Bay FC might have lost the game, but its history-making match at Oracle Park on Saturday showed that there is a robust demand to have the women’s professional soccer team eventually play in San Francisco.
The club was able to attract more than 40,000 fans to the waterfront ballpark, which is double the capacity of PayPal Park, the team’s full-time home venue, which it leases from the San Jose Earthquakes.
While the two teams are in the middle of a five-year deal, Bay FC is deepening its ties to San Francisco, where its principal owners, Sixth Street Partners, are based. Next month, the team will break ground on its own training facility on Treasure Island, where it will construct a new, 25,000-square-foot building along with three professional-sized practice fields on 40 acres leased from the city.
Earlier this year, Bay FC also leased an entire office floor in SoMa for its new corporate headquarters, relocating from a coworking office. There, CEO Brady Stewart sat down with The Standard to talk about how Saturday’s game — the team’s first-ever in San Francisco — is coloring the organization’s next real estate moves.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s your takeaway from seeing this level of demand for Bay FC at Oracle Park?
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At the highest level, so much excitement to be here in San Francisco, setting this [attendance] record with this community. You know, since day one, we wanted to be a team for the entire Bay Area, and we’ve really felt that — but our games have been down in San Jose. So to get to have this historic moment for the fans who have been with us since the beginning is incredible. We also see it as a chance to bring some new people into the fold.
Does this experience open the door for Bay FC to play in other venues across the Bay Area?
Absolutely. We want to meet our fans everywhere they are. Of course we can play games, but we also talk about things like, can we do open practices and bring the team into other communities where maybe there isn’t a venue, but where there are incredible practice facilities where our fans can come interact with the team. I think that’s what’s really special about women’s soccer. It’s a really connected fan experience in a way that other sports aren’t.
What can you say about your working relationship with your venue partners in San Jose and San Francisco?
We are so lucky to be partnered with the [San Jose Earthquakes]. We work with them day-to-day and we have a shared vision for providing a great fan experience. We are very happy at PayPal Park. It is a beautiful, custom-made stadium that is designed for soccer and that is very special. I mean, the NWSL championship game is going to be there. So we don’t have any short-term plans to move out of that venue or not partner with the Quakes.
As for the Giants? What a world-class organization, just first-rate across the board. They’re hugely supportive of women’s soccer and soccer broadly. In fact, we started talking with them during our first season about whether there were ways we could partner with them and they were very excited about hosting matches. When you have a soccer team in the Bay Area, you’ve got to play at Oracle sometime.
But it’s not just them. The entire Bay Area sports community has embraced us. We can pick up the phone and call any of the leaders of those organizations and they’re excited and willing to be partners with us. That just doesn’t happen in other businesses. When I was at Levi’s, we weren’t calling up Wrangler and asking, you know, how are you unlocking market share?
Why is it important for Bay FC to eventually build its own stadium?
The simplest way of expressing it is that you control your own destiny. For us, the concept is, when you think about what it means to be a global sports franchise, you need to have your own home so that you can control the stadium and really own the fan experience from beginning to end. If you’re doing it right, you’re building your brand and developing your identity as tied to experiences in that venue. And then of course there are all of the financials that come from sponsorship within the stadium. You have naming rights you can sell. Right now, we can do great sponsor activations here and there at PayPal, but it’s still not our building. There’s a lot of costs and capital that comes with owning your own stadium, of course, so that’s something we have to be really smart about.
What criteria will your team use to evaluate potential sites for a new stadium?
It’ll be similar to how we went about landing on Treasure Island. So we have a roadmap for how we do it. What I will say is the process for the stadium will be just as rigorous and thorough.
For Treasure Island, we looked at more than 70 locations across the Bay Area and we ultimately decided on that location because we believed it was iconic, had the best possible weather, affordability, and if you can believe it, traffic for our players’ [commutes]. Ultimately, we’re going to think about what is going to be the best location for our fans. Obviously, costs, timing, and the complexities of building any stadium and integrating it into the community will be important factors. You want these things to be really mutually beneficial for wherever you end up.
Have you started that process yet?
I would say our focus right now is Treasure Island. We have our groundbreaking next month and it’s a pretty aggressive timeline to be open by the end of 2026.
From a new stadium perspective, we’re still in the philosophical phase. What does a stadium mean for us? How would we best bring it to life, and what would we need to understand about the economics and timing to make it happen? That’s candidly where we are.
Building it in San Francisco has got to be your top preference though right?
We are a team for the whole Bay Area. Everything is on the table for us.