An exhibition game in Baton Rouge between two international men’s soccer teams was canceled hours before the planned Sunday night kickoff after some of the Honduran players objected to the field conditions at Olympia Stadium following their Saturday training session.
Baton Rouge attorney James Vilas with the Baton Rouge Capitals Soccer Foundation helped facilitate the planned match between Honduras and Barbados. He says he’s still adding up the tens of thousands of dollars his organization spent preparing for the event, which he hoped would showcase Baton Rouge’s ability to stage important matches and help make the case to permanently host a lower-level professional team at some point.
“This could have been great for economic development,” Vilas says. “This is just a black eye.”
Honduran players objected to the field’s condition while also raising issues with transportation and accommodations. BREC staff had filled in low points on the pitch with sand, Vilas says.
“BREC had an agreement with a local, third-party vendor for a rental of Olympia Stadium,” spokesperson Cheryl Michelet says by email. “Nowhere in the agreement did it mention anything about field conditions or field requirements.”
A representative of the Honduran team had inspected the field weeks before and requested a mixture of sand and dirt spread on certain areas and painted green, Vilas says. He says Memorial Stadium was not an option because the field isn’t large enough for a soccer pitch, and LSU’s women’s soccer facility doesn’t seat enough fans.
While English-speaking local residents may have learned about the event through Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s Friday statement, Vilas says the word had spread before that announcement through Spanish-speaking outlets, while tickets were sold at Hispanic-owned businesses throughout south Louisiana. The state has a very large Honduran and Honduran-American population, and organizers expected more than 6,000 fans to attend.
Mark Armstrong, a spokesperson for Broome’s office, says the office was looped in a week or two before the event and released a statement more to celebrate the historic nature of a FIFA-sanctioned event in Baton Rouge than to encourage attendance. While it’s disappointing it didn’t happen, he says, the fact that it almost did could be a good sign for the future.
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