The Oakland Coliseum: What It Was, What Ruined It, and What Happens to It Now
Opened in 1966 for $25.5 million, home to two championship franchises, wrecked by a 1996 renovation nobody wanted, and now the middle of a $5 billion redevelopment. The building, not the grievance.
Every story about the Athletics leaving mentions this building and almost none of them explain it. So: what the Coliseum actually was, how it went from one of the better stadiums in America to a national punchline, and what's happening to the site right now, which is more interesting than most people realise.
What was built. The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum opened on 18 September 1966 at a cost of $25.5 million, part of a 120-acre complex that also included the arena next door. The design was the good idea of its era: a symmetrical concrete bowl sunk into the ground so that most of the seating sat below street level, which kept the profile low and left the view open to the Oakland hills beyond the outfield. It wasn't a beautiful building. It was a genuinely well-sited one.
Who played in it. The Raiders from 1966 to 1981 and again from 1995 to 2019. The Athletics from 1968 to 2024. The Warriors were next door at the arena from 1971 until they crossed the bay in 2019. For a stretch in the seventies and eighties this parking lot held three professional franchises, and it's the place where more than half of everything on the Bay Area championship ledger was won.
What happened there. Three consecutive World Series championships in the early seventies. Two Raiders Super Bowl teams. The Bash Brothers. The twenty-game winning streak in 2002. The 1989 World Series, which the A's won in a series interrupted by an earthquake. The right-field bleachers, the drums, the flags, a supporter culture that visiting teams genuinely disliked playing in front of.
Then 1996, which is the part that actually killed it. To bring the Raiders back from Los Angeles, the public paid roughly $200 million to bolt an enormous upper deck onto the east side of the stadium. It added football seats. It also walled off the view of the hills that was the single best feature of the original design, put thousands of baseball seats at a distance and an angle nobody wanted to sit at, and turned an open bowl into a closed concrete box. Fans named it Mount Davis, and for the entire baseball season afterwards it sat under tarps, a monument, tarped, to a decision made for a football team that left again anyway.
The decay was a policy, not an accident. The sewage backups that made national news, most notoriously when it flooded the clubhouses in 2013. The possums. The tarps over the upper deck. All of it was real and all of it was the predictable end state of a building that two governments and one ownership group spent twenty years refusing to invest in while they argued about a replacement. Stadiums don't rot on their own. This one was left to.
What it was, uniquely, at the end. The last stadium in America shared full-time by a Major League Baseball team and an NFL team. Everywhere else that arrangement ended in the nineties and 2000s, because it's a bad arrangement: the dirt infield sits in the middle of the football field in September, and neither sport gets the building it wants. Oakland kept it going until 2019 because Oakland couldn't afford to stop.
The last game. 26 September 2024. The Athletics beat the Texas Rangers 3-2 in front of 46,889 people, which is close to a sellout and roughly five times what the franchise had been drawing. Fifty-seven seasons ended in a building that was full for the first time in years, which tells you something that the attendance argument never did. The rest of that story is on the relocation timeline and the record of what was lost.
What's there now. Not nothing. Oakland Roots SC and Oakland Soul SC play there, and the San Francisco Unicorns have used it for cricket. The concrete bowl that a major league franchise called inadequate is currently hosting professional sport in front of crowds that fill the lower deck.
The sale, which is genuinely happening. The city and the county each owned half through the Coliseum Authority. Both halves are going to Oakland Acquisition Co., an entity formed by the African American Sports and Entertainment Group with financing from Loop Capital, after the Athletics assigned their own purchase right to the group in 2025. The City Council approved amended terms on 13 July 2026, including a provision that gives Oakland 6 per cent of annual gross ticket sales from events at the complex, the city estimates roughly $3 million a year into the general fund.
What they intend to build. More than $5 billion across the full 112 acres over something like thirty years: housing in the thousands of units, with about a quarter of it deed-restricted affordable, plus retail, restaurants and entertainment space. Thirty-year masterplans in the Bay Area have a poor record, Candlestick Park sat empty for a decade after demolition, so the correct posture is interested scepticism rather than either cynicism or excitement.
The thing worth holding onto. A stadium isn't the reason a city loses a team. Oakland was told for twenty years that this building was the problem, and the building is still standing, still hosting sport, and about to become the largest redevelopment site in the East Bay. The team is the thing that left. Our column on the move is where we say what we think about that.
More on the era this building held: Bay Area championship ledger, the relocation timeline, and the history section.
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