The Bay Area is set to help host the 2026 World Cup, but Oakland and San Francisco’s professional soccer infrastructure lags far behind the San Jose area’s. Now both cities are trying to catch up while putting community first
Enter the official FIFA World Cup 2026 website, and the tropes are familiar. FIFA’s description of the San Francisco Bay Area– set to host six matches at the 2026 World Cup held in the US, Canada and Mexico—features paens to its ‘rolling hills with historic streetcars’ and numerous images of the Golden Gate Bridge. The website also highlights the rich sporting legacy present in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. Left unmentioned by FIFA, however, is the reality that one of those three hubs, San Jose, boasts soccer infrastructure which stands head and shoulders above its near neighbours’. The Bay Area’s only soccer-specific stadium, PayPal Park, is in San Jose, and is the home ground for the San Jose Earthquakes, the region’s sole Major League Soccer team. Meanwhile, Levi’s Stadium, in the adjacent suburb of Santa Clara, is the venue where the Bay Area’s six World Cup matches will be played, its pitch to be graced by some of world soccer’s greats.
San Francisco and Oakland, by contrast, are at a significant remove from the San Jose area. This is true not only in a geographical sense (Levi’s Stadium is at least an hour’s drive from most parts of San Francisco, and even further away by public transport) but especially regarding soccer infrastructure. While the Earthquakes play in a swanky, 18,000-capacity ground which manages to incorporate North America’s largest outdoor bar, the lower-league outfits based in San Francisco and Oakland have led a peripatetic existence, bouncing between community college fields and poorly kept-up venues owned by the local Parks and Recreation department. Local soccer clubs have traditionally had a limited following on both sides of the Bay Bridge, where professional baseball, basketball and American football teams have ensnared the loyalties of generations of fans. But soccer’s growing popularity in America as a sport both to play and to watch, accompanied by Oakland’s loss of MLB’s A’s and the NFL’s Raiders, might finally be spurring the development of professional-grade soccer facilities in the City and the Town.
Next year, both Oakland’s Roots, of the second-tier USL Championship, and the San Francisco Glens, who play in the fourth division of American soccer, are slated to move back within the municipal limits of the cities they represent following a period of suburban exile. The Glens, who have played at Skyline College in the bedroom community of San Bruno since 2022, will be making their heavily-anticipated move to brand new digs on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, while the Roots—along with their affiliated women’s team the Oakland Soul—will return from two years in the suburb of Hayward to play their 2025 home matches at the famed Oakland Coliseum, with plans to build a soccer-specific stadium on one of the Coliseum’s adjoining parking lots and help fill the sporting gap left by the departure of three professional teams in five years.
Both the Glens and Roots stress the community orientation of their stadium projects on their club websites, albeit with differing focuses. The Glens, whose youth academy—San Francisco’s largest— has expanded from just two teams in 2011 to over 1,000 players currently, have presented their Treasure Island development as an investment in the future of local soccer. The Glens bill their new facility as a crucial step forward not only for the Glens’ ambitions of climbing into the professional ranks but for the long-term strength of local soccer; it will, for instance, allow the Glens to hold regular youth soccer clinics. The community ethos is also evident from the Treasure Island facility’s funding, a mix of sponsorships, grants and individual donations without any taxpayer money involved.
The Roots seem to view their proposed stadium on the Malibu Lot beside the Coliseum grounds as a vehicle to provide Oakland itself with some much-needed positive momentum. Once the proud industrial heart of the Bay Area, Oakland has teetered on the brink of insolvency in recent years, faced with both a nine-figure budget deficit and rising crime. Oakland’s misery has been compounded by the loss of its beloved sports teams: the Warriors moved across the Bay to San Francisco in 2019, with the Raiders heading to Las Vegas the same year. Now the A’s’ impending departure will strip Oakland of its status as a big-league town once the Major League Baseball season wraps up in late September. The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Complex, which just over five years ago hosted teams in each of America’s three most popular professional sports leagues, threatens to lie derelict.
The Roots, and their hoped-for new Malibu Lot stadium, could soothe the spiral of negativity plauging Oakland. In August, Oakland sold off its fifty percent stake in the Coliseum to the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG) for $105 million, averting massive cuts to public services. (AASEG now own the Coliseum site in full after purchasing the other fifty percent from the departing A’s for $125 million.) In 2023, the Roots and AASEG signed a cooperation agreement to transform the Coliseum site into a ‘mixed-income, sports-anchored community’ serving and benefitting the people of Oakland. AASEG’s purchase of the Coliseum grounds is a step in that direction, as is the Roots’ return to Oakland to play at the Coliseum next season. Jonathan Comeaux, a journalist covering the Roots for RootsBlog, told me fans are ‘ecstatic’ that the Roots will be at the Coliseum next season. ‘It’s going to be a moment that brings a lot of people together,’ according to Comeaux, as people whose fandom ended in heartbreak as the Raiders and A’s left town enter the Coliseum to watch a team that have returned (even if their temporary home was only a half-hour drive away). For a city and a sporting community that’s been trodden on in the way Oakland has, the presence of the Roots—with their motto ‘Oakland First and Always’—is a symbol of Oakland’s defiance and resilience.
The stadium projects afoot in Oakland and San Francisco are also indicative of American soccer’s heightened prominence and caché. San Francisco mayor London Breed was conspicuously present at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Glens’ Treasure Island site, boasting the new facility would place San Francisco ‘on the map in the soccer world’ ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Breed has also proposed converting the shuttered Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco into a soccer stadium with up to 25,000 seats. While the Westfield Mall proposal seems unrealistic, Breed’s idea of counteracting San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’ by investing in soccer is a noteworthy sign of soccer’s greater stature.
Across the Bay, Oakland city officials are also attempting to boost the city’s image through soccer. In May, Oakland City Council agreed an intent to purchase Alameda County’s fifty percent stake in both the Malibu Lot site and the Raiders’ former practice facility at Harbor Bay, which would put both properties fully in Oakland’s hands. The Harbor Bay site, where the Roots and Soul now train, is particularly interesting because of its potential role at the 2026 World Cup. An undisclosed ‘top-tier’ World Cup team have reportedly expressed interest in training at Harbor Bay in 2026—though refurbishment of the site would likely be required. Were the city to succeed in buying, renovating and hosting a major power’s base camp it would burnish Oakland’s beleagured image.
Plans to upgrade the Bay Area’s soccer infrastructure are in place, but that doesn’t mean no obstacles remain. While the Glens had initially hoped to start play on Treasure Island by mid-2022, Covid and high inflation pushed back their timeline, and the Glens’ first team are yet to play at the new ground. When I visited Treasure Island on a recent weekday afternoon, banners reading ‘Up the Glens!’ surrounded a FieldTurf pitch glistening in the August sun, but there was no sign of any seating; a dirt mound covered with a white tarpaulin overlooked the field. And while the Roots are hopeful of having a stadium ready at the Malibu Lot site in time for the 2026 season, no formal building approval has yet been granted. If the Malibu Lot plan falls through, Roots blogger Comeaux reckons the club would look to extend their Coliseum stay or potentially return to Hayward—a blow both to the club’s ambitions and professional soccer’s development in the Bay Area.
Meanwhile, the newly-founded women’s team Bay FC—with USWNT icons Brandi Chastain and Aly Wagner amongst the co-owners— are currently playing their inaugural season at PayPal Park in San Jose. Bay FC’s iconography pays tribute to the entire Bay Area and the club crest features the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was almost inevitable that a top-flight team with title ambitions like Bay FC would play in San Jose, at least initially. Though Bay FC have not yet decided where to build their long-term home stadium, the South Bay’s relative abundance of land and ease of building might mean the NWSL club stay in San Jose. The South Bay thus looks likely to remain the locus of professional soccer in the Bay Area.
Where does that leave the rest of the Bay Area? Top-tier soccer might remain the preserve of San Jose, but improved soccer infrastructure would be a boon to San Francisco and Oakland regardless. The Roots’ Malibu Lot development has the potential to revitalize a moribund slice of Oakland while also showing Oakland’s continued status as a viable sports town. San Francisco also stands to benefit from the Glens’ development if it can become a anchor of Treasure Island’s wider makeover from navy base to residential district. Even if soccer’s greatest stars don’t venture beyond the South Bay, Bay Area soccer can thrive in its own limelight.
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