San Diego was among 10 cities listed by Commissioner Don Garber for Major League Soccer expansion from 24 to 28 teams, possibly as soon as 2020. But before you wrap a supporter’s scarf around your neck, brush up on the passive offside rule and begin wondering which players with local ties might be available in the expansion draft, consider what has to happen first.

The NFL’s Chargers probably have to leave, which Garber admits makes the “market more attractive to us.”

Then Qualcomm Stadium would have to be demolished, and the city would have to gift the lucrative piece of land to a development group (that currently involves former Padres owner John Moores) proposing to build a “university annex” there for San Diego State and UC San Diego with a mid-sized stadium as a centerpiece.

Then a local ownership group would have to ante up an expansion fee, which is $150 million for teams 25 and 26 but could be higher for 27 and 28 – the most likely slot for a San Diego franchise.


Then it would have to spend another, what, $250 million building a stadium.

And all this would have to happen in relative haste in a city that doesn’t exactly have a history of building sports facilities quickly (Petco Park took six years from ballot to ballpark) or, in the case of the Chargers, building them at all. Garber said MLS owners plan to select the next two expansion cities in mid-2017, and the following two sometime after that. He also said he expects new stadiums to be completed when teams join the league, which for the first two would be 2020.

Of the 10 cities named by Garber, none has been an MLS expansion target as long as San Diego. It was considered among the leading expansion markets at the league’s inception in 1996 by then-commissioner Doug Logan, who brought the 1999 MLS All-Star Game to Qualcomm Stadium – the only time it’s been played in a city without an active team – and held talks with Moores.

Chivas USA nearly chose San Diego in 2004 before fatefully opting to share a stadium with the Los Angeles Galaxy – a venture that ended a decade later when it folded.


Now Garber says a San Diego “ownership group has come forward and we’ve met with them a number of times.” He declined to identify it, but the group is widely believed to be headed by Mike Stone of La Jolla-based FS Investors and include Padres owner Peter Seidler along with local businessman Steve Altman. Seidler confirmed their interest in June, but they were unavailable for comment Thursday.

The ownership group is new. But what’s different about the market?

“There are changes that could take place in the professional sports environment in the city that I think could potentially play into whether San Diego is more attractive to us today than it was in the past,” Garber said on a media teleconference Thursday following owner meetings. “The Rams leaving St Louis has certainly opened up an opportunity for us in that market that we had not seen in the years prior.

“And should the Chargers make the decision to not remain in San Diego, the market would be more attractive to us. We believe that because we’ve seen what happened in Seattle when the (NBA’s) Sonics left. In many ways, the (MLS’s) Sounders were able to fill a void in the professional sports landscape in that city.”


And if the Chargers stay?

“It makes it a bit harder,” Garber said, “and that is not to influence anybody’s decision whatsoever. It’s just a factor that comes into play as we think about the competition in the market and how could that effect a team’s success.”

If the Chargers indeed relocate, San Diego would have two of three elements on Garber’s expansion wish-list: a viable ownership group and soccer-literate market. It would still need the third piece – a soccer-specific stadium – and that’s where things could get tricky.

The Mission Valley site is the most attractive, since an MLS stadium there could be used by SDSU’s football team that would be homeless when or if Qualcomm has a date with the wrecking ball. Former SDSU athletic director Jim Sterk is known to have communicated with potential MLS investors going back nearly two years, and the proposed ownership group includes several Aztecs boosters.


That assumes the city would donate 166 acres of prime real estate to a university annex also benefiting a for-profit sports enterprise, instead of using proceeds from a sale to help balance a looming budget shortfall.

Another potential snag: SDSU prefers a 40,000-seat stadium, which it views as a necessity to keep dwindling hopes alive for its football team to join a power conference with larger television revenues. And Garber said Thursday, “Our stadiums have been 20,000 to 25,000, and that’s the size that we think would be appropriate for any of these new markets.”

Stone’s ownership group is known to have toured a bayside stadium site at the old SDG&E plant in Chula Vista, but building there might geographically cut off the North County fan base and put an MLS team in direct competition with the Tijuana Xolos, who play in Mexico’s top division and regularly draw thousands of fans from north of the border to see games in what is regarded as a higher-quality league.

MLS currently has 20 teams, with Atlanta and Minnesota set to join in 2017 and a second Los Angeles team in 2018. David Beckham’s long-delayed project in Miami would be No. 24.


Applications for the next round of expansion are due Jan. 31, and Garber expects the 25th and 26th teams to be chosen in the “second or third quarter” of 2017. The favorites are Sacramento, which has established a solid following for a minor-league team and has been in talks with MLS for years; and St. Louis, which has moved quickly after the NFL’s Rams moved to Los Angeles and has already has an exclusive option on downtown land for a stadium.

San Diego likely wouldn’t be a candidate for those slots given the compressed timetable and the uncertainty surrounding a Chargers stadium. More realistic is the final two teams, which Garber said would be selected “at a later date.” That might mean a higher expansion fee, but it also would buy the valuable commodity of time.

The other markets named by Garber: Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham (N.C.), San Antonio, Tampa-St. Petersburg and San Diego. Of those, Cincinnati, Detroit and San Diego appear to be the furthest along.

No matter who wins the expansion derby, it won’t be cheap. Gone are the days when Toronto FC paid $10 million for a team. Garber estimated the initial investment required now is “well north of $300 million” in expansion fees and stadium costs – for the right to own a team in a league where most still lose money.


Said Garber: “We clearly are very focused on having owners that not only have to have a deep passion about the sport and a desire to continue to be a trail blazer in growing Major League Soccer, but now you also need to have significant financial wherewithal to be able to make these kinds of investments.”

mark.zeigler@sduniontribune.com; Twitter: @sdutzeigler