas’

Any team in San Diego must also compete against the charms of San Diego itself – the sheer number of ways that residents can spend their days in such relentlessly pleasant weather.

“For me, it’s, why don’t you combine the two?” said Hejduk, who has experience in this sort of thing. He now works as brand ambassador for the Columbus Crew of the MLS, where he was a fan favourite as a player. There, most recently, he organized a beach football tournament. “We’re bringing southern California to Ohio!” he said.

Reflecting on the possibilities for top-flight football in San Diego, Hejduk says: “Why don’t you build a stadium right where you can watch the sunset in the background and have fish tacos in the stadium? I can’t be the first guy to think of this but if I am, give me a couple owners out there and I’ve got some great ideas for you. Have a little surfing bar right there, with a man-made wave!”

However, any efforts to bring MLS to San Diego – even surfable waves inside the stadium – might be rendered futile by the success of a team located just 20 miles south of the city. There, on the other side of the border, are Club Tijuana, a six-year-old team who became champions of Mexico in 2012, in their second season in the top flight.

Their games, at the Estadio Caliente, offer the authentic, spirited football atmosphere that draws many American fans to the sport, and it shows: 20% to 30% of Tijuana’s home gate comes from north of the border, according to front-office estimations – an impressive feat considering that wait times to cross back into the US can reach several hours. Stickers and flags for the Xolos can be seen on cars all over San Diego; the team attracts American sponsors who do no business in Mexico and there is a fan shop in San Diego. The next such store is due to open in LA.

In a plot twist that turns contemporary immigration issues on their head, the Xolos are even importing American talent. They have eight Americans on their senior team and last year the club established an academy in suburban San Diego (the “Mini Xolos”) that ranges from 4-year-olds to Under-19s. Scouting extends throughout California.

“We might have more Americans than MLS teams do,” says the Xolos’ assistant general manager, Roberto Cornejo, only half-jokingly.

Local players like 24-year-old Joe Corona, one of Tijuana’s stars who grew up on both sides of the border, are increasingly turning their gaze south. After all, for the thousands of kids in the area with dual citizenship, it’s a natural fit.

“Growing up in San Diego, soccer was the biggest sport going on,” Corona said. “The other sports, most kids played them at school. But outside school, there were way more soccer leagues than anything.”

In fact, the fields around San Diego are more fertile than anyone seems to realize, according to Eric Wynalda. The former US striker, now a Fox Sports analyst in Los Angeles, also works as technical director the Atlanta Silverbacks in the second-tier North American Soccer League. He spends his weekends on the touchlines of fields in East Los Angeles and throughout southern California – “Places where a white guy probably shouldn’t go,” he says – watching Hispanic leagues and Sunday recreational leagues, prospecting for hidden gems.

Eric Wynalda in 2001. Photograph: Monica M Davey/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Monica M Davey/AFP/Getty Images

“The thing about San Diego is that it would probably be the most amazing academy system in the MLS,” Wynada said. “Hands down. There is no way anybody, in my opinion, can even come close to the talent that exists in a 30-mile radius in San Diego. Nobody.

“The truth is, if I’ve gotta find a player, I get in my damn car and I go to Chula Vista or El Cajon,” he says, of a couple of San Diego suburbs. His biggest obstacle lately? Many of the players he has recently asked about have been snatched up by Tijuana.

Unless San Diego can figure out how to attract a MLS club without offering a place to play, the most talent-laden, spectator-friendly football city in the nation will forever be stuck without a team. And to most residents, that seems OK. Where cities like Philadelphia had a supporters’ club years before they had an MLS team, and second-tier cities like Sacramento can pack second-tier stadiums, San Diego has neither a supporters club nor much interest in lower-tier football. Even the relocation of an existing team is off the table – despite rumoured interest from Mexican investors who have proposed purchasing and moving the commercially toxic Chivas USA club to San Diego, MLS is resolved to keep the Goats in LA, albeit under a new name, new ownership and a clean slate.

‘The flip-flop town’

Of course, if it can be said that San Diego’s hometown team is in another country, that is, in a way, how football is catching fire across in the US, as more and more European clubs make tours every summer. Is San Diego, therefore, in fact a model for the future of football in the states? San Diegans can watch their favourite teams in Europe first thing in the morning, make it to the beach before noon, and play the game year-round in the sunshine. Some might say this is truly having it all.

The former Newcastle full-back Warren Barton, now a studio analyst for Fox and a San Diego resident, begs to differ – “We’ve got local teams. You look across Europe, and not every town has big-league teams there. Whether it’s Barnsley or in the London suburbs, there’s not always a Premier League team there” – and is part-owner of the San Diego Flash, who play in the National Premier Soccer League, the fourth tier of American football.

But it’s hard to see how a city as football-literate as San Diego wouldn’t catch the fever if given a chance in the top flight. It beggars belief to think San Diegans wouldn’t want to look and act the part as supporters groups in Portland, Seattle and elsewhere do so with such panache.

“San Diego has always been called the flip-flop town,” said Wynalda, who has been privy to many of the city’s bids to attract an MLS team, “because people are wearing flip-flops, but also because they have an undeserved reputation for flip-flopping about whether they want to support something or not. San Diego just needs the opportunity to prove that it’s a soccer town. It’s never really been given that.”

Two of San Diego greatest talents, Hejduk and Wynalda, MLS veterans who spent years playing in Europe, have no doubt a team can thrive in a city that saves its strongest passion for foreign teams and international tournaments.

“There’s soccer fans everywhere,” Hejduk said. “There’s people that not only just follow Manchester United, they follow soccer. They want to be soccer fans. You see this all over the place. All you have to do is go to a San Diego bar at 10 in the morning and the bar’s full – all of them are wearing Man U or Tottenham jerseys.

“Well, those guys, I feel that they would like to wear a San Diego jersey. They would like to support their hometown club, but they don’t have one so they have to look elsewhere.”

Wynalda agrees. “If you’re really trying to tap into a market that’s waking up and watching games anyway, that’s planning their day around a game that’s happening halfway across the world, you’ve gotta be silly to think that they wouldn’t show up a little bit later on in the day to watch soccer if it’s a quality game,” he said.

“Can you put a quality product on the field that’s worth watching? Soccer people always show up for that.”