Larry Berg calls himself a soccer junkie. It makes sense, considering he owns three teams.
With financial stakes in both Serie A’s AS Roma and the Premier League’s Swansea City, Berg has seen some of the best soccer venues worldwide. Now that he has become lead managing owner of the Los Angeles Football Club, Major League Soccer’s newest member, Berg will stack Banc of California Stadium against any international facility.
LAFC’s $350-million facility opens April 29 at Exposition Park, just southwest of downtown and home to the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That venue is undergoing a $270 million renovation for University of Southern California football, and together the two developments bring a dramatic change to the city’s sports landscape.
On its own, Banc of California Stadium stands out as North America’s most expensive soccer-specific venue. Over the past three years, the overall project cost escalated by $100 million after LAFC officials upgraded the design and added a 70,000-square-foot food hall next to the stadium that will be open year-round to all Exposition Park visitors.
It’s all good, according to Berg.
“We built the nicest soccer-specific stadium in the country and there’s very few places you can probably do that,” he said. “L.A. is one of them, given the size of the market, the diverse population and the support of the sponsors. It has all those things going into it.”
Location was key, and LAFC officials researched a half-dozen sites before deciding on Exposition Park. Most were in remote areas, and the team strongly considered building the stadium in Orange County, before landing much nearer downtown L.A., which is a hot market and the place to be for young professionals, Berg said.
“The allure of being ‘of the city’ and be authentically L.A.’s team was too good to pass up,” said Tom Penn, LAFC’s president and an owner.
L.A.’s other MLS team, the Galaxy, has been around since the league’s launch in 1996, playing first at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before moving south to StubHub Center in Carson. “We felt like we could offer something new and fresh with our location adjacent to downtown,” Penn said. “It was just a different offering.”
It didn’t come easy. The decision to build on the site of the old Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena came with the challenge of negotiating with multiple property owners among the city, county and state. To its credit, though, LAFC ownership remained committed to the site it thought made the most sense, said Ron Turner, Gensler’s sports practice leader.
“I know [MLS Commissioner] Don Garber and other [league officials] that have been here have said that so many MLS stadiums are in the suburbs … and this is the new model for the league needing to come back and be in critical places in the city where they belong,” he said.
The stadium is within five miles of L.A.’s main business district, a short drive after work for corporate clients, which project officials say was a key factor for selling every piece of initial premium inventory one year before the first home match: 32 suites, 80 loge boxes and 1,975 club seats. (Late in stadium development, LAFC added 34 loge boxes in the north end, one level above the supporters’ section, and had fewer than 10 left to sell as of mid-March.)
“The proximity to downtown was critical in the ability to sell premium,” said Jon Emmett, principal and design director with Gensler Sports, the stadium’s architect, whose L.A. office sits on the same street four miles north of the venue. “A location further from downtown may have been more difficult. To drive two miles down Figueroa Street is an easy sell.”
Legends Global Sales, which hired Corey Breton and Jamie Guin to head the team’s sales department, consulted on the mix of premium, which included sister firm CSL International’s market research early in the project.
The clubs tied to those high-end seats are some of the nicest in the market, which hasn’t seen a new open-air stadium built in the city limits since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.
The Sunset Deck, for example, an outdoor lounge at the top of the stadium on the northwest side, is tied to suites priced at $75,000 and $85,000 a year. Designed with a water feature and couch furniture, the deck overlooks the Coliseum’s iconic peristyle and the Hollywood Hills.
“There’s a throwback Palm Springs feel to it, a backyard party,” Penn said. “It’s perfect for California.”
Banc of California Stadium showcases MLS’s first bunker suites, which the team calls Field Level Suites and are modeled in part after Staples Center’s courtside seats. For LAFC games, patrons in the 10 bunkers sit with their feet on the pitch. Behind those front-row seats lies a private hallway to their hospitality spaces tucked under the stands.
The 10 bunker suites, distributed equally behind both the north and south goals, cost $120,000 a year. Terms are seven and 10 years, and the suites are all-inclusive, covering the cost of beer and wine.
“From the purest futbol fan perspective, is it the best view?” Emmett asked. “No. But it’s all about that up-close experience to the action.”
It’s been a trend across sports for years. The sidelines at Banc of California Stadium are a scant 11 feet from the first row of seats along the sidelines and the end lines. Gensler designed the facility as steep as possible for an intimate feel, Penn said.
“The American consumer loves being close to the action, down on the field,” Penn said. “[The bunkers] were our most sought-after product.”
Bunker patrons have access to the Field Level Club, a 12,000-square-foot lounge on the stadium’s west side, where players from both teams pass through to get to the field.
In Los Angeles, the Directors Lounge, a smaller club within the Field Level Club, is reserved for LAFC’s 30 owners, including Magic Johnson, Nomar and Mia Hamm Garciaparra, Will Ferrell and motivational speaker Tony Robbins. Their seats are among the 10 loge boxes at center pitch on the west side.
For the most part, the expansive ownership group was “very particular” about not being separated from the rest of the crowd in the seating bowl, said Breton, LAFC’s executive vice president of sales, and a former executive with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Atlanta Hawks.
“The whole premise is to unite the world’s city to the world’s game, and to bring this to fruition, they want to be connected to our fans,” Breton said.
As much as premium is a signature element, LAFC relied on the team’s die-hard fans holding the least expensive tickets at $20 a game as a guiding force in stadium design. Those 3,000-plus fans make up the team’s supporter groups, and they were influential for developing the safe standing zone in the stadium’s north end.
Safe standing areas for supporters groups originated in Europe after the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989 in England killed 96 people and prompted a move to all-seat stadiums. MLS stadiums in San Jose and Orlando have safe standing, but it was not part of Banc of California Stadium’s original design, Berg said. The zone was added after Gensler architects met with dozens of supporters on several Saturday afternoons to discuss preferences for their section.
The zone has folding seats that can be used for concerts and other events. For LAFC matches, they’re locked into place.
Overall, the supporters — five smaller groups that collectively make up The 3252, a name that reflects the stadium’s total number of safe-standing spaces — felt it would help generate greater energy in the stadium, Berg said.
“It was almost like ‘The Godfather’ with the heads of the five families saying, ‘We really want safe standing,’” he said. “The main point is they’ve been involved from the beginning. They’ve been vocal, given their opinions and it’s been interactive. It created a terrific bond with our first fans, and hopefully it will expand to the rest of the stadium.”
At the top of the supporters section sits the Heineken House, a 70-foot-long outdoor bar. It’s another example of how the group influenced design, which in this case included direct conversations with the beer brand, Berg said.
Heineken is among the team’s founding partners. Toyota sponsors the northwest gate and stadium naming-rights holder Banc of California has a branch inside that entrance. Bank customers, which include local vendors that do business at Exposition Park, can park and walk in the branch, which is open on non-game days, Penn said.
The swoopy roof canopy, another signature feature, provides shade to 75 percent of the stadium’s 22,000 seats. After completing extensive sun studies, Gensler was able to pull the canopy back from the front row on the south and west sides and still maintain shade to all seats in those areas, Turner said. The roof design also allows for more sun on the pitch for maximum turf growth, he said.
It’s the sun that defines SoCal, and for LAFC, all that goes with the temperate climate helps define the culture of its new stadium. The team reached its cap of 17,500 season tickets sold, with the balance of seats reserved for single-game and group sales.
“It will attract every demographic in L.A. and it will be a venue the city can be proud of,” said LAFC co-managing owner Bennett Rosenthal.
BANC OF CALIFORNIA STADIUM
City: Los Angeles
Tenant: Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Football Club
Cost: $350 million
Architect: Gensler Sports
General contractor: PCL Construction
Structural engineer: Thornton Tomasetti
Owner’s representative: Legends Global Planning
Food service: Legends Hospitality
Team store: Fanatics
Seats: 22,000
Premium seats: 32 suites, $65,000 to $120,000 annually, seven and 10-year terms; 114 loge boxes, $16,000 to $42,000 annually; 1,975 club seats, $2,000 to $4,000 annually.
Naming rights: Banc of California, $100 million over 15 years
Founding partners: Delta/Aeromexico, Toyota, Heineken, Kaiser Permanente, YouTube
Source: LAFC, VenuesNow research