The most precarious job in Oakland sports belongs to Benny Feilhaber, the coach of the Roots soccer club. In June, he became the sixth coach since the Roots’ inaugural season in 2019, replacing Gavin Glinton after a shaky stretch of play. Glinton, for his part, had replaced Noah Delgado after a shaky stretch in 2024. And Delgado? He had replaced Juan Gerra after a shaky stretch in 2022.
Roots coaches tend not to remain Roots coaches for long. And for Feilhaber, who concludes his first season on Saturday at the Oakland Coliseum, this final stretch has proven to be, well, shaky.
The Roots managed only a single victory in the final three months of the season, and after flirting with a spot in the playoffs, they were eliminated from contention last weekend. They enter Saturday’s finale against Lexington SC with seven wins, eight draws, and 14 losses, holding down the No. 10 spot out of the 12 teams in the USL Championship’s Western Conference.
In all, the season fit the pattern that has defined much of the club’s brief history: flashes of potential but disappointment in the end.
“There have been a number of years now where the Roots have underperformed,” Douglas Zimmerman, who covers the Roots for Soccer Bay Area, said in an interview with The Oaklandside. “I think, unfortunately, you only can really point [to] the technical staff, the technical directors, the people that have kind of not been able to perform and put a team together.”
The season had begun with so much promise. With the A’s having abandoned the Coliseum, the Roots were brought in to fill that void. They set a United Soccer League single-game opening-day attendance record when 26,575 fans filled the Coliseum for the team’s home opener in March.
It was a very Oakland sort of occasion. Chants of “Let’s go Oakland” echoed around the stadium, mixing with the drums from the Los Roots supporters group. Fans in Roots jerseys filled the stands, and the night ended with fireworks.
The move from Pioneer Stadium in Hayward was rich in symbolic meaning for the Roots: The A’s, and their mercenary way of doing business with Oakland, were gone; in their old home now was a community-oriented organization in which fans quite literally could own a stake.
The story on the field was a different matter. The Roots’ president, Lindsay Barenz, said as much in a June 2 statement announcing the firing of Glinton and assistant coach Jesse Cormier: “The start to the season on the field has not matched the momentum we’ve built off the field,” she said. “Our expectations for on-field performance are much higher than where we currently stand.”
The Roots at that point were 3-7-1. They had scored 13 times in all, giving up 22 goals — more than any other team in the USL Championship.
And then in came Feilhaber.
Born in Brazil, Feilhaber moved to the United States at 6, bouncing around the country — New York, Connecticut, Texas, and finally California, where he walked onto UCLA’s men’s soccer team. That opportunity launched him into the European professional leagues and a spot on the U.S. men’s national soccer team roster.
As a player, he had an uncanny sense for finding the right spots for his teammates to score. He could attack from midfield and finish himself, score from set pieces, and deliver precise balls from free kicks. In the 73rd minute of the 2007 Gold Cup final against Mexico, he blasted a volley from beyond the penalty box into the back of the net, giving the United States a 2-1 victory. The New York Times, like a lot of observers that day, was slackjawed, calling it “the greatest, the best, the most technically impressive goal scored in the long, long history of soccer in the United States.”
After another USMNT stint at the 2010 World Cup, Feilhaber became a mainstay of Major League Soccer, a creative midfielder who by at least one reckoning was the league’s best in 2015. He retired in 2020 and turned to coaching.
“I’ve had some of the top American coaches and I’ve been able to take a little bit of everybody. And obviously, you’ve got to be true to yourself, who you are as a coach and as a person,” said Feilhaber, 40, in an interview with The Oaklandside in August. “You can take some of these things that they did extremely well with me and pushed me to different heights as a player, and now I can utilize that with the players that I have.”
In short order, Feilhaber began molding the team in his image, switching from a 3-4-3 formation to a more aggressive 4-4-2 diamond.
“I was always an attack-minded player, and as a coach, I think I have that as well,” he said. “I’d like to think that a perfect way of playing is by creating, by having the ball, by imposing your will on the other team, by putting them in difficult defending situations constantly throughout the match.”
Kendall McIntosh, an Oakland native and goalie for the Roots, noticed the change in tone Feilhaber brought to the locker room.
“He steps in the room and you can tell that he’s focused on winning,” McIntosh said in August. “Especially when he came in here, we were having some not so good results. He came in and he said: ‘Look, what’s happened has happened. We need to focus on the board, and we need to focus on winning.’”
For a moment, at least, something seemed to be clicking. Early on, Nana Attakora, the Roots’ director of player personnel, noticed a change in the team.
“It goes back to accountability. We had good players. We have good players here in Oakland. But there was something missing in my estimation,” Attakora, who has known Feilhaber for 16 years, first as a competitor and now as a colleague, said back in August. “And I think Benny has brought that to the group, right? The best, whoever performed the best during the week, will play. There’s no handouts anymore … and what I’ve noticed since he’s come in every day, the tension is high, the competitive nature is very high, and we’re taking that into the weekend. And that just helped the group.”
But that was in August. The Roots had gone 4-3-1 in Feilhaber’s first two months on the sidelines. In the 12 games since the start of August, the team has won just once. The Roots are scoring more — forward Peter Wilson leads the USL with 17 goals — but they’re giving up more goals, too.
Off the field, the picture is considerably rosier. The Roots are sixth in the league with an average attendance of 7,746 fans — a number that is sure to jump for Saturday’s hotly anticipated finale. All those fans returning to the Coliseum will offer a reminder of the promise surrounding the team. How long that lasts amid all the uncertainty of the on-field product is anyone’s guess. Will Feilhaber be the newest former Roots coach?
Zimmerman was delicate in his answer. “Sometimes he’s putting players in positions that they might not be most comfortable in, but he’s trying to piece the players that he has into a product that he wants to deliver,” he said. “I feel the question is, Do the Roots front office and technical staff want to bring him back or not?”
As Zimmerman saw it, there were perhaps bigger questions facing the organization. “Unfortunately, if you’ve had a number of years where you haven’t achieved the results, at some point you have to look at the leadership on the technical side and be like, ‘Maybe we need a new voice and a new person making the decisions and bringing direction to the team.’”
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