SDSU Football to Play Next Season at LA Soccer Stadium amid Venue Construction

With its 70,000-seat stadium being destroyed earlier than planned to speed up construction on a new venue, the San Diego State football team will play home games during the upcoming spring and fall seasons at the home of Major League Soccer's LA Galaxy. 

The Aztecs will play at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, about 110 miles north of their current home. Ground broke on a new $310 million stadium last month, with the facility being part of a campus expansion project and scheduled to open in the fall of 2022. 

SDCCU Stadium, which was previously known as Qualcomm Stadium and Jack Murphy Stadium, was the home to the San Diego Chargers before the franchise relocated to Los Angeles, where Dignity Health Sports Park was also its home.

No stadium was available in San Diego to host the team, athletic director John David Wicker said, per USA Today: 

“We are San Diego State University. We are going to be here forever. We're excited that we are building a football stadium in San Diego. ... We are part of this community. We're just going to run up the road for a little bit to play football and then we're going to come back and we're going to open a phenomenal stadium and continue developing a campus that is great for San Diego."

SDCCU Stadium opened in 1967 and has hosted three Super Bowls and two World Series; the San Diego Padres played at the facility until 2004. 

The Aztecs had planned to play two more seasons at the stadium before the Mountain West Conference postponed the fall football season to spring because of COVID-19. With the pandemic ongoing, the decision was made to move up demolition of the stadium to early 2021.

Wicker said concrete from the demolition of SDCCU Stadium will be used as a base for the new Aztec Stadium, which will seat 35,000. 

In 2019, San Diego State went 10-3 and ended the season with a 48-11 defeat of Central Michigan in the New Mexico Bowl.