From Australia so still in baby land knowledge.... From what I understand San Francisco is a big city and I wonder aloud why when new teams are discussed SF is never in the mix....
1. San Jose is in that market. 2. There hasn't been an investor interested in owning a team there and/or with the ability to build a stadium there. 3. There is no 3rd reason.
I lived there. It doesn't feel like a big city when you're there but a series of small neighborhoods. It's an outdoor city, people like to get away. They're aren't that many families and the poor have largely been pushed out. There's also nowhere to put a stadium. The area where the baseball stadium was built is now a desirable neighborhood and the 49'ers play over 70 kilometers away. Best places for a soccer team are San Jose or Oakland both of which now have teams, the latter in USL.
You have San Jose, and the team they should add is Sacramento Republic FC. San Francisco-Oakland is listed as one market, but SF/OAK, San Jose, Sacramento is one mega region that needs two teams. The support for soccer in the Bay Area is off the charts. It's stupid to not have a second team in that region.
2. That lack of stadium hasn't stopped Seattle, Atlanta or Charlotte. Nashville has their own stadium, but didn't they start in the NFL one? There's ongoing rumors that New England will get their own stadium.
Sacramento was on the expansion list, but was withdrawn over the past year or two when one of the prospective investor-operators pulled out.
They didn’t have a basketball arena either but they made that work. Okay so the team regularly won championships and was awash in money so there’s that. I do think there’s a lot of interest in having a soccer team in town but the finances don’t work at the moment.
There are already teams in San Jose, Sacramento, Oakland and Monterey. If MLS had been where it is today 20+ years ago they may have been able to build a stadium in one of the less developed neighborhoods but no-one was interested at that time.
Dropping below MLS, there was a soccer team in SF, the NASL champion Deltas. They really seemed to be building a fan base at Kezar but the finances, not to mention the league fights, really killed that off. It would be cool to see a team at Kezar or the Beach Chalet area. With all the stories about people moving out of San Francisco, maybe land will become more available!
They weren't building a fan base at Kezar at all, they were just giving away more free tickets. They did finally get a decent attendance at the NASL Fall final after they reduced average ticket prices to $5.
You see the glass as half-empty, I see it as half-full. Or to be fair, you see the glass as almost entirely empty, and I see it with a little splash of water on the bottom. It was always going to take a lot of work to build a soccer fan base in San Francisco, though I do think they were trending upwards. But admittedly at $5 dollars a ticket there was no chance they could pay their bills.
As a San Jose Earthquakes fan, I was always against putting a team in San Francisco. Mostly because I was afraid of losing my/our team yet again to another town. The South Bay though in particular (now also known as Silicon Valley) has been the go-to spot when it comes to big time soccer, dating back to 1974. That was when former Quakes owner and founder Milan Mandaric ignored the old NASL’s demands and put a team in San Jose as opposed to San Francisco. The NASL at the time was desperate to add teams and so they let him in. It actually worked out great that he went against their wishes as the Quakes lead the league in attendance. The NASL Quakes lasted 11 years and always had great draws at the gate. Peter Bridgwater executive of the Vancouver Whitecaps franchise in the NASL had been named GM of the Quakes. After the NASL went under, Bridgwater became a founder of the Western Soccer Alliance, which later became the USL First Division. Peter was one of the men most responsible for keeping professional outdoor soccer alive [in the U.S.] after the collapse of the North American Soccer League. Although Dan VanVoorhis who founded the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks also should deserve credit as they were flagship team and won the old APSL tittle in 1992. The Balckhawks also played in San Jose. Bridgwater was also a venue director for the 1994 FIFA World Cup at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California. Two years after the World Cup, the MLS was launched; Bridgwater served as the Clash's (later renamed Earthquakes) first president. He remained the GM through the 1998 season, and played a role in having San Jose host matches for the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup. When AEG (in my opinion crookedly and fraudulently) moved the MLS-Quakes to Houston, San Jose was without a team for two seasons. Dimitry Piterman placed a USL team in San Francisco sin 2007 saying no one in Europe knew where San Jose was. They played at Kezar Stadium and the team failed miserably and folded after 1 year. The SF Deltas also playing at Kezar in 2017 folded only 12 days after winning the last NASL title. John Fisher & Lew Wolff of the Gap and Oakland A’s then came in with a Quakes expansion franchise in 2008. The Quakes on the field though have been a disaster. They had one semifinal berth in 2010 and a Supporters Shield in 2012 but since then have made the playoffs only twice. Although I commend Fisher for bringing back the team and building the stadium, the Quakes have been somewhat of a failure going through 7-8 coaches since 2008 and 6 since 2013. I’m hoping that he would sell the club but I heard that he doesn’t want to. In a way he is pretty smart as he came in with an investment of only $15-$20 million. With the appreciation of MLS teams and the new stadium, the club is now worth (by my estimate) somewhere between $550-$700 million, if not more. I have feeling he is banking on a successful World Cup 2026 where the South Bay will be a venue and which will have the value of his club increase. After San Jose, the only areas left in Northern California to field a team is Oakland who seem to have an ambitious owner and Sacramento who withdrew their MLS bid after Covid I believe. The problem though with San Francisco is no one seems to be interested in placing a team there. I mean there is no interested ownership group and also, as others have posted, there is nowhere to build a stadium. Renovating Kezar would be cool but the access to highways, railways (Bart) and public transportation is not great. The SF Giants Baseball Oracle Park has almost 42k seats and was opened in 2000 at the China Basi Area. The building of the stadium vastly improved that area. A soccer team could play there like NYCFC plays in Yankee Stadium; it wouldn’t be that great for soccer. The Oakland Raiders moved to Las Vegas and the SF Forty Niners are now playing at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara (adjacent to San Jose). Sacramento or Oakland do end up failing to land an MLS team , San Francisco would be great venue but sadly, I’ll believe it when I see it.
The logistics of putting a team in San Francisco are just prohibitive. Playing in the baseball stadium is the only thing that's even remotely feasible, and NYCFC being stuck in a baseball stadium is a real headache for MLS right now. Oakland might be a bit easier, but is still challenging. The Roots have a rather suboptimal stadium situation where they're laying turf over a JuCo football field, and a lot of the seats have poor sight lines that are not helped by the field itself being elevated. Note that the Raiders played in a baseball stadium.
The Raiders moved out of Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. The A's also want out of the Coliseum. The Warriors moved in 2019 from Oakland to Chase Center in the Mission Bay neighborhood and it's only 2 miles from downtown San Francisco. Not too many teams really want to be in Oakland anymore but again there is just no place to build a stadium in SF unless it`s on landfill. The San Francisco Glens Soccer Club who now play in USL League Two, planned to construct a 1,500-seat stadium and training facilities on Treasure Island as the nonprofit shoots at a goal of fielding professional teams. Not sure if they ever completed or even started construction on it yet. They still need 17,000 more seats to field an MLS club. That coupled with parking and better or even more access to public transportation.
The Coliseum has better sightlines for soccer than Oracle Park. Also Oracle Park is a weird shape, you can barely fit a football field in there.
The field at Oracle Park for the Real Madrid vs. Club America games seemed like patchwork on TV but I think it was good footing for the players. I didn’t care for the one sideline where the fans seemed like 15-20 years away for the field.