Over the past decade, Oakland has suffered a brutal triple blow: the Raiders to Las Vegas, the Warriors across the Bay to San Francisco, and the A’s preparing to leave for Nevada. As a Bay Area native, each departure is more than athletic reshuffling; it’s an unraveling of my home’s identity. Economically, the losses are staggering, as game-day revenue once fueled small restaurants, local vendors, and transit systems. The city loses millions in tax revenue each year, while surrounding neighborhoods lose foot traffic and investment momentum. This ripple effect extends to jobs in concessions, maintenance, and hospitality, but perhaps the deepest wound is cultural. Oakland’s teams gave voice to the city’s underdog spirit, resilience, and pride. Their exits amplify the perception of a city left behind. The real game loss isn’t on the field; it’s in the struggle for an abandoned people, with identity and pride taken off the scoreboard.
The Oakland tragedy begins with the Raiders, as the aging Coliseum’s restricted ticket sales and revenue streams stifle any shot at financial parity with rivals. In Nevada, those constraints vanished: $729 million in annual revenue, a franchise valuation that doubled to $6.2 billion, and league-leading ticket and event income. The numbers are a testament to what Las Vegas ownership saw all along, a city eager to subsidize spectacle and thrill.
The Warriors’ exit in 2019 followed a similar playbook. At Oracle Arena, they were Oakland’s pride, but across the Bay, the economics transformed overnight. Their move to San Francisco’s Chase Center was justified on paper as a matter of debt and development, yet the payoff dwarfed any moral or civic hesitation. Even after being compelled to pay off roughly $40 million in outstanding arena debt, the team’s annual revenues exploded to more than $830 million by 2025, outpacing even most NFL teams. The Warriors didn’t just relocate; they graduated into a corporate powerhouse. In essence, ownership traded community for capital.
In each case, executive boards agreed: loyalty wasn’t a practical solution. For owners, staying meant stagnation; leaving meant multiplying revenue. John Fisher’s Oakland A’s, once a symbol of small-market grit, have become a case study of “maximizing profits.” Citing roughly $40 million in annual losses in 2023, Fisher painted relocation as the only viable path to competitiveness. But the numbers tell a different story, one of profit potential, not survival. Analysts project the Las Vegas move could generate half a billion dollars in new sponsorship deals over the next decade. For executives, Oakland’s loyalty was easily trumped by a potential shiny new stadium and profits in Vegas.
From the owners’ perspective, these are success stories. But they expose a brutal throughline in modern sports economics: the value of a city is measured in market potential, not in people. Oakland’s devotion built these teams, yet the balance sheet continues to win. As former A’s executive vice president and current sports business consultant Andy Dolich reflected, “Over 80 million people have come through the Coliseum turnstiles since the A’s first game 56 years ago. That’s a lot of hot dogs, beer, merchandise, enthusiasm, and families. When you think about it, that’s the emotional attachment a team builds with its community.” Now, that emotional attachment has morphed into loss and tentative hope.
For many fans, the dominant word is betrayal, not because they didn’t see the moves coming, but because they believed loyalty should run both ways. In a chat with Javier Morales, a longtime Raiders fan, he described when the Vegas decision went public: “I knew the vote was coming, but I still thought, ‘They can’t really do this to us again,’ and then they did, and it felt like they never thought about us for even a second.” Former mayor of Oakland Jean Quan, from 2010 to 2014, shared a similar sentiment: “people will learn from cities like Oakland,” and how teams, whom we admired and adored, can abandon us all.
As the Oakland A’s wrapped up their goodbyes at the end of the 2024 regular season, organizers tied to the Last Dive Bar community printed tens of thousands of “SELL” shirts, hung banners calling out ownership, and turned what should have been farewell celebrations into something more like a picket line with drums and cowbells. I spoke with die-hard A’s fan Annet Ewamotto, who summed it up very simply: “We look like fools with how many times we’ve been slapped by these owners—but we’re still here, and that’s exactly why it hurts so much.”
Warriors fans from Oakland talk about a different kind of betrayal: less abandonment, more being priced and pushed out of something they helped build. All NBA fans can attest, Oracle was loud, cheap by NBA standards, and visibly full of life; Chase is a “destination,” framed in tourism language as part of “Thrive City,” with boutiques and waterfront views that feel as much about tech money as basketball. As fan Anthony Nguyen said in conversation, “They took our team across the water and then sold our culture back to us at three times the ticket price.”
For historically marginalized communities, that loss of identity intersects with a longer story of dispossession. People who lived through school closures, redlining, the war on drugs era, and waves of displacement see the teams’ exits as one more institution deciding Oakland isn’t profitable enough, respectable enough, or “safe” enough to invest in. For heartbroken Oakland natives, this narrative of abandonment is just the latest chapter.
The teams were one of the few institutions that made the city visible on national terms without diluting its edge. Raider Sundays at the Coliseum, in particular, functioned like a weekly neighborhood festival with families grilling side-by-side, homemade banners, lowriders, and gospel-level noise rolling out of a crumbling concrete bowl. Losing that space isn’t just losing football; it’s losing a regular, physical rehearsal of what “Oakland” looks and sounds like. A second-generation A’s fan might talk about $2 Wednesdays, sneaking down to the lower bowl, teaching their little cousin to keep score on a paper card, all small, cheap habits that made major league baseball feel local and accessible.
Now, instead of handing down a team, an identity, and a legacy of stories of how sports legends once lit up these arenas, they’re explaining why that team is playing in a casino town that many of those kids have never seen, and why our Coliseum has turned dark. The city, our city, was always the “it factor” that made “Raider Nation” or the “Roaracle” special; that energy, that loyalty doesn’t disappear just because the logo moved across state lines. You can see that logic in how A’s supporters turned their grief into organizing, community merch collectives, fan-run events, and independent media that center on Oakland rather than the brand. Oakland’s resilient fan base should not ruminate on “How do we get the next team?” but more so, “What does our community need to keep a team?” For Oaktown to thrive, the hope isn’t to erase the hurt, but to turn it into a different kind of civic pride: not “We kept our team,” but “We kept each other.”
Featured Image Source: Marcio José Sánchez/AP