Major League Soccer to Return to San Jose
19/07/2007 |
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Major League Soccer will return to San Jose next season with a club owned by Lewis Wolff and John Fisher, who also own Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics.
The Earthquakes, one of MLS's original franchises in 1996, won league titles in 2001 and 2003 and had its best record in 2005 before moving to Houston after that season because of small crowds and the lack of a stadium agreement in California. The team, renamed the Dynamo, won the MLS championship in its first year in Texas.
The new club in San Jose will retain the Earthquakes' nickname and give the MLS 14 franchises.
Wolff and Fisher hope to build a privately financed, soccer-only stadium with 18,000-20,000 seats near the San Jose, airport in time for the 2010 season, pending approval from the city council, the league said in a statement.
The release didn't say where the Earthquakes would play for the 2008 and 2009 seasons.
Wolff, a hotelier, and Fisher, son of the Gap Inc. founders, held an option to place an MLS team in the Bay Area through 2009.
MLS has teams in cities in the U.S. and Canada and plans to expand to 16 by 2012. The league has said that new teams should have a soccer-specific stadium ready or a plan for one in place.
Wolff is building a baseball stadium for the A's in Fremont, California, to replace Oakland's McAfee Coliseum, where they have played since 1968.
(Source: Bloomberg.com)
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