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Why San Diego won’t be a venue in the 2026 World Cup

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Here’s one more thing to blame on the Chargers and city government: The 2026 World Cup is coming to the United States but not San Diego.

A joint bid from the United States, Mexico and Canada was awarded soccer’s 2026 global championship in a 134-65 vote over Morocco early Wednesday morning at FIFA meetings in Moscow. The 2026 tournament will be expanded from 32 to 48 teams, which means 80 instead of 64 games.

Twenty will be in Mexico and Canada. The other 60 will be in the States, including everything from the quarterfinals on.

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Just not in a tourist mecca in the country’s southwest corner bordering Mexico that has a temperate summer climate and a rich history of hosting international soccer games.

The joint bid reached out to 44 metropolises across the three countries last summer as it began to parse potential venues for 2026. The deadline was Sept. 5. Forty-one responded that of course they were interested in hosting World Cup games.

Three did not: Green Bay, Wis.; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and America’s (Supposedly) Finest City.

Green Bay has a big enough stadium, but 81,441-seat Lambeau Field isn’t wide enough for international soccer. Calgary has a wide enough stadium, but city leaders were more interested in bidding for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The problem in San Diego wasn’t a lack of interest in soccer but a lack of a stadium, although, who knows, at this rate 70,561-seat SDCCU Stadium might still be around in 2026, celebrating its 59th birthday. Although both measures on the November ballot propose a new stadium on the Mission Valley site, neither would meet the World Cup bid’s minimum of 40,000 seats.

But … had the Chargers not moved north to play in a, ahem, soccer stadium and built a glistening new NFL palace here, San Diego, you’d think, would have been among the 17 finalists in contention to host games in 2026. Only four currently are in the Pacific or Mountain time zones: Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

That makes San Diego 0-for-2 on World Cups, for different reasons.

The city had a suitable stadium in 1994 (that was less than 30 years old at the time) and organizers badly wanted to come here, but it didn’t have a pro baseball stadium yet. Petco Park was still a decade from opening, and the Padres shared what was then Jack Murphy Stadium with the Chargers.

FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, then required that World Cup venues be reserved for six weeks in June and July, which would have sent the Padres on the road trip to end all road trips.

The Houston Astros did that in 1992, vacating the Astrodome for the Republican National Convention. But a subsequent grievance filed by the Major League Baseball Players Association resulted in an agreement that teams could be away from home no longer than 17 consecutive days – not enough for FIFA.

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

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