On Friday, Bay FC, the new Bay Area based NWSL team that will join the league in 2024, announced that they would be calling PayPal Park their initial home stadium. The Equalizer was able to sit down with CEO Brady Stewart and talk about the choice and what the future is for the Bay Area franchise.
“Our vision and goal is to bring some of the best players in the world to play on Bay FC and we wanted to make sure that we are creating an equally world-class playing environment for the team,” said Stewart of the decision to go with PayPal over other options in the Bay Area. “We wanted an environment that is energetic and exciting for the fans. And when we looked around and explored our options, we thought PayPal was the perfect place to play.”
For Bay FC, the current lease with PayPal lasts for five years, but they are still looking even further in the future. Stewart spoke of the long term plan, “[w]e are also looking for what is the permanent home of the team.” “Our goal is to build not just a stadium, but also a state-of-the-art training facility that becomes a global mecca for soccer. That’s our next priority, is getting that state-of-the-art training facility chosen and start building that out and then we’ll work on the stadium.”
Bay FC will invest significant money in making sure that players do have the high-end facility to train at, while the front office continues to work on the long-term. While making these decisions, having the training facility and player housing be fairly close by each other has been a goal for Bay FC. “Our goal is to make their lives as focused on the beautiful game as possible and remove that friction from their experience,” Stewart said.
“We want to be a team and a franchise that every player in the world wants to play for. We want to build out best in class player culture, player experiences, and player infrastructure. Just in the locker room at PayPal, we are investing over $3 million to build out the facility, and at the temporary or near term training facilities that we’re building out, we’re investing a couple million dollars there, as well.”
Stewart was not ready to announce where the short-term playing facility would be, although the founders have strong roots with Santa Clara University, and San Jose State University is also close by.
One of the major obstacles that the Bay FC team will face in building its fanbase is that the Bay Area is very big. Between the traffic and the state of the public transport, making the team feel like it belongs to more than just the South Bay will be hard. Stewart already has a plan for that.
“The Bay Area is huge, but our goal is that we are not just a Bay Area team, but Northern California, and eventually the world. We already love our fans here in the Bay Area and we are wanting to create an incredibly energetic electric game day experience. When you look at soccer across the world, the game day experience is a key part of the fan community. It’s a really immersive, interactive experience. It’s the singing, it’s the showing up early to tailgate and celebrate the sport and the team with your fans. And our goal is to recreate that kind of immersive, electric game day experience for our fans at PayPal and draw people in from around the Bay Area.”
“One of the things we saw the US women’s national team send off was just how electric the atmosphere was with that 18,000 seat stadium sold out and the fans just going crazy for the team. That’s our benchmark. That’s the experience we want to provide on game days as well and we can’t wait to get there.”
In order to draw people in, the team plans to play some games outside of PayPal, to make it easier for fans to attend games without having to go to the South Bay. Additionally, the team will be hosting trainings where they engage with the public, or in Stewarts own words, “even if you can’t make it to PayPal, we’ll come find you.”
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