Mexico soccer coach criticizes SDCCU Stadium field ahead of game vs Chile
The national soccer teams from Mexico and Chile were scheduled to practice at SDCCU Stadium on Thursday ahead of their game there Friday night.
They didn’t.
They couldn’t.
Rolls of grass were still being installed in parts of a field after four San Diego Fleet football games in the last five weeks, combined with unseasonable amounts of rain.
Not happy: Gerardo “Tata” Martino, who is making his debut as Mexico’s coach.
“The field is bad,” Martino said at a press conference Thursday night in downtown San Diego. “They’re working on it. I hope they represent the interests of the Mexican national team. With the value of this team, they should have good conditions, especially when they knew about this game months ago.”
Instead, Mexico and its first-choice roster worth north of $200 million on the international transfer market practiced again at the Elite Athlete Training Center in Chula Vista, where they have been based all week. The plan was to leave the training center Thursday, check into a downtown hotel and train at SDCCU Stadium in the afternoon.
Chile has been practicing at the San Diego Jewish Academy, which has arguably the best grass field in the county, and returned there again Thursday.
The Fleet schedule was released last October. Mexico-Chile was announced two months later, knowing it would be played five days after a football game.
Mexico regularly comes to San Diego, usually in the spring or early summer, but the Alliance of American Football wasn’t around then. Sometimes there have been motocross or tractor pulls in the stadium before a soccer game, but in those years the entire field was re-sodded.
The issue isn’t the sod itself but the seams between strips of grass. If they don’t have time to properly bond, the fear is players catching a cleat in the gaps and twisting an ankle or knee.
International soccer games, particularly involving Mexico, represent one of the city’s biggest sources of revenue at the financial-troubled stadium, as much as $500,000 in some years. Ticket sales for Friday’s game reportedly are approaching 45,000.
“We needed a little bit more time to prepare the field, so the teams were unable to train on it today,” said a spokesman from Soccer United Marketing, the game’s U.S. promoter. “Certain parts of the field have been re-sodded throughout the week, including some this morning. The rain we had this week slowed us down a little. But the field will be fine for the game.”
Stadium general manager Mike McSweeney was unavailable for comment.
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