An off-the-cuff remark by Mayor Breed in June apparently has fresh legs, as she said Tuesday that the city has now retained an architecture firm for a preliminary design work on a possible soccer stadium to replace the beleaguered Westfield San Francisco Centre.

Less than two weeks after the owner of San Francisco's Westfield San Francisco shopping mall declared it was surrendering the property to its lender, San Francisco Mayor London Breed pitched an idea that seemed way out of left field. "A Westfield mall could become, you know, something completely different than what it currently is. It could be a place where — we could even tear down the whole building and build a whole new soccer stadium,” she said in a June Bloomberg interview.

And the Chronicle reported Tuesday SF is still kicking the soccer stadium idea around. In a Tuesday address to the Chamber of Commerce, Breed said the city had retained the architecture firm Gensler to do “some preliminary design work on what potentially is possible” for a soccer stadium at the site, and the Chron adds that “the firm is in the very early stages of conducting a feasibility study.”

"I go back to this in terms of a soccer stadium in the heart of downtown," KTVU quotes Breed as saying. "Not just soccer, but concerts and activities. How do we make downtown more than a financial district, with housing, with all kinds of other spaces?"

Ok, but… for what soccer team, exactly? Are we going to steal the Earthquakes from San Jose, or something? And parenthetically, the city does not even own the property. But per the Chron, Breed said the place could be transformed into a multi-use venue with as many as 25,000 seats.

“We hope to be able to share that information with the public fairly soon and potentially get the ball rolling,” the Chronicle quotes her sas saying. Though intriguingly, she added, “there has been a lot of interest in the Westfield mall.”

That may be true, but the place is starting to empty out. As KTVU reminds us, the soon-to-close Nordstrom has its last day in business this Sunday.

Related: Mayor Breed Floats the Idea of Turning Westfield Mall Into… A Soccer Stadium? [SFist]

Image: Kenny P. via Yelp