A city report set for a public hearing on Tuesday says the subsidy paid for itself, as June hotel-tax receipts rose about $343,000 above a baseline, though it does not try to separate the team’s effect from a month in which the World Cup came to the Bay Area.
By Staff Reporter
Oakland officials will hold a public hearing on Tuesday on one of the more unusual sports deals in the city’s recent history: an agreement to hand back up to $300,000 in hotel-tax revenue to the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer club in exchange for bringing a World Cup team to the East Bay.
According to a staff report prepared by the city’s Economic and Workforce Development Department, the arrangement worked as designed. Australia’s men’s national team, the Socceroos, made the club’s training complex its base camp during the tournament in June, and the city’s general-fund share of transient occupancy tax for the month exceeded the trigger by enough to pay the club the full $300,000. The report is Item 4.1 on the agenda for the City Council’s 3:30 p.m. meeting on Oct. 20, and payment is due by Oct. 31.
The council is not being asked to vote. State law, Section 53083 of the Government Code, requires local agencies that grant an economic development subsidy of $100,000 or more to disclose its costs and results and hold a hearing on them.
How the deal worked
The council authorized the agreement late last year by resolution, and City Administrator Jestin Johnson signed it in May. Under its terms, the city set June 2025’s general-fund hotel-tax revenue, $1,355,084, as a baseline. Every dollar collected above that figure in June 2026 would go to the club, up to $300,000. If receipts fell short of the baseline, the club would get nothing.
The city reported June 2026 general-fund hotel-tax revenue of $1,698,272, an increase of about $343,000. After paying the club, Oakland keeps $1,398,272 of the month’s general-fund collections, the report says, along with more than $460,000 from the separate Measure C hotel surcharge that supports arts and tourism groups.
The agreement said the club expected to spend at least $700,000 to host a team, on top of roughly $5 million in upgrades to its facility. A committee report last year cited an estimated $1 million operating gap that the subsidy was meant to help close.
An Alameda complex, an Oakland subsidy
The club’s training center, now called the UCSF Health Oakland Roots and Soul Performance Center, is the former Oakland Raiders practice facility on Harbor Bay Parkway, which is in Alameda, not Oakland. The club holds a 15-year lease on the site. Oakland’s interest lay in the hotel rooms: the team, along with delegates, news media and traveling supporters, stayed at the Claremont Club and Spa, the report says. The agreement’s recitals projected an estimated 30,000 hotel nights from hosting a base camp; the staff report does not say how many were actually booked.
A study by Tourism Economics, provided by Visit Oakland and attached to the report, found that Oakland hotels’ average daily rates rose 14.5 percent from June 12 to July 2 compared with a year earlier, lifting hotel revenue 16.7 percent even as the number of available rooms fell 8.8 percent.
The report also credits the club with one full-time and 42 temporary, part-time jobs, and nearly 4,000 hours of contracted security work. It describes watch parties at Raimondi Park in West Oakland and at venues across the city, and an “East Bay Soccer Trail” promotion organized by the Oakland Sports Group, which includes the Roots and Soul, the Oakland Ballers and Oaklandish, linking more than 40 neighborhood businesses.
What the report does not measure
The staff analysis treats the full increase in June hotel-tax receipts as attributable to the deal. It does not attempt to estimate how much of that increase would have occurred anyway. Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara hosted six World Cup matches between June 13 and July 1, drawing visitors across the region, and the Tourism Economics study measured overall market performance rather than the Australian delegation’s spending.
The report acknowledges one soft spot: passenger arrivals at Oakland International Airport were down in June compared with a year earlier. It cites increased activity at bars and restaurants but offers no sales-tax figures, although the agreement asked the club to provide an estimate of sales-tax revenue where available.
The hearing comes as Oakland confronts persistent budget deficits and a labor dispute with its own workforce; city workers represented by SEIU Local 1021 have authorized a strike. The $300,000 payment is small against the city’s general fund, and by the report’s accounting the city still collected roughly $43,000 more in June than the baseline after paying the club.
A small deal in a larger debate
Across California, cities are weighing how much public money to commit to sports ventures. In Rancho Cordova, outside Sacramento, officials are considering financial participation estimated at about $185 million over 35 years, largely through tax sharing, for a privately developed indoor-soccer arena and surrounding district, The Sacramento Bee reported. In the South Bay, Gilroy’s City Council voted unanimously on Oct. 5 to stop actively pursuing an ice rink it had planned with Sharks Sports & Entertainment, citing rising construction and borrowing costs, San Jose Inside reported.
Oakland’s arrangement was narrower: a one-month, capped rebate that paid out only if hotel receipts rose. For a city that has lost the Raiders, the Warriors and the Athletics in the past decade, it was also a bet that a new generation of smaller clubs could bring some of the economic and civic benefits of professional sports back to town.
The report, signed by Ashleigh Kanat, the department’s director, frames the deal as consistent with all five goals of the city’s economic development action plan, including rebuilding Oakland’s sports economy. Members of the public may comment at Tuesday’s hearing.
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