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UCLA has played its home games at the Rose Bowl since 1982, and that is supposed to remain the case for the next couple of decades. However, the school has found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the city of Pasadena for trying to flee the iconic venue for a shiny new stadium in Los Angeles.
The football team at UCLA played its inaugural season in 1917 and initially played on a unremarkable field on campus before upgrading to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1928. It shared the venue with USC (which has called it home since 1928), and that remained the case for over 50 years until the Bruins decided to relocate to the Rose Bowl starting in 1982.
That turned what had been an approximately 15-mile commute from campus into a 25-mile journey, but plenty of fans were still willing to make the trek.
Attendance numbers for their games at the Rose Bowl (which can accommodate a little over 80,000 spectators) began to grow after Los Angeles found itself without an NFL franchise in the 1990s, and while they peaked with an average of 76,703 in 2014, those numbers have cratered over the past decade as the team’s performance has done the same.
In 2024, UCLA officially posted an average attendance of 46,805 fans, but according to the Los Angeles Times, that does not accurately reflect the number of people who actually showed up; the outlet took a closer look at crowd sizes and determined the school has a tendency to overreport to the tune of between 20 and 30 percent.
The fact that the Bruins have had trouble assembling a competitive team is obviously the biggest issue when it comes to improving those totals. However, the school has apparently come to the conclusion that playing at the Rose Bowl isn’t doing it any favors, which has led to a proposed pivot that has sparked a lawsuit.
The city of Pasadena is suing UCLA to prevent the Bruins from leaving the Rose Bowl for SoFi Stadium
The aforementioned report from the Times asserts there were only 27,785 fans at the Rose Bowl when UCLA opened its season against Utah. The school’s reported number was 35,032, and that has been around the average for the first four home games the Bruins have played this season.
According to that same outlet, UCLA’s inability to hit half of the Rose Bowl’s capacity led to some soul-searching that resulted in the school deciding it was time to find a new home at SoFi Stadium, the venue in Inglewood that the Rams and the Chargers call home.
UCLA has an agreement to play at the Rose Bowl until 2044, but the school recently informed officials in Pasadena that it has no intention to remain there until the lease expires. That led to the city filing a complaint in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Wednesday while citing “a profound betrayal of trust” and pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars it has poured into the Rose Bowl in an attempt to block the move.
It went on to assert the economic impact of a premature departure “could easily exceed a billion dollars” and is asking the court to force UCLA to adhere to the contract it signed.
The school has not officially responded to the development, but it seems like there’s plenty of potential for things to get messy.