Dignity Health Sports Park

Lore & Background

Opened in 2003 as Home Depot Center, the $150 million complex was developed and operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group. It was renamed StubHub Center in 2013 and became Dignity Health Sports Park in 2019. The 27,000-seat main stadium was one of the earliest soccer-specific venues in the MLS era, following Columbus Crew Stadium (1999). It has hosted numerous events including the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup final, MLS Cups, and the USA Sevens rugby tournament.

In Their Own Story

The 6:30 p.m. kickoff is twenty minutes away, but the east stand is already a living thing. A drum line in the third row sets a slow, rolling beat—boom, boom-clap, boom, boom-clap—and the crowd answers in a low, sustained roar that you feel in your sternum before you hear it with your ears. The sun is dropping behind the west stands, and the grass has that deep, almost black-green sheen of late afternoon in September. A kid in a size-small LAFC jersey presses his face against the railing, breath fogging the metal, watching the goalkeeper take a touch. The wind off the harbor pushes the banner—hand-painted, slightly crooked—against the concrete wall with a soft, constant flapping, like a sail. Someone two rows back is singing "We Are LAFC" in a half-whisper, testing the words, and the row around him picks it up, then the section, then the whole lower bowl. The sound is not loud in the way a stadium can be loud. It is dense. It is close. It is the sound of two and a half thousand people breathing the same rhythm, and for a few minutes the open sky above feels like it is pressing down, holding it all in.

Reader's Guide

The complex includes a 27,000-seat soccer stadium, an 8,000-seat tennis stadium, a track-and-field facility with 2,000 permanent seats (expandable to 20,000), and the 2,450-seat VELO Sports Center velodrome. The soccer stadium was the temporary home of the Los Angeles Chargers from 2017 to 2019 and the San Diego State Aztecs football team in 2020 and 2021.

Did You Know?

• The stadium was known as Home Depot Center from 2003 to 2013, then StubHub Center until 2018.
• The Los Angeles Chargers funded a $10 million renovation in 2017, adding 1,000 seats and other NFL-required facilities.
• The complex hosted the Reebok CrossFit Games from 2010 to 2016.
• The stadium is scheduled to host the 2028 Olympic Rugby Sevens tournaments.