Aloha MLS

Honolulu Advertiser Article
Official Aloha Cup Site

It seems as though the Aloha Stadium Authority has decided to give both baseball and soccer the boot. And it now seems more and more that the MLS will not be returning to Hawaii in the forseeable future. And one wonders if the LA Galaxy's agreement to play a preseason friendly in Hawaii every year has been discarded as a promise unfufilled.

When the Galaxy came in 2005 the media reported that they had signed a five year agreement to come and play a J-League team in Hawaii each year. The first year the J-League side Hiroshima cancelled due to the J-League's descion to start their season earlier because of World Cup Qualifying. DC United (another AEG side) would come in their place to play. This past year CONCACAF commitments kept LA from paradise, that however is just my own educated guess, as nothing was ever reported.

With the locking of the stadium there would be few alternative venues to host a soccer game. It might still be possible to remove several rows of seats to bring the field up to the smallest possible allowed field size, but having been to the Aloha stadium I'm not sure how feasible this really is. Another alternative is the Waipio Soccer Complex, but after the first game drew more than 14,000 fans to the game on a cold and rainy night (yes we get those in Hawaii), limiting seating to 5,000 could be problematic.

Other Aloha Cup Articles...
Spotlight Cobi Jones
Color Commentary on the Game

Heres to hoping they come back.

In an aside, you might think that the Star Bulletin is a very soccer friendly paper with all of these articles, many of them very positive about soccer. However they have a tendancy to forget to publish MLS scores. Which is to bad, when they are otherwise the better paper in Hawaii I feel.