Did you see this coming?
San Diegans are going nuts over playoff soccer in east Mission Valley.
They fill up a 32,500-seat stadium on brisk nights, after meeting up in a gravel parking lot and other areas.
When players are introduced, they roar in unison.
If the home team scores, you’ll hear them in El Cajon.
The more zealous supporters chant, sing, bang drums and wave flags behind the home side’s goal for the better part of the match’s 90 minutes.
Caught up in playoff fever, the rest of the crowd, larger in number than during the regular season, now joins in and belts out a favorite chant. Everyone stresses the last four words.
“Ole, ole, azul y chrome; we are San Diego Football Club.”
Tom Penn is one person who saw this coming. Penn worked with NBA clubs in Portland and Memphis as an executive. He helped found and oversee LAFC, a Major League Soccer powerhouse, before moving to San Diego and assisting the launch of San Diego FC as the expansion club’s CEO.
In Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, Penn saw and heard full-house crowds of Angelenos going bonkers inside a 22,000-seat venue whose overhead canopy circulates fans’ cheers.
Asked how the larger and uncovered San Diego crowds have compared, even to when LAFC was headed toward the 2022 MLS Cup title, Penn chuckled.
“It’s louder, it’s more intense,” he said.
“At this playoff match,” he said of the 4-0 victory Nov. 9, a win-or-go-home contest against the Portland Timbers that decided a best-of-three first-round set, “the whole stadium was singing at the same time and engaged for every moment. The goals were these eruptions of joy. It was 32,000, 33,000 people going crazy at once.”
San Diego FC fans celebrate during match three of the Western Conference Round One of the 2025 MLS Cup Playoffs against the Portland Timbers at Snapdragon Stadium on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025 in San Diego, California. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Penn wasn’t done being impressed.
The following day, tickets went on sale for the Western Conference semifinal game that will come Monday night against Minnesota United. The combined pace and volume of purchases exceeded anything Penn had ever experienced in a 24-hour stretch.
Let’s recap recent events: three SDFC home playoff matches, three sellouts, one market forecast validated.
“Our research showed us that soccer thrives in San Diego,” Penn said. “And we’ve come to learn that’s true. Soccer is a big part of life for so many people. To have the top level of American soccer expressed in San Diego is coming to fruition.”
Coming off a regular season in which the team’s announced crowds averaged 28,000 across the 17 matches, good for fourth in 30-team MLS, San Diego FC’s leaders had to set ticket prices for the first and third games against Portland and the only match against Minnesota.
“We took a super-modest increase on our regular-season prices because we wanted to make it available and affordable and accessible for everybody in San Diego,” Penn said. “For our playoff tickets, for example, 33% of our tickets for our season-ticket members were below $50. And the majority of those, like 70%, are below $40.
“And then,” he added, “we have some very expensive tickets as well. Our higher-end tickets, down on the pitch, are as much $800 and $900 per seat – where your feet are on the grass and it’s like being courtside for basketball, where your feet are on the wood.”
Anders Dreyer #10 of San Diego FC, left, and fans celebrate after scoring a goal against the Portland Timbers during match three of the Western Conference Round One of the 2025 MLS Cup Playoffs at Snapdragon Stadium on Nov. 9, 2025 in San Diego, California. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Parking can cost up to $50. But the trolley costs a lot less. And spots can be found on Mission Village Drive, where fans can park for free. Just don’t tell San Diego City Hall.
Twenty-two months after the NFL’s Chargers announced their relocation from San Diego to Greater Los Angeles, San Diego voters approved a sale of public land in east Mission Valley. The old, huge stadium on the site was replaced by a smaller stadium funded largely by the Cal State University system.
Was east Mission Valley indeed a good choice for Snapdragon Stadium, which opened in 2022?
The traffic relating to SDFC matches can be sticky, even with three interstates nearby and a fourth not very far away. The connectors to those interstates aren’t ideal in breadth or number, relative to the stadium.
But the traffic flow for SDFC matches isn’t worse than downtown, where some 40,000 folks are heading to and from the East Village for a Padres game.
As San Diego FC has collected more data on where fans are coming from, this seems true: the Mission Valley decision has held up.
“If you look at our demographics, the beauty of this is, we draw (from) the entire county,” Penn said. “We are sort of spread around across the regions of San Diego County. We do trend more toward the 10-mile radius around the stadium. We trend a little more toward Chula Vista in terms of the masses. When you look across the broad spectrum of how our audience shows up, it’s very (consistently) the makeup of San Diego County. Which was the goal. We get a lot of folks from North County, from East County, from the South Bay. It’s really a neat cross mix of what broader San Diego is.”
Fans celebrate after Amahl Pellegrino #90 of San Diego FC scored his second goal against the Portland Timbers during match three of the Western Conference Round One of the 2025 MLS Cup Playoffs at Snapdragon Stadium on Nov. 9, 2025 in San Diego, California. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
It’s not surprising that all three playoff games have been sold out.
If a good time is picking up steam, San Diegans aren’t bashful about jumping on a Happy Train’s caboose. There’s a hunger among many locals for some local professional team, really anyone, to win a major sports trophy.
If some late arrivals to the SDFC party, which began in February, have never heard of star wing Anders Dreyer and wouldn’t recognize captain Jeppe Tverskov, it won’t be held against them. The players appreciate the enthusiasm.
“The stadium was on fire,” Amahl Pellegrino, a 35-year-old wing from Norway, said of the Nov. 9 crowd, which saw him score twice and don a Mexican wrestling mask after a fan handed it to him afterward.
Starting with pregame warmups, added Pellegrino, “you feel like almost one more player (is added to) the field.”
Defender Luca Bombino, a 19-year-old native of Santa Monica obtained from LAFC, noted the fans’ “non-stop chanting.” The crowd support, he said, equates to a “12th player.”
Reciprocating in each playoff game, San Diego FC jumped to multi-goal leads each night.
If top-seeded SDFC defeats fourth-seed Minnesota and the weather cooperates, the party would attract more would-be revelers for a homefield match against LAFC or Vancouver with an MLS Cup berth on the line.
