The fans were never the problem.
Despite the cynicism that was lobbed by John Fisher on his baseball team’s way out of the crumbling Oakland Coliseum, there was never a shortage of people who wanted to support The Town’s sports teams.
They just wanted someone to love them back.
The A’s are gone, but the Roots have taken their place. And after five years of bouncing between different college campuses in the East Bay, the USL soccer club has made the Coliseum their new home — setting a club attendance record on Saturday, with 26,575 tickets sold in its first night as the venue’s home team.
Before getting to the sport at hand, it’s worth acknowledging that the night, which featured a halftime performance by Too Short and a post match fireworks show, provided moments of pure joy and catharsis. It created hundreds of jobs; provided a platform for local schools and businesses; and to my personal joy, reactivated the bridge that leads to the Coliseum BART station.
This was Oakland. Done by Oakland. For Oakland.
And on this day, despite losing 2-1, the Roots soccer team is off the hook. For pulling off this event in one piece, by an organization that has only had to handle about 4,000 attendees for five years, was nothing short of a miracle.
But this team and its fanbase have bigger aspirations than just a one night fling. They want Oakland to be a major league sports town again. (For the uninitiated, the Roots are an iconic brand but a minor league soccer team. Yes, it is professional sports, but the game’s biggest stars and games are elsewhere.)
On the pitch, those dreams feel far away.
Since joining the USL Championship in 2021, the Roots have toiled in and around the bottom half of the American soccer second division. Last year’s playoff appearance is a generous framing which paves over the cracks of a tumultuous season which saw coach Noah Delgado fired and the team finish with a negative-20 goal differential.
Playing at CSU East Bay’s 5,000-seat stadium in the hills of Hayward didn’t help. Short of the revenues needed to grow the startup business, the Roots traded away their best players for two straight seasons, depriving fans of heroes to grow attached to, let alone win games.
Behind the scenes, the organization is operating on a razor’s edge. Two rounds of crowdfunding were initially framed as opportunities for fans to buy into the Roots’ ownership, but the fine print revealed those investments do not actually equate to board votes. Other teams in the cash-strapped USL have since adopted a similar strategy.
All of this raises the stakes for the Roots at the Coliseum, which opened up thousands of more seats for the home opener. Afterwards, capacity for USL games will be capped at around 15,000. The Roots negotiated a one year lease for the venue and still hope to build their own modular stadium before turning their attention to, gulp, the Howard Terminal site the A’s ditched.
In order to fund those dreams, the Roots will have to retain fans and attract new ones. In order to do that, the team will have to start winning a lot more than they have, which requires recruitment and continuity, two things Oakland has not been able to enjoy because of its limited financial resources.
The visiting San Antonio FC, which are owned by the NBA’s Spurs and won a USL title in 2022, showed how far the gap still is. The final scoreline was more flattering than the actual game, where the visitors’ proven talent in the back and front lines dominated the Roots on the run of play.
The hosts meanwhile, look like a collection of players who haven’t played with each other, which to be fair to them, is only the truth. Last season’s top performers Johnny Rodriguez, Paul Blanchette, and Memo Diaz are gone. Among those replacing them are 19-year-old local product Ilya Alekseev and a little-known Liberian striker named Peter Wilson.
It’s also telling that Mexican international Jurgen Damm, whose career has sputtered since bursting onto the scene a decade ago, still hasn’t cracked the starting lineup.
How long will the fans’ patience and good will last?
The cracks already started to show in the second half of the game against San Antonio, where after watching their team struggle to possess the ball, large segments of the crowd started partaking in the homophobic chant in Spanish, which only increased in volume as more time ticked away.
Officials paused the game in the 90th minute and players pleaded with fans to stop before a steady “Let’s Go Oakland” chant started to reverberate around the Coliseum and overtake the slur.
“That was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” defender Justin Rasmussen said after the game. “To have over 26,000 show up, that’s MLS or European numbers.”
“We have the best fans here in Oakland,” he added. “We gotta give them something to celebrate about.”
About the Author: Kevin V. Nguyen is a business and sports journalist based in the Bay Area. Follow him on X/Twitter @KevinNguyen_89 or on Bluesky @kevinvnguyen.bsky.social
