It wasn’t so long ago that Padres leader Peter Seidler and former soccer star Landon Donovan partnered as supporters of the “SoccerCity” plan headed by an investment group based in La Jolla.

For their troubles, the two men each took a figurative soccer ball to the chops, SoccerCity falling well short of a competing land-use measure, “SDSU West,” in the November 2018 general election.

Seidler invested $2 million in SoccerCity; Donovan, a spokesman who was effective at mobilizing local soccer fans who were enthusiastic in support of him and the project, conceded it was a rough outcome.

But in both sports and land-use politics, just playing the game can lead to better results downstream; if not directly, through better aptitude and relationships.


“It was hard,” Donovan said recently of the SoccerCity plan not becoming reality, “because it was two years of our life. But that’s what soccer is, right? You lose one weekend, and then you get ready for the next game. If you quit because you lost one game, you wouldn’t have a successful career.”

Responding by joining other soccer ventures, Donovan played for the indoor San Diego Sockers and more recently became coach of the new San Diego Loyal, a men’s professional soccer team.

The Loyal team has financial backing that doesn’t include Seidler, but the Padres general partner and private-equity investment veteran, while acknowledging he knows little about soccer, said he’s bullish on the Loyal’s future because of Donovan.

“I think he’s an awesome guy,” Seidler said. “He does things for the right reasons, he cares. For as great an athlete as he was, he doesn’t have an outside ego. I really hope it’s successful.”


What remains to be seen is if supporters of a MLS expansion franchise coming to Mission Valley will now embrace the Loyal, which targets a March launch at the University of San Diego stadium.

MLS occupies the top tier of professional men’s soccer in the United States. One level below MLS is the USL Championship, the league the Loyal joined.

“It’ll be entertaining soccer,” Donovan said, adding that the USD venue is one of his favorites.

Also, Loyal games will be more affordable than MLS games.


Seidler has remained busy in local sports, but the soccer ball doesn’t bounce for him these days. “The Padres are 100 percent my focus,” he said.

While there isn’t a soccer-baseball overlap for Seidler and the Padres, perhaps the SoccerCity venture will have some residual benefits for the East Village-based ballclub via a pending real-estate play.

Did exposure to land-use politics with SoccerCity improve the chances of a Padres’ land-use plan, announced last month, to develop East Village property near Petco Park?

“Apples and oranges,” Seidler said this month of the two land-use measures.


The measures, in fact, don’t have much in common.

But it can’t be said that Padres leaders, a few years after SoccerCity’s plan was incubated and ushered forward, don’t know their way around Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s City Hall.

Seidler, in addition to contributing $2 million to SoccerCity and lending his name to the project, was involved in some of the project’s early politics, such as when he attended a February 2017 meeting called by Faulconer — who backed SoccerCity from its launch — and former Mayor Jerry Saunders, the CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The gathering involved several local power brokers, including Mission Valley land developers, per a report of the Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis.


Seidler wasn’t long for the politics, though.

He said in the summer of 2018 and again this month the messy divorce between early supporters of SDSU West and SoccerCity led him to distance himself from the project.

“I got involved because frankly I respect Landon and it was a situation where San Diego State and the mayor’s office and the other politicians and the guys that were leading the SoccerCity effort were all on the same page,” Seidler said recently, when also asked about Donovan’s current venture.

“It was going to be a collaborative deal that everybody was happy with, and then it turned into a conflict. I just wasn’t in it for the conflict. It was never my fight to have.”


Faulconer remains in office, giving Padres leaders a familiar relationship to draw from in their real-estate bid.

The land-use site the ballclub targets for a redo is a four-block, city-owned parcel where the team currently operates the parking lot known as Tailgate Park.

The property was eyed by the former San Diego Chargers, who in their 2016 measure, which met the same fate as SoccerCity would two years later, proposed a downtown football stadium and a convention center annex.

Faulconer long has favored a different kind of expansion of the convention center, expanding along the waterfront. The mayor showed far more support for the SoccerCity plan than the Chargers’ plan. With the Chargers having moved to greater Los Angeles, still to be determined is the fate of the land the football team targeted.


Batter up.