Author’s Note: This is the first entry in the series “The World Cup in Sun and Shadow,” my attempt to document soccer’s progress across the Bay Area– and the U.S. more broadly– as the sport’s greatest spectacle gets ready to kick off one week from today. Stay tuned for more articles over the next six weeks, or subscribe so new posts head straight for your inbox.
Summer may not officially start until June 21, but on a recent Wednesday evening at Kezar Stadium it felt like San Francisco’s chilliest season was in full swing. As a cold wind swirled and a thick blanket of fog encroached from the Pacific, around 1,500 fans dressed for a San Francisco summer– think beanies and puffer jackets– filtered into the city’s most venerable sporting venue to watch a fourth-division soccer match, hoping to see their local team extend their winning start to the 2026 season.
That team was San Francisco City FC, founded in 2001 and who bill themselves as “the oldest community-owned soccer team in the U.S.” Twenty-five years into their existence, SF City– who play in USL League Two, the fourth tier of American soccer– are in the midst of a boom in popularity. Where the club drew “maybe forty diehards” to its games as recently as 2022, according to Head of Marketing Ian Blackley, they now consistently welcome four-figure crowds to their home matches, with the number of club members now exceeding 600. While these numbers are still modest, SF City are now the best-supported soccer club in Northern California’s leading city.
That growth in attendances has been mirrored by improvement on the pitch. While SF City have not qualified for the League Two playoffs since the 2018 season, manager Berdi Merdanov says the environment around the club is “day and night” compared to when he took over ahead of the 2022 season. In Merdanov’s first campaign, SF City finished second-bottom of their division; now, he says, “there’s significant growth, in the fan engagement aspect of it but also in results on the field.” The team’s hopes of cracking this year’s postseason have gotten off to a good start, winning each of their first three games to top the League Two NorCal Division table.
San Francisco has experienced sweeping changes in recent years. Long a hub for the tech industry, the city is now the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, the cityscape dotted with Waymo self-driving cars and billboards hawking AI integration services. Even as the city has started to rebound from its post-pandemic slump, fears that it might be losing its character have risen. San Francisco is “not as much fun as it used to be,” wrote Carl Nolte of the San Francisco Chronicle in a recent column. “I sense something missing in San Francisco, something in the air.”
Yet attending an SF City game feels like stepping back into a slightly older, more familiar version of San Francisco. The club play the majority of their home matches at Kezar Stadium, a decidedly low-tech relic of San Francisco’s sporting past. Previously home to the NFL’s 49ers and the Golden Gate Gales, the city’s first professional soccer team, Kezar’s facilities are spartan, with wooden benches and cobwebby red folding chairs serving as seating. The ground is also notorious for being located in one of the city’s foggiest areas, a trait which SF City’s supporters have embraced. The club’s mascot is christened Foggy, and “Roll Fog” is the club’s unofficial tagline.
The fog symbolism is just one way that SF City leans into San Franciscan identity. In late 2023, the club struck a sponsorship deal with Muni, San Francisco’s public transit operator, to have Muni’s iconic “worm” logo appear on the team’s jerseys. The increase to the club’s visibility was immediate. “Brother, it has been crazy,” Blackley told me reflecting on the impact of the Muni-adorned kits. The 2024 season– the club’s first with the new sponsorship– saw attendances explode, from the low hundreds to nearly one thousand per game.
For some new supporters, such as Angel Palmares, it was the Muni sponsorship itself which served as their gateway to fandom. Palmares, a college student who started attending games last season, told me that he first got interested in SF City “because of Muni.” Now, he’s passionate enough to have become a club member.
At SF City, membership means having a say over how the club is run. The club follows the German-style 50+1 ownership model, meaning that fans hold the majority of shares and voting rights. Supporters have also influenced club policy, including by pushing for the introduction of student memberships which now allow high school and college students to join the club at a discounted rate.
For many fans, the 50+1 model is part of SF City’s appeal. Talking before a recent game, Jeremy Becker, who’s been a member since 2017, said he felt the same way. “You feel kinda special being a part-owner of the club,” he told me.
The popularity of SF City’s 50+1 model may also reflect a dissatisfaction with the conduct of Bay Area sports owners in recent years. Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco, has seen all three of its major professional sports teams depart the city since 2018, pleas from fans of baseball’s A’s for owner John Fisher to sell the team instead of moving falling on deaf ears. Charles Johnson, majority owner of the San Francisco Giants, has also attracted criticism for his hefty donations to Donald Trump, spending at odds with San Francisco’s famously liberal politics. Those developments have made it “really easy to hate really rich sports owners,” Blackley says.
Those rich owners are absent at SF City, whose community-based approach also extends to the running of the club. The team is volunteer-run, with the board– who are themselves all fans– being elected by members in a yearly vote. As Jack Lowery, the club’s broadcaster, phrases it, “SF City is nothing without the supporters.”
Even with their recent surge in success, SF City face a looming major obstacle. In May 2025, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie announced the founding of Golden City FC, a new privately-owned soccer club which Lurie heralded as “representing a new era for San Francisco sports.” At their founding, Golden City, who are set to compete in MLS Next Pro (essentially the third tier in the U.S. soccer pyramid) starting next year, announced that they would invest $10 million into renovating Kezar with the intention of making it their long-term home. That, however, would mean SF City have to move to a new ground after having played at Kezar for over a decade.
Being forced to move isn’t the only reason SF City fans are irked by Golden City. When Golden City’s colors and wordmark were unveiled last Spring, SF City were struck by the resemblance to their own black-and-gold color scheme and logotype. To some, the similarities– which Golden City have argued are coincidental– reflect an attempt to appropriate the grassroots soccer culture that SF City have built up.
Lowery, the club’s broadcaster, doesn’t mince his words, opining that Golden City is “just rich people trying to steal stuff.” Fans on the Kezar terraces are equally blunt. Attending the recent fixture against Marin FC, I could hear cries of “fuck off Golden City, the city is ours.”
Even if SF City are forced to leave Kezar, supporters say they’ll continue following the club. Brendan Hallett, who says he became a fan in 2011, told me he would “support the club no matter what,” even if that meant trekking to watch them at high school venues. And Blackley, the Head of Marketing, noted with encouragement that SF City drew over one thousand supporters when they were forced to play their season opener away from Kezar on the campus of San Francisco State University.
It may not be at Kezar, but Hallett and his fellow fans might soon be watching SF City play at a higher level of the U.S. soccer pyramid. The United Soccer League (USL), the organizer of the league that SF City compete in, has announced ambitious plans to launch its own top-flight division in 2028, challenging Major League Soccer’s primacy. Unlike its rival, USL plans to implement a system of promotion and relegation, meaning lower-tier clubs would be able to move up to the top level as a reward for good performance.
For SF City to have a shot at ascending the ladder, however, they would first have to transition to a fully-professional model. Like almost all clubs in USL League Two, SF City are currently “pre-professional,” with their roster mostly comprised of college players who turn out for SF City during the NCAA offseason. But with SF City currently thriving on the pitch and in the stands, there are ambitions to try their luck on a bigger stage. “The model clearly is working, and we’re gonna try to push that to the next level,” says Merdanov, the club’s manager.
Fans also seem to back the idea of SF City breaking into the professional ranks. “I would love to see them go all the way to the top,” says Hallett, while Becker told me that it “would be great to see” the club progress up the pyramid.
Even as they try to climb the rungs, SF City don’t want to stray from the rooting in the community that has gotten them where they are now. The challenge, says Blackley, will be to navigate the financial requirements of moving up the pyramid without abandoning the fan-owned model, which he calls a “crucial part of the club’s values and identity.”
On that recent chilly Wednesday, SF City kicked off leading the table in League Two’s NorCal Division, having won each of their first three matches. Their opponents, Marin FC Legends, were initially no match for Berdi Merdanov’s charges. Ronan Rattigan, a forward who plays college soccer at Sacramento State, put SF City in the lead with a back post header after just six minutes, sprinting over to the club’s hardcore fans to celebrate the goal. By halftime, further strikes from Dane Pendleton and the impressive midfielder Jameson Raby had nullified a Marin goal, sending the hosts into the break with a comfortable 3-1 lead.
The margin was 4-2 as the match ticked into its final ten minutes, SF City seemingly cruising towards a fourth win on the trot. That’s when things went awry. Marin won and converted a penalty to halve the deficit, before an SF City back pass skittered on the lumpy Kezar turf and went past goalkeeper Luis Evangelista into the net.
It was a bump on the road which cost SF City victory. They will hope it’s not an omen of things to come on their path upward.
Inthehalfspace 