Olympics Continue Planning Outside L.A. With 6 New Soccer Host Cities

Los Angeles won’t serve as host to the majority of Olympic soccer matches in 2028.

Organizers announced Tuesday that Columbus, New York City, Nashville, St. Louis, San Diego, and San Jose will host group stage matches throughout the tournament. The medal games were already announced to be at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The men’s final will be on July 28, followed by the women’s final the next day.

Soccer is the latest sport set to take place outside of Southern California. Softball, canoe, and kayak events have already been assigned to Oklahoma City, which hosts the Women’s College World Series every year and is home to a whitewater training site that hosted the Olympic team trials in 2024.

In a meeting with the International Olympic Committee in Milan on Tuesday, LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover said matches will be played in “premier existing Major League Soccer stadiums.” In the country’s biggest market, those matches will be held in New York City FC’s planned $780 million stadium next to the Mets’ Citi Field in Queens, which is slated to open in 2027.

More women’s than men’s soccer teams will compete in the Olympics for the first time, organizers said. The tournament will feature 16 women’s and 12 men’s teams. The men’s UEFA European Football Championship, or the Euro, is also scheduled for summer 2028.

Also present at the meeting in Milan was LA28 chair Casey Wasserman. He has come under fire in recent days for emails released by the Department of Justice that show the agency executive conversing with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking and sexual abuse of underage girls.

In addition to talking about real estate, Wasserman and Maxwell’s emails in 2003 were overtly flirtatious. While discussing a massage, Maxwell wrote there are “a few spots that apparently drive a man wild” and offered to “practice them on” Wasserman. He said another time that his “desires” include “You, me, and not else much.”

Wasserman released a statement on Saturday, saying: “I deeply regret my correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell,” which happened “long before her horrific crimes came to light … I never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. As is well documented, I went on a humanitarian trip as part of a delegation with the Clinton Foundation in 2002 on the Epstein plane. I am terribly sorry for having any association with either of them.”