Teams leave, but Oakland still finds reasons to cheer

OAKLAND, Calif. — On a cool May night, as the sun set over San Francisco in the distance, drummers and flag-waving fans led cheers of “Ohhhh-O-O-O Oakland” (to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes) and “Let’s go, Oakland!” (clap clap, clap clap clap) as one of the city’s biggest sports teams pulled out a nail-biting victory.

But the nearly 4,000 fans were not in Oakland, and they were not cheering for a team from one of the major American professional sports leagues. The setting was a rented college stadium in nearby Hayward, and the game was a home match for the Oakland Roots, a soccer team that plays in the USL Championship, a second-tier league. The Roots defeated Orange County SC, 2-1, on a late goal, before making the journey back home up Interstate 880.

At the same time, 20 miles north, construction workers were racing to put the final touches on a $1.6 million renovation of Raimondi Park, a city park in West Oakland. The park’s previously run-down baseball field was being transformed into the home of the Oakland Ballers, an independent league team that began competing this summer.

Oakland has had an exodus of sports teams over the past half decade. The Warriors of the NBA moved across the bay to San Francisco, the Raiders of the NFL decamped for Las Vegas, and, after this season, the Athletics will play their next three or more Major League Baseball seasons in Sacramento while they settle on a permanent home. In a city that once had three teams from the country’s major sports leagues, there will soon be none. (A new WNBA franchise, the Golden State Valkyries, will begin play next season … in San Francisco.)

The Warriors, the Raiders and the A’s left Oakland for varied reasons, but most came down to money. The Warriors built an arena in San Francisco, where they could more easily attract the kind of fans who could spend $2 million on a suite. The Raiders wanted $400 million in public funds, which Oakland and Alameda County would not give them; in Las Vegas, they got $750 million. The A’s spent years pursuing a complex and expensive new waterfront stadium before throwing in the towel during negotiations with the city.

Though there have been exceptions in recent years, these three teams are some of the latest examples of a longtime dictum in professional sports: There is more money to be made in larger, richer cities, especially if those locales are willing to build new venues for teams.

When that happens, what is left for the jilted former home? In Oakland, it has meant squads like the Roots and the Ballers, and what their owners say could be a new approach to professional sports, especially when it comes to how they are financed.

“Why does Oakland have to have small thinking?” asked Edreece Arghandiwal, a founder of the Roots. “We never have small thinking. We have always tried to tackle world issues. We have been at the forefront of anything that is global.”

Professional sports are a peculiar business in America. Teams compete fiercely with one another, but band together to negotiate with outsiders, much like a socialist collective with exemptions from some antitrust laws. They are privately owned, yet municipalities routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build venues for them. When that doesn’t happen, those same owners, often billionaires, sometimes simply move their teams to cities that will.

“I think we need to reevaluate the social contract between sports teams and their community writ large,” said Paul Freedman, an Oakland Ballers founder.

These teams are trying to prove that size and prominence do not have as much civic importance as a genuine connection to the community does. It may be a tough argument to make, but it’s the best one these Oakland teams have.

“I think that the Roots and the Ballers are both sincere in trying to form a new pact with the fans,” said Angela Tsay, the owner of the Oakland clothing brand Oaklandish, which has collaborated with both teams, along with the Warriors, the Raiders and the A’s. “I think they both understand that something got broken in Oakland between sports teams and fans.”

The Roots were founded in 2018, not because teams were leaving Oakland but because the city had no professional soccer team. Their games at an Oakland junior college quickly sold out, and the Roots began climbing the ranks of American professional soccer, forming a women’s team, the Soul, and youth teams along the way.

Roots executives call the team “purpose-driven,” and compare their organization to socially conscious companies such as Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s.

In many ways, experiencing a Roots game is an aggressively local experience. You will hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” performed by longtime Bay Area resident Carlos Santana; the team’s theme is “East Bay Night” by Berkeley punk band Rancid. You might see one of the team’s local celebrity owners, like Marshawn Lynch, Jason Kidd or rapper G-Eazy. Concessions are provided by an ethnically diverse smorgasbord of food trucks serving up bacon fried rice burritos, horchata, mushroom bao and more.

But the team has aspirations to become a cultural phenomenon that transcends Oakland. Its merchandise sells well worldwide. Reaching the next level, however, requires growth, which requires money.

The Roots will play next season at the Oakland Coliseum, once the A’s vacate it. Simultaneously, the Roots will build a 10,000-seat stadium on a nearby parking lot that is expected to last for a decade, giving them enough time to build a permanent home somewhere else in the city.

The team was valued at about $80 million when it held a community investment round last year, a way of both raising money and connecting to fans in a more tangible way. More than 5,000 people invested a total of more than $3.1 million in the team.

The Roots, then, are a bona fide team full of professional athletes supported by dozens of staff members, but they pale in comparison with NFL and NBA teams, which sell for billions.

The Ballers, in contrast, are undoubtedly a minor league team, and it’s fair to wonder if they are simply a protest or an elaborate joke gone a bit too far. They were born out of the protest movement against the A’s ownership, their baseball cap says “B’s” and the team even tried to play a game at the Coliseum this season until the A’s blocked it.

But Freedman insists they are perfectly serious.

“Trolling anybody isn’t a sustainable business model,” he said. “What is, is providing an experience.”

He was motivated to create the Ballers by his belief about the central role that sports play in communities. “Without a baseball team, the local Little League doesn’t know what team to pick,” he said. “Without a baseball team, there aren’t events people can go to multiple times per summer with their grandparents. People from Oakland should get to decide whether baseball continues in this town.”

Jorge Leon founded the Oakland 68s fan group in 2017 to make sure A’s fans had a voice as the team was considering a new stadium that would most likely price some of them out. He has since led a boycott against the team; the only A’s game he attended this season was in Philadelphia. His group, whose name invokes the A’s first year in Oakland, now supports the Roots and the Ballers.

“I think true change is through legislation, policies,” he said. “If you want a professional sports team here, you have to build a stadium on your own, or if you don’t, there has to be some sort of return to the city or ownership stake for the fans.”

The Roots say the only public support they’ll ask for is rooting for the team. “There is no appetite for public funds for professional sports facilities — you can thank the Raiders for that,” said Lindsay Barenz, the team’s president.

Oakland’s infrastructure may not have been good enough for the previous generation of teams, but the city’s new teams think it has plenty of value left. The Roots and the Soul practice at the Raiders’ former headquarters, and both the Roots and the Ballers have been interested in using the Coliseum. The Ballers are also trying to buy the bleachers once used for Raiders games to install more permanent seating at Raimondi Park.

The question, then, is whether there is a ceiling to this approach. After all, once upon a time, the A’s used the tagline “Rooted in Oakland,” and then proved to be anything but. It can be tough for franchises to stick to their professed values when there are bigger leagues to join and more money to be made.

“I think that it is probably true that you can only get to a certain size and still truly be this community-rooted organization like the Roots, Ballers or Oaklandish,” Tsay said. “The best thing for the community is seldom the most profitable thing for the team.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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