By 2024, the Oakland Roots’ fan base had been on a meteoric rise. Their ranks had overflowed the bleachers at Laney College and then sold out the stands at Cal State East Bay. That August, the team announced its move to Oakland’s biggest sporting stage.

When the Roots claimed the Oakland Coliseum last spring, 27,000 fans showed up for the home opener, a loving celebration of the stadium’s history and of Oakland itself. The Roots’ white jerseys were bordered in green and yellow in a tribute to the A’s, a halftime show featured Oakland rap legend Too $hort, and the match closed out with a massive fireworks display.

That run at the Coliseum, the team announced yesterday, is now over.

“It’s not a soccer stadium at the end of the day,” Lindsay Barenz, president of the Oakland Roots Sports Club, told The Oaklandside. “We want to be in a space that is meant for soccer, a venue where we have complete control over the avenues of revenue and the cost of operations.”

The Coliseum, she said, has been a struggle. The soccer club effectively had to move in and out of the venue 17 times each season, making “the cost of having our games there extraordinary,” Barenz said.

And as fans have seen first-hand, retrofitting a stadium meant for football and baseball was never easy. The stands at midfield curved away from the field, making the play feel remote and giving a sense that even the booming sounds of fan group Los Roots weren’t reaching the team.

“The Coliseum is a mammoth venue meant for NFL games, and we’re producing soccer matches for 10,000 to 20,000 people,” Barenz said. “And the facilities aren’t right. We want locker rooms meant for a soccer team, and we want space for food trucks, and we want community activation spaces. We provide a unique game day experience, and the totality of the experience isn’t what we want for our fans.”

The lack of control over the venue may have forced the team’s hand. The Roots were displaced this season for several weeks so the Coliseum could host Major League Cricket, including the playoffs that kick off next week.

“It wasn’t the last straw, but it was a factor,” Barenz confirmed. “Having control over the venue for the scheduling of our games is a paramount factor in a venue being viable for our team. A weekslong disruption in the middle of our season is a huge problem.”

In the coming months, the soccer club will be trying to lock down a temporary venue for a pop-up stadium in either the Coliseum’s parking lot or at the Oakland Roots and Soul permanent training facility in Alameda — a facility that recently hosted the Socceroos, Australia’s national team, as they competed in the World Cup.

“Soccer stadiums can be erected shockingly easily,” Barenz said. “All you need is a rectangle field of adequate size and bleachers surrounding it.” Several teams in the United Soccer League, such as Sacramento Republic and Phoenix Rising, play in temporary stadiums, she said.

Barenz said both sites are great alternatives. “We’ll go with whatever becomes a real possibility first,” she said. The team expects to announce that temporary venue in the early fall.

Meanwhile, she said, negotiations continue to find a home for a permanent stadium. The team has been in discussions with the Oakland Port about building one at Howard Terminal, and is also in dialogue with the African American Sports & Entertainment Group, a prospective buyer of the Coliseum, about the possibility of building their home in a Coliseum parking lot.

“If they make that sale,” Barenz said, “we’d have an immediate conversation with them about what using that venue could look like.”

We asked if the team would ever consider a permanent site in Alameda or elsewhere in the East Bay if those plans don’t come together.

“We’re not considering any spaces that are not in Oakland,” she said.