Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club wants to turn its low-key Alameda training campus into a full-on matchday destination, filing plans for a temporary modular stadium that could pack in thousands of fans. The idea is to shift some home dates away from the Coliseum and over to the Harbor Bay practice site while the club keeps chasing a permanent waterfront stadium. Alameda planning officials are scheduled to review the filing later this month.
The application sketches out a modular venue with room for up to 8,000 fans for Oakland Roots matches, an estimated 20 to 24 dates a year from March through November. Oakland Soul games would be capped at about 1,500 spectators on a handful of dates between May and July. Other sports and community events would generally range from 500 to 2,500 attendees, and the documents make a point of banning concerts and music festivals outright. The proposal is set to go before the Alameda Planning Board on June 22, according to KTVU.
The site is already on the global soccer map. The City of Alameda has tagged the Roots and Soul training campus as an official FIFA World Cup 2026 team base camp, and the club recently welcomed Australia's men's national team for an open community training session. Roots operate the Harbor Bay facility with local real estate partners and have been quick to highlight youth programs and neighborhood access alongside pro training, according to Oakland Roots.
The filing says the club would not build new parking lots. Instead, Roots propose shared parking arrangements with nearby Harbor Bay Business Park properties and shuttle service from remote lots and the Coliseum BART station, pointing to roughly 4,000 existing spaces within walking distance. The modular setup would come together in three phases over about six months and could operate for up to five years. Youth, high school, college and adult league events are all listed as potential uses.
The Alameda play comes while the club is still pushing hard for a permanent home at Howard Terminal and trying to keep a short-term foothold at the Coliseum. Roots have been named a finalist for the Howard Terminal redevelopment and are in talks with the Port of Oakland. At the same time, the Coliseum Joint Powers Authority has warned that keeping Roots at the Coliseum past 2026 would be "highly problematic." That squeeze on long-term options helps explain why a nearby, quick-build modular stadium suddenly looks pretty appealing, according to USL Championship.
What Planners Will Watch
When Alameda planners dig into the proposal, they are expected to scrutinize traffic modeling, shuttle logistics and how game days would mesh with weekday tenants at Harbor Bay Business Park. The club is pitching the venue as a limited, interim setup rather than a permanent redevelopment, but neighbors are likely to zero in on noise, parking spillover and late-night operations.
Public comment and any required environmental review will shape conditions on hours, parking mitigation and community programming if the project moves forward. If the board signs off and the timeline holds, the team says phased construction could begin soon after approval and wrap within a six-month window, allowing matches to kick off within a single season. Local officials and business park tenants will get their first formal look at the plan at the June 22 meeting.
