Home Field Advantage
The exciting debut and foggy future of the Bay Area's newest sports franchise
I have lived in the Bay Area since I was six but have never been this excited to go to San Jose.
We giddily arrived at Paypal Park two and a half hours before kickoff only to find the entire area bustling with fans already in line to get in. We’d originally hoped to tailgate, but the crowds coupled with the battleship gray rain clouds made lingering outside feel unwise. So we finished a bottle of Chiroubles Beaujolais in the parking structure and contemplated a backup plan. A security vehicle drove past and we reactively hid our cups, making me briefly feel like I was back in college.
We ran into our friends in the parking lot, tailgating despite the gloomy weather. Instead of drinking wine in secret they were proudly pounding Modelos in public with the raucous supporters section, The Bridge Brigade. They’d brought drums and banners as if leading the fans into battle. One of them already had a Bay FC tattoo, despite this being the team’s first season and third game. I raised my beer and gave a friendly dad nod to a man across the parking lot from me assembling carne asada for his family. Later, returning from the bathroom, I found everyone had taken tequila shots with the Bridge Brigade without me.
Once inside, we took in the food truck feeding frenzy that was the fan fest, where countless more ebullient supporters seemed unbothered by the imminent threat of rain. While navigating the interior of the bustling stadium I did a double take. US Women’s National Team icon Brandi Chastain had just strolled past me to her field suite, with Aly Wagner and Leslie Osborne in tow. I’d never been so close to soccer celebrities before. As she joined her colleagues in their crisp letterman’s jackets milling around an untouched buffet of free food and beers, we went to find our more pedestrian seats.
Bay FC’s home opener already felt like a dazzling sensory overload of contrasting emotions and identities. Watching warmups I felt positively European, bundled against the early evening drizzle in a waxed jacket and Bay FC scarf, but I was sipping a tall boy of Mexican beer and bobbing my head to Bay Area rap staples like “Tell Me When To Go” and “Blow The Whistle” blasting over the speakers. The Bridge Brigade relentlessly pounded away on their drums as we counted down the minutes until kickoff, hoping the on-field result would be what we all desperately craved.
This was my first NWSL match and I noticed that the crowd visibly skewed welcoming, inclusive, and progressive. Rainbow and trans pride flags fluttered throughout the stands. The ratio of women and children to beer-splattered men was noticeably different than an NFL game, though beer was certainly splattered on everyone after Deyna Castellanos scored a spectacular goal to open up the first half. As the intensity ratcheted up I dared to believe things might just go our way.
It’s been a long time since I became a fan of something new.
My last attempt was thwarted by the Oakland Raiders. They moved to Las Vegas after just my second game at the perpetually lit, benevolent chaos of the Coliseum. I could have looked further South for a replacement, but the truth is that the only times I’ve been to Levi’s Stadium has been to see Taylor Swift and Beyonce play. Santa Clara is too far away, public transit is a joke, parking is a nightmare, I look terrible in red, and I’ve never been that invested in the 49ers. At least that’s what I’d always told myself.
Yet after returning from equally distant San Jose it struck me that there was something else at play. Women’s soccer is a wholesome and decidedly non-problematic sport to get invested in. The prospect of rooting for a nascent women’s soccer team feels categorically different, and markedly better, than cheering on the nearest available behemoth of an NFL franchise.
I often openly wonder if I should still be watching football at all given what I know about the league’s record on concussions, domestic violence, and racial justice. Does the NFL even need more fans? At this point, they basically own a day of the week and are the most profitable sports league in the world. This grants them sociocultural hegemony over the United States (and increasingly Mexico and swaths of Europe), but it also results in my attendance, cheers, and ticket revenue feeling insignificant. As much as any team might matter to me, it’s hard to convince myself that I matter at all to them. In contrast, Bay FC needs my support in a way the San Francisco 49ers or Las Vegas Raiders do not. My purchase of a ticket, t-shirt, or scarf makes a real impact, nourishing the hope that female athletes too can live out their dreams on the biggest stage imaginable.
As a new team, the fandom also feels like a more intimate, urgent, and high-stakes affair. Unlike the tens of thousands of jaded 49ers fans scattered across West Coast dive bars and living rooms, nursing beers and periodically screaming at Kyle Shanahan through the TV, Bay FC fans are a tribe of underdogs whose vocal support is literally the lifeblood of the team. As I covered in my review of Angel City, the HBO docuseries about LA’S NWSL team, there’s a palpable sense that if we don’t sell out every game, get decked out in their colors, and chant our way towards winning as many as possible, we may not survive the uphill battle that is simply being a women’s soccer team in America.
Attending the Bay FC home opener gave me the joy of having a new team to root for, but also let me channel my love of sports towards a larger social cause I care about and that needs my support right now. Wearing a Bay FC jersey feels bigger than loyalty to the team or region. It signals that you support gender equity in sports and society.
I still don’t own a Bay FC jersey because their jerseys are widely regarded to be the league’s worst.
Not only do the underwhelming black and white kits look like an intramural sports team; they don’t even use the team’s official colors: a navy blue and a warm red they’ve dubbed Bay and Poppy. Also missing are any hint of our iconic red orange bridge or literally any Bay Area iconography, save for some bridge-like flourishes on the stalk of the letter B. I shudder to imagine how little the graphic designer responsible had to work with if this is what they came up with.
What they likely lacked wasn’t talent or effort, but time. After hiring ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Bay FC unveiled the logo last summer: a minimal B in gothic script similar to the New York Yankees or Detroit Tigers. However, at this point, their first game was less than a year away and Nike was already deep into an 18-24 month long redesign process for every single NWSL jersey. So both expansion teams, Bay FC and the Utah Royals, entered the league too late to create anything worth wearing.
I trust that future seasons will see a jersey that better aligns with the team’s identify. I hope it’s one I’ll be proud to wear.
Disappointment is an inevitable part of fandom. Despite dominating possession and momentum for the first two thirds of the game, we lost 3-2 after conceding two goals in the last fifteen minutes of play. From my vantage point in section 112 it seemed like a combination of bad luck and bad play, being out of position and out of breath at the exact wrong moment. Goal two came via an unfortunate penalty thanks to an unintentional handball in the box that took an eternity to review via VAR. After we equalized thanks to a heroic effort by Zambian national Racheal Kundananji, I briefly thought we’d settle for a draw, only to see my hopes blown away along with the last of the rain clouds in the dregs of stoppage time. Two failed defensive clearances gave Houston just enough time and space for Havana Solaun to sneak in one last shot and that was it.
All major sports events have similarly overpriced concessions, frazzled parking attendants, and raucous audiovisual displays. Yet driving home, I felt a brimming enthusiasm that the rain and defeat had been unable to dampen. Being part of the first home game of a new team quenched a thirst I didn’t realize I’d had. I emerged convinced that this team needed my support and I in turn needed to support them.
After Kundananji bent a clever shot off her left foot to equalize in stoppage time I danced in ecstatic triumph like I haven’t in years. Was it the goal, the crowd, the banging playlist, or the sense that this moment was so momentous for Racheal, the first Zambian player to score in the NWSL and her team, playing for a sold out home crowd for the first time? Does it matter?
Sports offer a tantalizing sense of unity, an ecstatic release that compares only to religion, while managing to dodge most of the violent and oppressive baggage of religious zealotry. This kind of transcendent escape is something that I, like so many in the Bay Area increasingly need lately. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as the Bay Area has lost its luster over the past half decade we’ve also lost our historic sports franchises like the Raiders and A’s, who’ve fled Oakland alongside In and Out Burger.
In place of the egalitarian solidarity offered by fandom, our regional identify has become fractured and fragmented, dominated by the endless bad news about high crime rates and even higher rents. This pessimistic narrative feels as hard to stop as the crime and rents themselves. With our problems as clear and present as the solutions to them are opaque and distant, it often feels our community has responded by resignation and retreat. We’ve become become atomized individuals whose sole remaining ties to each other are economic and technological. To me, this is epitomized by all of the people wearing airpods, blocking out visible poverty and our neighbors alike just so we can get through traffic, get to the front of the line, and get on with our day of commuting, e-commerce, and streaming content.
Bay FC’s arrival didn’t just give us good news that felt as overdue as the shiny new BART cars. Their electrifying yet imperfect home opener made me believe that the Bay Area still can do the right thing, even if, like the BART cars, progress arrives much later than it should have.
Fandom is an open invitation that offers the promise of community while also demanding humility and sacrifice. The boundless optimism of the tailgate is balanced out by the deflated dissections of the match on the drive home. With triumphant dancing and celebration must also come shouting, frustration, and consoling. For me, becoming a Bay FC fan means daring to believe once more in the potential of sports and the Bay Area, knowing full well I may end up heartbroken.
In that stadium, in those stands, and on the field I saw proof that we may still have common goals. We can still came come together in person, befriend strangers, and lift each other up. We still have the power to hope, sing, and dance, if only for a drizzly Saturday evening.
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