Oakland is an acute victim of a stadium-financing racket that has existed for decades. But the loss of the city’s three pro sports teams over the past decade is a special kind of tragic
Professional sports’ exodus from Oakland, California gets sadder all the time. The Golden State Warriors’ move across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco in 2019 was tough for Oaklanders to swallow. The two cities aren’t the same, after all. But at least the Warriors stayed nearby. The NFL’s Raiders left for Las Vegas in 2020, an even rougher departure given the distance between the Bay and the desert. And now Oakland has taken a body blow, as the final major professional team in the city has headed for the exits: Major League Baseball’s Athletics, whose own move to Sin City was finalized last week.
The drying-out of the pro sports landscape in Oakland is, on some level, the same simple story that gets written every time a city loses a team. The Warriors played in an old arena that left them lagging behind the rest of the NBA in commercial opportunities. The Raiders and A’s played in an old stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, that put them at a similar disadvantage to their NFL and MLB peers, respectively. And when the Oakland football and baseball franchises couldn’t get local governments to give in to their demands for public assistance to subsidize a sporting venue whose benefits would mostly be reaped by billionaire club owners, the teams simply cut and ran. The Warriors, blessedly, financed their new home privately. Nevada taxpayers are on the hook for the Raiders and A’s, however.
