Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a new stadium not far from downtown San Diego.

There is a superstructure rising majestically from one sideline, with club seating topped by four levels of luxury suites. There are 210 skyboxes in all, with indoor and outdoor seating, with full food and beverage service. There is a phone app so fans can order food without so much as lifting a menu or hailing a waiter, and have it delivered in five to seven minutes.

There are two restaurants on the club level. One is a Spanish tapas bar with leather upholstered chairs and 16 giant TVs, doubling as a sports bar on off days and including a sports wagering window in the corner. The other is the creation of an award-winning celebrity chef and features a menu with octopus, quail, slow-roasted pork, a prime cut of rib-eye for $21. There’s a VIP dining area with the back wall covered in wine bottles; you gaze across a fire pit out over the stadium and the mountains in the distance.

Chargers Huddle daily newsletter Sign up for our San Diego Chargers newsletter to get the latest Chargers headlines in your inbox every day by 7 a.m.

Beers on the concourse cost $3.50, but you get two.

There is a hotel in one end so the team can eat and sleep there the night before games. The locker room cubicles are arranged with such acoustic precision that the coach can stand in the middle and speak in a whisper and everyone can hear. The domed ceiling is inlaid with intricate tile work representing the team logo, with alternating mood lighting – deep blues, purples, reds – creating the effect of an underground grotto.

There is a 2,500-square-foot fitness center filled with cutting-edge equipment. There are coaches’ offices, scouting centers, film rooms with theater seating, a game room for players to unwind. A war room for draft day. Grass and artificial turf practice fields with a deep sand training area and plans for a pool.

On the other side of the wall from the practice field is a high-end shopping mall and multiplex movie theater. There’s a casino and ritzy nightclub next door, a Marriott hotel across the street, a golf course.

Now open your eyes and look south. All of this exists. It’s real.

“You know,” a friend in Tijuana said to me recently, “there are a lot of Chargers fans here. But we can’t understand the stadium problem for the last 10 years. Why can’t they build a stadium? Tijuana did.”

He was sitting in Estadio Caliente, the sparkling home of futbol’s Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles, in the twilight of balmy Friday night, in the shadow of the luxury suites above us, glasses clinking from restaurant and tapas bar, the scent of carne asada drifting across the parking lot, the images from more than 500 TVs flickering in unison.

Not long ago, this was a lake in the backstretch of the historic Agua Caliente race track, thoroughbreds rounding the far turn while birds and monkeys and other exotic animals frolicked in the water. Jorge Hank Rhon, the property owner and animal enthusiast, shifted to a smaller greyhound track and suddenly had two key ingredients: a lot of land and imagination.

They needed a pit to start, so they drained the lake. But it’s what rose above it and now dominates the Tijuana skyline that is so impressive, and so frustrating to a similarly loyal fan base a few miles across the border. They built a stadium of NFL quality; why can’t we?

Jorge Hank remains an eccentric, controversial figure in Baja California, a powerful politician and businessman who lords over the Grupo Caliente sports betting empire. But you’ll find little dissent with his grand soccer vision, building a stadium before they even had a team.

Correction: Technically they had one, but in Mexico, like the rest of the world, there is relegation and promotion between the various tiers of professional sports. They bought a modest club in Mexico’s second division in 2007, and only the second-division champion elevates to Mexican soccer’s version of the NFL. And for the first three seasons, they didn’t.

Risky proposition to start pouring cement, and in their eyes a necessary one.

“The problem I saw in TJ was that every time they brought a team here – whether it was Chivas Tijuana or Dorados Tijuana or Queretaro Tijuana – the owner of the team was from somewhere else,” says Jorgealberto Hank, the 31-year-old son of Jorge Hank and the Xolos’ president. “We knew that there was a big fan base but they were scared to go all out for their team because they knew in the back of their mind somebody could take it.

“We knew the way people would get more involved was if people from Tijuana like us bought the team and owned it and built their own stadium. People are going to look at that say, ‘If they invested all this money building a stadium and they’re from Tijuana and they bought the team, this is here to stay.’ It was something that we wanted to do and that the city needed.”

Jorgealberto grew up on both sides of the border, living in Coronado, attending Uni (now Cathedral Catholic) High, and has always viewed the Xolos as a “bi-regional” enterprise, embracing fans from both sides of the border. In many respects, he is the anti-Spanos: young, engaging, affable, candid, accessible, not referring media to Lance Armstrong’s former PR adviser for comment. He sat with me alone for a 30-minute interview last week, then chatted amiably for another half-hour.

It’s a novel concept, forging customer loyalty by not demanding taxpayer money to build some or all of a stadium, not waiting to dance through bureaucratic hoops, not holding a community hostage with the threat of relocation. Just sticking hands in their pockets for money, then shovels in the ground.

They began with a simple horseshoe dug into the empty lake bed, then closed the rectangle, then added an upper deck behind one goal, then erected the five-level superstructure along one sideline. There are plans over the next year to add an upper deck on the south end and more premium seating areas – maybe another restaurant or bar – on the other sideline. Total capacity could be in the 40,000 to 45,000 range.

Jorgealberto says the current cost, if you count the value of what in Tijuana is primo land, is between $100 million and $125 million. That seems like nothing compared to the $1.4 billion for a new stadium in San Diego or $1.7 billion in Carson.

But consider that minimum wage in Tijuana for construction workers is between $5 and $6 … per day, and minimum wage in California is $9 per hour (and construction labor unions often get double or triple that). The cost of raw materials is cheaper in Mexico, too, and there’s far less red tape.

There’s also this: They’re spending their own money, which eliminates bloated construction contracts.

“We’ve been building it little by little,” the anti-Spanos says. “We’re still not done, but we’ve had no (taxpayer) support. A lot of stadiums in Mexico, just like the States, aren’t owned privately. They’re built with taxpayer money. And we haven’t done that. It’s all personal and private money. It’s been hard but it’s been very satisfying at the same time. We know what the consumer wants, what our fans want, and at the end of the day we’re just trying to build it better for them.”

The initial plans had a railing in front of the first row of seats in the luxury boxes. Jorgealberto noticed in other stadiums that you had to keep moving your head up and down to see over or under the railing.

So he switched to thick plexiglass. More expensive, more fan friendly.

“Whatever’s best for the customer,” he explains.

Refreshing, isn’t it?