L.A. Olympics will likely force USC football to play at SoFi Stadium

Since its opening in 1923, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has been the sole home of USC football. No major sports team in the city’s history has played in the same venue for longer.

But after more than a century at the city’s iconic stadium, the Times has learned that the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics will likely force USC to find a new home for its football team in 2028, with the most likely option being SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

Multiple people with knowledge of the situation and not authorized to discuss it publicly told the Times that the Coliseum would not be ready for the start of the college football season in September 2028 because of the $100 million temporary track that is being built above the Coliseum field to host the track and field competition at the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Logistics are still being worked out with LA 2028, and USC has not made a final decision on where the Trojans’ 2028 football season will be played. A source said the school has not officially determined whether the Coliseum field could be ready later in the fall, perhaps to host part of USC’s home schedule in 2028. But even if that is logistically possible, it is not clear that the USC athletic department would find that arrangement in its best interest, given that it would mean uprooting the team midseason or sitting out a long stretch of the roster 2028 far from Los Angeles.

“USC and LA28 work closely on all Olympic and Paralympic Games logistics,” USC athletics spokesman Cody Worsham said in a statement. “We will share details with the public when they are finalized.”

SoFi Stadium officials declined to comment when asked about a possible USC move to the site in 2028.

With the Paralympic Games closing ceremonies set for August 27, 2028, there will only be two weeks left for the temporary track to be removed and the turf field to be restored before USC’s 2028 home opener, currently scheduled for September 9. Several people told the Times that this is not a feasible timeline for a structure. 2028 Games.

This is not a new problem at USC. Discussions about the plausibility of the football program sharing the Coliseum with the 2028 Olympics date back well before the hiring of current athletic director Jennifer Cohen in 2023. According to a person familiar with those discussions, it was believed at one point that with a smart schedule, USC would only have to miss one or two home games.

Now, according to several people familiar with the matter, USC is expected to spend the 2028 season at SoFi Stadium, home to the NFL’s Rams and Chargers. At that point, it could also become the home field of the city’s other Big Ten football team.

UCLA has already announced plans to trade the Rose Bowl, where it has played since 1982, for modern SoFi Stadium, despite a lease agreement that runs through 2044. The city of Pasadena and the Rose Bowl Operating Company have since sued the school and ownership of SoFi Stadium in hopes of blocking the Bruins’ move.

If UCLA moves forward with plans to abandon the Rose Bowl in 2026 for SoFi, the city’s four major football teams could play under the same roof two years later.

Those logistics, however, pale in comparison to what it will take to welcome Olympic athletics to the Colosseum in 2028, in the same stadium where the competition took place nearly a century earlier. The biggest obstacle LA28 faced in using an iconic venue that hosted the 1984 Olympics was that there wasn’t enough room on the Coliseum floor for an Olympic-sized track.

Renovations in the early 1990s added 14 rows of seats to the bottom of the bowl, reducing the size of the Coliseum grounds. The solution requires the installation of a track 11 feet above the field that extends across the first few rows of stadium seats to meet Olympic standards.

To construct the temporary track, the Coliseum turf and dirt beneath it will be scraped down to the stadium’s concrete base where columns will be placed approximately every 10 feet. This construction at the Coliseum is expected to begin immediately after the Trojans complete their home football schedule in November 2027.

Bill Hanway, executive vice president of AECOM — the infrastructure consulting firm hired to oversee preparations for LA28 — told the Times in June 2024 that the runway was “an incredibly complex construction” in “an incredibly tight space.”

The hunt will be a challenge in itself, one that will take longer than the two-week window between the end of the Games and the start of USC’s 2028 roster. When a similar structure was built for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, the football team that played in the stadium – Queen’s Park FC – did not return for over a year.

Unless that schedule can be reduced, the Trojans will spend the 2028 season switching out Saturdays with their rivals, who for a year would be across the hall rather than across town.

USC and UCLA shared the Coliseum for 54 years before the Bruins moved to the Rose Bowl in 1982. For 33 of those years, the Coliseum also hosted the Rams on Sundays.

If USC seems too crowded, the Rose Bowl is the only other option in town — and suddenly appears to be in serious need of a tenant.

But for now, according to a person familiar with the matter, SoFi Stadium is the only venue that has been discussed as a potential temporary home.