Rooted in Oakland: The Coliseum’s new tenant is a community-owned soccer team

The Oakland Coliseum towers over the flatlands of East Oakland as a monument to American sports’ expansionist age. The stadium was built in the late 1960s to host Major League Baseball’s A’s and the NFL’s Raiders, a symbol of multi-functional efficiency easily reachable from the freeway and ringed by parking lots. For decades, the Coliseum played host to both America’s national pastime and its most popular spectator sport, its two tenants combining to win six championships during their tenure in Oakland. Yet 2025 marks the first year since the Coliseum’s construction that it is not host to a team in one of the country’s Big Four sports leagues, with the A’s having followed the Raiders and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors out the door after the 2024 season. 

Those teams’ departures have left a void in Oakland’s sporting life which soccer club Oakland Roots, who play in the USL Championship, the second tier of American soccer, are trying to fill. Founded by East Bay natives and having started play in 2019, the Roots have moved into the Coliseum for this season after a stint playing outside Oakland in the suburb of Hayward. In selecting the Coliseum as their new (albeit temporary) venue, the Roots cited the stadium’s “special bond with the people of Oakland” as the site of the city’s greatest sporting successes, a legacy which the Roots intended to carry on. 

Oakland is home to Northern California’s largest port, and its sports teams have long been known for their rowdy fanbases. As one Roots fan at their recent game vs Orange County SC put it, San Francisco is like a fancy cocktail bar, while Oakland is “like a dive bar with sticky floors and a barman that hates you, but great beer.” That “dive bar” reputation is something A’s fans revelled in, and at least one A’s fan group– the Oakland 68s– has become a fixture at Roots games this season. 

 For some Roots fans, going to matches has filled the fandom gap in their lives that was created when the A’s and Raiders left. Jack, a curly-haired Oakland native, grew up a Raiders fan, but says he stopped following the Raiders– and the NFL altogether– after they left for Las Vegas following the 2019 season, shifting his sporting loyalties to the Roots. Intriguingly, Jack says that while he wasn’t much of a soccer fan before the Roots were founded, following the Roots has facilitated a broader soccer fandom that has replaced the role American football used to play for him. 

His case could be indicative of a broader trend within Oakland. The Roots are now the largest professional team remaining in Oakland, and have averaged a draw of over 8,000 fans a game this season, more than twice the average number of attendees they managed last season in Hayward and only a few thousand short of the average A’s attendance in their final Oakland season. Many Oakland sports fans have also been turned off of following the major professional leagues after they abandoned the city. Those two factors– along with Oakland’s large Hispanic population, almost 30% of the city’s total residents– make Oakland an interesting case study of whether soccer could become an American city’s main sport, its avatar of civic pride for Oaklanders to rally around.

The Roots’ growth has also had its drawbacks. Jeremy, an Oakland-based teacher who has been attending Roots games since they began playing, said that while he appreciates the ease of accessing the Coliseum, he misses the ability to mix with the whole crowd and the homespun atmosphere that existed at Roots games in previous seasons, with players’ families running food trucks at the stadium. Jack expressed a similar lament. In Hayward, he said, “you were cheering, and hugging after goals,” creating an “intimate environment” which has been lacking in the cavernous Coliseum, where the sightlines for soccer are poor and spectators sit at a remove from the action. Yet the Coliseum has also attracted new Roots fans, including Camden, a San Francisco resident who says this is the first year he’s regularly gotten to games after previously following the Roots online and who cites the ease of reaching the Coliseum as a factor in his attendance. 

How much longer the Roots will remain at the Coliseum is still uncertain. The Roots and their affiliated women’s team the Oakland Soul had previously pursued the goal of building a 10,000-seat modular stadium in one of the Coliseum’s parking lots, but abandoned that idea in January of this year. Earlier this year, the Roots committed to staying at the Coliseum beyond 2025 while they search for a permanent home ground. While the club has floated the idea of building a stadium at the Howard Terminal on the Oakland waterfront, it is unclear if that is still being pursued. And with Bay Area real estate notoriously scarce and expensive, the search could be a long one. 

A bigger question is whether American soccer could grow to the point where it doesn’t feel like a placeholder for other sports. While the Roots have drawn impressive crowds at the Coliseum, the stadium is poorly suited for soccer; the stands bulge away from the action, and sightlines are lacking. Similarly, a sizeable portion of the crowd still turns up in the Raiders and A’s paraphernalia they used to don to watch football or baseball at the Coliseum, and the frequent chants of “Let’s Go Oakland” have been lifted from the old A’s repertoire. You can’t escape the feeling that the Roots are not fully able to compensate for the loss of the teams Oaklanders used to adore. Perhaps that is the measure of where soccer stands in the American sporting landscape– growing, but still marginal in comparison to the behemoths of the major leagues.