BMO Stadium
When Los Angeles FC played their first game at BMO Stadium on April 18, 2018, the goal of the exercise was to prove that Los Angeles could sustain a second major league soccer club less than 30 miles from where the Galaxy played. The skeptics were plentiful. Los Angeles is a car culture, a freeway culture, a horizontal city where people drive to things rather than gather for them. The 3252 supporters section — named for the square footage of a standard pitch — had other ideas. The stadium sold out. It kept selling out. The experiment was not an experiment anymore.
The Site and the Build
BMO Stadium sits in Exposition Park, the cultural and recreational campus south of the University of Southern California that also holds the California Science Center, the Natural History Museum, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The $250 million stadium was built on the footprint of the old Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, a mid-century multipurpose venue that had hosted everything from NBA games to political conventions before its demolition made way for the new structure. The arena came down; the stadium went up on the same ground, taking roughly three years from groundbreaking to opening day.
The Steep Bowl
The stadium's designers made a specific choice that shapes how it feels to watch a game there: the seating angle is the steepest in Major League Soccer, pitched at 34 degrees to bring all 22,000 seats close to the action. A steeply raked bowl concentrates sound and energy in a way that more gently sloped venues don't, and the supporters groups — particularly the 3252 supporters section behind one of the goals — have made the acoustic effect distinctive. The stadium regularly measures among the loudest in the league, which matters in a sport where crowd noise is part of the home-field experience.
Two Teams, One Pitch
LAFC played the stadium's first MLS season in 2018 and have called it home since. In 2022, Angel City FC — a National Women's Soccer League team backed by a high-profile ownership group that included several prominent athletes and entertainers — joined them as co-tenants, making BMO Stadium one of the few soccer venues in the United States used by both a major men's and women's professional team. The arrangement has generally worked, with the two clubs scheduling around each other and sharing the infrastructure of one of the more purpose-built soccer facilities in the country.
From Banc of California to BMO
The stadium opened as Banc of California Stadium in 2018, a naming rights arrangement that lasted until 2023, when the venue was renamed BMO Stadium following a sponsorship deal with BMO Financial Group. The renaming was unremarkable by the standards of modern sports venue naming, where corporate sponsorships turn over on multi-year cycles. What hasn't changed is the building itself, the neighborhood, or the clubs that play there — or the supporters section that was already naming itself after a unit of measure rather than a corporation, which perhaps tells you something about how they expected things to go.
From the Air
BMO Stadium is located at 34.0130°N, 118.2850°W in Exposition Park, south of the USC campus and about 2.5 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. The stadium's distinctive bowl shape and proximity to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum make the complex identifiable from the air. The California Science Center and Natural History Museum are adjacent. Nearest airports: Hawthorne (KHHR) 6 miles southwest, Los Angeles International (KLAX) 9 miles west, Compton/Woodley (KCPM) 4 miles south.