Like so many longtime residents of San Francisco, an influx of big money is set to uproot the city’s fan-owned soccer team from its home turf.
The San Francisco City Football Club has been around for 25 years and is the nation’s oldest supporter-owned soccer club — a unique structure compared with the standard of American sport. Since its humble beginnings in 2001, the side battled its way into the minor league United Soccer League’s second division, a national league of semi-professional teams with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ favored Vermont Green as the reigning champions.
And perhaps no team is as rooted in its city more than SFCFC. Its logo features Sutro Tower, its mascot is “Foggy” and the club’s slogan, “City ’til I move to Colma,” is an ode to San Francisco’s graveyard history. Not to mention the club’s partnership with the San Francisco Municipal Railway, with the iconic, squiggly “worm” logo adorned across its chest. And for most of its decade-plus existence in the semi-pro levels, it has called the iconic Kezar Stadium home.
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Fans take in a San Francisco City Football Club match at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.
Seamus Geoghegan
In 2025, newly elected San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a bold new plan for the city’s soccer scene. Golden City Football Club, with a co-owner who had deep ties to Lurie prior to his becoming mayor, would invest at least $10 million in renovations at Kezar and join Major League Soccer’s developmental league MLS Next Pro. The plans would make Golden City the primary team for the historic venue — over high school football teams, track events and, yes, the longtime local soccer team.
“It’s a big respect thing,” Isaiah Cornejo, the youngest elected member on the club’s membership board, told SFGATE earlier this year. “For someone to come up and say you have to ask us permission to play in the stadium that we’ve been playing for 10 years? You can’t really just come in and just kick us out.”
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According to board chairman Brendan Browne, the club found out about Golden City FC just days before the mayor took to Instagram to announce the team — and not directly from the new club but rather via “word of mouth,” he said. While SFCFC finished its 2025 season at Kezar with a record 1,500 fans at its final match, the club’s nomadic lifestyle has already begun in 2026.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie signs legislation with the Golden City Football Club at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco on June 25, 2025.
San Francisco Police Department
SFCFC hosted its first match of the season on the city’s west side at San Francisco State University’s Cox Stadium. On Wednesday, the club was forced out of the city entirely and played a match at El Camino High School in South San Francisco, as it couldn’t find a suitable venue with lights available in SF. That’s already a big disappointment for Berdi Merdanov, who played for SFCFC before taking on the role of the club’s head coach in 2022.
“With SF City, it’s unique, where you can’t really move the club anywhere else, because it’s SF City, supporter-owned for the community,” Merdanov told SFGATE. “That’s why, for me, I connected with it from the get-go.”
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The clásico between SFCFC and the Glens, another SF soccer institution and its rival, on this upcoming Sunday will be back at SF State, not Kezar. Club supporters like Eli Groshelle fear a move away from the stadium could hamper the team’s community.
“Being right at the end of the panhandle in Golden Gate Park and in the Haight, people will be walking by and be like, ‘What’s going on there?’ and might engage with the football club more actively just by virtue of them being around it,” Groshelle told SFGATE.
There’s no getting around the negative sentiments toward Golden City FC from the SFCFC folks — after all, an SFCFC slogan is “built, not bought.”
SF City supporters cheer during a San Francisco City FC match against Marin FC on May 27, 2026 in a USL League 2 game at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, California.
Nap Badillo/3pointsports
San Francisco City FC faces off against the Davis Legacy SC on May 17, 2026 in a USL League 2 game at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, California
Nap Badillo/3pointsports
San Francisco City Football Club players thank the supporters who attended the club’s season-opening match at San Francisco State University’s Cox Stadium in San Francisco on May 3, 2026.
Nap Badillo/3pointsport
“They’re going to invest some money into Kezar, so they think it’s fair that they get to kick everyone else out,” Browne told SFGATE, adding that the club was “ringing the alarm bells” almost instantly.
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Browne, who has been involved with the club’s board since 2015, pointed out that SFCFC has been through this before. Back in 2017, the San Francisco Deltas played a single season in the North American Soccer League and even won the league in Kezar Stadium, while SFCFC moved to the University of San Francisco’s Negoesco Stadium. After that season, the Deltas and their entire league folded, and SFCFC moved back in at Kezar and has continued its growth from there.
But the club is operating on the assumption that it won’t play many, if any, home games at Kezar Stadium next season. And the fact that Golden City FC hasn’t said much of anything publicly since the announcement has only stoked SFCFC supporters’ skepticism. (An anonymous spokesperson told KQED last month that Golden City FC’s silence is intentional.)
“The mayor and the city attempt a privatization of public spaces, which I’m not into, to some extent by taking private donations and then being like they have exclusive access to this field, which is a public park,” Groshelle said. “It seems like it could be another case of tech investors just kind of grifting their own investors and paying the city a bunch of money and not really being able to deliver on their promise.”
This summer has become a transitional season for SFCFC. The club has been able to host four matches at Kezar, with two already played and two more in early July. That’s likely not going to be the case when Golden City FC officially starts up, leaving SFCFC to do soccer’s version of couch-surfing throughout the city — Browne said finding a stadium that can both meet the USL’s requirements and fit the club’s needs is much easier said than done.
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The starting lineup for the San Francisco City Football Club poses for a photo in front of some fans at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco on May 17, 2026.
Nap Badillo/3pointsport
For now, the best alternative appears to be Cox Stadium. At the season-opening match last month, many around the club had ties to SF State and enjoyed returning to the campus, especially since the Gators cut soccer after the 2024-25 school year. Alums of the school include one of SFCFC’s play-by-play broadcasters — Jack Lowery on the English-language call, who graduated in 2015 — on top of numerous fans and several current players. The club’s other broadcaster, Mark Moreno for Spanish speakers, is a current student.
SFCFC captain and defender Adrian Vasquez, midfielder Issay Bravo and forward Isaac Sandoval all played for the Gators. While he admitted he enjoyed his time back in the Swamp, Vasquez said the nearly 900 fans in attendance on May 3 added more fuel to their fire than playing at a familiar venue did.
“It doesn’t matter what field we’re at. The fans are coming out, and it’s always a blessing,” Vasquez said.
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Nowhere was that more apparent than when La Bahía De Frisco, a culmination of three supporters groups formed last year in response to the mayor’s announcement, erupted after each of the team’s three goals. After the shutout win, the group’s Instagram account proclaimed that Cox Stadium was a “vibe” on that day.
But it still wasn’t home, especially when a post-match celebration couldn’t be across the street at the Kezar Pub. Instead, supporters gathered upstairs at the Dubliner in the West Portal neighborhood. The noise of the bar below was drowned out by fans singing — to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In” — “I want to be in San Francisco, when the fog comes rolling in.” (A scarf for the rival Glens mysteriously disappeared off the wall, replaced with city’s black and gold.)
No one around the club is certain of what’s next as this season kicks into high gear. But Browne promised that the club is not going anyway anytime soon, no matter what happens with Golden City FC and Kezar.
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“We’ll always survive because the whole way the club is set up is to survive these types of things,” the board chairman said. “We’re built on sustainability, 100%. That’s why we’re still around, and so I’m not worried about it. They can do whatever they want to do, and we’ll adjust and we’ll move forward.”
Kezar Stadium, the longtime home of the San Francisco City Football Club, sits empty ahead of a match in San Francisco on May 17, 2026.
Nap Badillo/3pointsport
And perhaps the uncertainty can be a unifying force. Through the first month of action, SFCFC is unbeaten, leading the Northern California division with three wins and a tie. For fans like Austin Peterson, a follower since 2018, it’s not hard to dream about the spotlight that a deep USL2 playoff run could bring to the club — and its fight for its home.
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“Vermont, they won the title last year, and they got nationwide attention,” Peterson said. “If SF City can do something like that, I think that would bring soccer and San Francisco to a whole new level.”
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Seamus Geoghegan was born and raised in San Francisco and has been a Bay Area sports fan ever since. A writer and photographer, Seamus was formerly editor-in-chief of San Francisco State’s newspaper Golden Gate Xpress and City College’s The Guardsman. Now, you can find them strolling through the city’s beautiful parks or scarfing down an El Farolito burrito.