Setting the stage for a Los Angeles rivalry

When they and their opponents leave their locker rooms to walk onto the field for matches at the team’s new Banc of California Stadium, which will host its first match Sunday, they first will walk through what could pass for one of LA’s hip new nightspots.

On one side, separated by a series of velvet ropes, will be the Field Club, featuring a large bar surrounding a cube-shaped floor-to-ceiling light installation and reserved for the sort of people with enough money to buy a field suite.

On the other side, behind a glass wall — Field Club patrons can look, but not enter — is the sprawling Directors Lounge, a space carved out, with some difficulty given its size, for the 30 owners of LAFC, their families and their guests. It is, like several other things about LAFC, just a little bit shinier, a little bit more enticing, than other such spaces around the league.

When it is time to watch the game, the owners who get a glimpse of the players from inside this most exclusive of vantage points — private equity types and tech moguls but also boldface names like Magic Johnson, Will Ferrell and Mia Hamm Garciaparra — can take a private elevator to the owners’ veranda. From there they can watch the day’s battle in the nascent fight for Los Angeles’ soccer soul.

LAFC’s ostensible rival in this style-and-substance competition is the Los Angeles Galaxy, the original MLS glamour club.

Playing at the soccer-specific StubHub Center in Carson, California, about 13 miles from downtown Los Angeles, the Galaxy have long been the MLS standard, the star-driven, title-winning cornerstone franchise around which the league has revolved for two decades.

The Galaxy have won a record five MLS Cups, including three in four years from 2011-2014, when they were led by high-profile, and highly paid, signings like David Beckham, Robbie Keane and Landon Donovan.

That star-centered system has been the Galaxy’s calling card and winning business model, and after missing the postseason in 2017, the team has doubled down on it, signing Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a swaggering Swedish striker with the crowd-pleasing habits of scoring stunning goals and talking about himself in the third person.

To the delight of MLS, Ibrahimovic’s debut — in Los Angeles against LAFC last month — ended with his scoring two goals in a 4-3 thriller, delivering some welcome buzz for the league in a rivalry that had been pre-emptively called El Tráfico.

Yet if the Galaxy’s model is the exemplar of MLS 2.0 — imported headliners, a suburban soccer-specific stadium and success — then LAFC is showing what its next generation of fan engagement, stadiums and media relationships might look like.

Because beneath the gleam and glimmer of LAFC’s new home — the pristine field, the silver roof that shades row after row of gray seats and the theatrical nature of seemingly everything the club does online — is something more fundamental: a well-run team and a well-executed plan.

LAFC was born from the ashes of Chivas USA, an earlier Los Angeles club with a manufactured Mexican identity that folded in 2014 after years of lackluster play, dwindling attendance and lost opportunity.

"Chivas was effectively a failed expansion in LA,” said Larry Berg, LAFC’s lead managing owner. More than anything else, Berg said, that experiment provided a blueprint for what not to do.

Instead, from the awarding of the expansion team in 2014 until its on-field league debut in March, LAFC undertook an expansive branding effort to try to position itself as belonging to the city of Los Angeles specifically, and to Angelenos generally. Street by street, block by block, one by one is a mantra repeated by those around the team and on its social media accounts, and the methodical approach has proved even more successful than the founders had hoped.

Before the team ever kicked a ball, LAFC had sold 17,500 season tickets, and club officials project that Banc of California Stadium — in the heart of south Los Angeles, adjacent to the famed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home to Southern California football and two Summer Olympics — will be sold out for every match this season.

The implicit, and sometimes explicit, message is that the Galaxy aren’t of Los Angeles and play in the faraway land of Carson. LAFC fans even have a hashtag (#carsongalaxy) they use on social media to mock the Galaxy, much as NYCFC and its fans needle the Red Bulls for claiming to represent New York while playing their home games in New Jersey.

So far, the team’s play on the field has been both exciting and, at times, infuriating. Opening the season on the road as finishing touches were put on its new home, LAFC has won four of its first six games, scoring goals by the bucketful but conceding almost as many, as the humbling 4-3 loss to the Galaxy and a 5-0 thrashing in Atlanta a week later illustrated.

Still, eschewing the outdated stereotype of MLS as a retirement league for well-known Europeans, coach Bob Bradley and general manager John Thorrington have built a fan-friendly and surprisingly formidable (at least up front) team. Carlos Vela, a 29-year-old Mexican forward, arrived with extensive experience in the Premier League and Spain’s La Liga, and Diego Rossi, a 20-year-old from Uruguay, quickly opened eyes inside the league and out.

Fans who want to watch them but can’t get into the stadium will not find English-language LAFC matches on a free over-the-air channel or a regional sports network, but somewhere more novel: YouTube’s streaming cable replacement, YouTube TV. The decision to seek out the unusual arrangement, which also includes a jersey sponsorship, was an effort to explore a nontraditional solution.

“I think in a world where the MLS local rights aren’t quite where they are in other leagues, it allows you to experiment a little bit more,” Berg said.

But while MLS hopes that LAFC and the Galaxy grow into formidable rivals, their biggest competition remains international: the cross-border appeal of Mexico’s top soccer league, Liga MX, in the heavily Latino Los Angeles market. That was the original conceit behind the failed Chivas USA experiment — to create a team with a Mexican identity to attract Mexican fans — but the target audience dismissed it, and Galaxy fans already had a team.

Banc of California Stadium is the latest attempt to draw those fans in for another look, to try to win them over with a Mexican striker, an attack that has produced a few memorable goals and some stardust in the owners’ box. The timing of the team’s debut hasn’t hurt, either: The Galaxy finished last in the league standings last season, missing the playoffs for the first time since 2008.

At a ribbon-cutting for the stadium last week, the team’s sky-high expectations were on display when Johnson got his turn at the microphone.

“Just like we were able to turn the Lakers around into a championship team,” he said, “we’re going to do the same thing with this great soccer team, LAFC. We will be champions one day.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.