The whole point of having a home game in World Cup qualifying is to play the match at the most favorable venue your federation can imagine.

It seems clear that the U.S. Soccer Federation’s imagination is not very good.

The United States is playing a critical World Cup qualifier, against El Salvador, at Sandy, Utah, on Saturday night.

Why is it critical? Because the Americans are part of a four-team clot atop the qualifying standings, and the fourth-place team at the end of the process has to win a home-and-home playoff against South America’s No. 5 team — which will be very difficult — in order to get to South Africa 2010.

So, the U.S. must, must, must get a victory (and three points) against the also-ran Salvadorans. So, yes, you want this match at the place where you have the best change to get 1) a pro-U.S. crowd, 2) a sellout and 3) the attention of the local fans and media.

Sandy, Utah, then, is the wrong place … at the wrong time.

Here’s why:

–The U.S. should have agitated to have this match moved back one day, to Sunday, Sept.  6. To escape the first-weekend crush of college football.

Yes, I know, CONCACAF likes to play all three of its Hexagonal matches on the same day, but exceptions can and have been made. The U.S. played June 3 and 6 earlier this year, when the other games were June 6 and 10. That was because the Americans were going to the Confederations Cup in South Africa. Anyway, there is precedent for moving the date of a match, and Job 1 for the Federation should have been to get the Salvador match to Sunday.

The way the game is scheduled now, it is competing all over the map for time and attention with college football, a far more popular TV and spectator sport than is soccer. A move to Sept. 6 would jump the Yanks past the colleges and onto the Sunday before the National Football League begins. It would be perfect, that is.

–U.S. Soccer further botched this by scheduling kickoff for 6:11 p.m. — or about one hour after Brigham Young University’s football team, a Utah institution, plays No. 3-ranked Oklahoma on national TV. Meaning the soccer match is a distant second for the attention of Utahans who, presumably, are supposed to make up the majority of fans at the 20,000-capacity Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy, a Salt Lake City suburb.

A starting time of, say, noon or 1 p.m. would make the game the No. 1 local interest for Utah sports fans because Utah and Utah State play each other on Thursday night.

–A Sunday match also might have gotten a easily accessible outlet on national TV. The Saturday match is being shown on ESPN Classic — which isn’t available on most basic cable packages in the U.S.  Which means most U.S. fans will have to try to watch the game on TeleFutura, if they get it, en espanol. Holy Andres Cantor!

–Turns out, the federation still hasn’t sold out the Rio Tinto stadium, and nothing kills home advantage (and depresses the spirit of players) like a non-full stadium. Part of the problem is the high price structure the federation has insisted on — starting at $38 and going on up to $300.

Why the high prices? To try to price-out Salvadoran fans, we imagine. But Salvadorans still entertain the notion that their team can get to the World Cup for only the second time in national history, and our experience has been that immigrant groups in the U.S. — and there are some 2 million Salvadorans in the U.S. — will pay any price and bear any burden to see their home team play in the U.S.  So … the chances are fairly good all the cheap seats have been bought up by Salvadorans, and the good seats will not be sold because not enough people in Utah care about the U.S. national team to play triple digits for tickets.

Let’s back up for a minute and try to puzzle out why the U.S. Soccer Federation chose this venue in the first place.

The U.S. has some history playing in Utah, defeating Costa Rica in the 2005 qualifying. But that match was in Rice-Eccles Stadium on the University of Utah campus. A much bigger venue.

Maybe because the Rio Tinto facility is new? Well, shiny locker rooms. Grand. But the field is the same dimensions as they are elsewhere, and that is where the match will be decided, between the lines.

Maybe there was some sort of quid pro quo here, when Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer got the stadium built? “If you build a soccer-specific stadium in the suburbs, we’ll get U.S. Soccer to bring you a World Cup qualifier.” Certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

Perhaps Sandy is on the calendar because it is located at 4,400 feet above sea level, and the Yanks will see if the living-at-sea-level Salvadorans will exhaust themselves in the, comparitively, thinner air? But haven’t many studies suggested that altitude doesn’t really get to an athlete until it’s at least 5,000 feet? (And more like 7,000 feet?)

Because the Salvadoran community in Salt Lake City (the metro area involved here) is small? Again, that doesn’t much matter, because Salvadorans from Los Angeles — and there are 300,000 of them, according to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau figures — will think nothing of making a nine-hour drive up Interstate 15 to see the match.

So, now, where should the match have been played?

My first choice would have been Anheuser-Busch Soccer Park, in Fenton, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. My second choice would be PGE Park in Portland, Ore.

Here’s why:

–If U.S. soccer is tethered to Saturday, and TV destruction at the hands of college football, then play the match at a tiny venue that can be filled with U.S. fans — and that would work in St. Louis, which has no hometown college football team of any significance. The park is fairly primitive, sure,  and holds only 6,200 people. But the national team played here several times in the 1980s, and did fairly well, and if the USSF marketed this intelligently, it could have channeled nearly every ticket to a USA fan. Remember, it’s all about getting to the World Cup, not selling another 14,000 tickets,  and the crummy TV exposure (ESPN Classic) wouldn’t get any worse.

–If the federation wants 1) a change of weather for the El Salvadorans but is 2) committed to a bigger stadium, then go to Portland, another site formerly associated with the national team. Weather Saturday in Portland? A predicted high of 62 Fahrenheit with a chance of (chilly) rain. That will seem like freezing weather to the Salvadorans. Plus, the Salvadoran population of Portland is quite small (and Portland is farther from Salvadoran fans in L.A. than is Salt Lake City), so the crowd would be overwhelmingly pro-U.S.

And there’s more: The University of Oregon’s football team (a big Oregon attraction) plays Thursday, so it’s out of the way.  Then Portland State plays Oregon State at 11:30 local time Satuday. So the state of Oregon can turn its focus to the national team at, say, 6 p.m. PDT and the match can go off in an 18,000-capacity stadium that knows soccer because the Portland Timbers of the USL.

If I had control of this, I would play in Portland on Sunday. That would be perfect. A full house at a fairly big venue (so what if it’s not soccer-specific?) and no competition locally or nationally on the college football front.

I just have a bad feeling about this. The Americans must win, at home, against one of the two weak teams in the Hexagonal. But it is asking its team to play in a stadium that will not be filled, in a state that will have its attentions focused on BYU football. How does that help the players? Not at all.