Bay FC will play at San Francisco’s Oracle Park, home of Major League Baseball’s Giants, against the Washington Spirit on Aug. 23, the team announced Tuesday.
The matchup will mark the first women’s professional sports competition held at the waterfront baseball field, which has a capacity of 40,260. According to Bay FC leadership, it will demonstrate the club’s ambitions to accommodate fans from other regions of the vast Bay Area. San Jose, where the club’s 18,000-capacity home stadium, PayPal Park, is located, is in the region’s southernmost county.
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“That was a big consideration for us,” Bay FC CEO Brady Stewart told ahead of the announcement. “We’re a team for the whole Bay Area, all nine counties. Our fans are incredible, they come down to San Jose to watch us play, and we wanted to bring the game to them here, the fans here in San Francisco and in the North Bay, and our fans in the East Bay. It’s a central location for that group of fans.”
This will be Bay FC’s second match played at a baseball stadium in two years, with the first taking place at Chicago’s Wrigley Field during its inaugural season against the Stars (then known as the Chicago Red Stars), whom they beat 2-1 in front of a record-setting crowd of 35,038.
Outside of baseball, Oracle Park has been a top destination in San Francisco for major artists’ concerts — Kendrick Lamar and SZA will stop there next month on their tour — and men’s soccer games, including the 2006 World Cup, friendlies featuring Manchester City, Juventus, and Everton in 2011 and 2013, and a match between Real Madrid and Club America in 2022.
The club has wanted to organize a match like this for itself since Stewart joined Bay FC in 2023, she said. She called the team’s experience at Wrigley “inspirational,” the special kind of match that Bay wants to bring its supporters in northern California.
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“We always knew that we wanted to be playing games around the Bay Area, so you will see more of this from us,” Stewart said.
The August game could also offer helpful insight into Bay FC’s search for its next home stadium after its five-year lease at PayPal Park, the only soccer-specific venue in the Bay Area, expires. Just over 46 miles — and a drive that can take well over an hour in traffic — separate the two venues, and unlike PayPal, Oracle is centrally located in downtown San Francisco and easily accessible by several modes of public transportation from within San Francisco and other parts of the Bay.
That is also the case for two other top women’s sports teams: the Oakland Soul women’s soccer team in the USL, and the Golden State Valkyries in the WNBA, which begins its inaugural season next month. The Soul recently announced its short-term home at the Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics used to play, and the Valkyries will share Chase Center with the Golden State Warriors, a short distance south of Oracle.
“There’s no other market like that in the country,” Stewart said of the cluster of women’s sports teams. “The support for women’s sports in the Bay Area, and from such an authentic and deep and excited place, is incredible, and we’re so lucky to be playing here amongst this ecosystem.”
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Brady said the club is still in the early stages of its journey to secure its next home stadium, but that the search will employ the same strategies that led the club to build a permanent training facility on Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland that is set to open in 2027. PayPal Park, in the meantime, has proven a suitable temporary locale for a growing fan base. Bay FC played its inaugural home game in 2024 before a sold-out crowd and boasted an average attendance of 13,617 that season.
“It’s hard to be an iconic sports franchise without your own home,” Stewart said. “As we explore where it’s gonna be, where the stadium’s gonna be, we’re gonna be really methodical and data-driven just like we were with our training facility location, and we’re gonna look at the whole Bay Area and understand where’s the best long-term home for this franchise. We want to be playing 150 years from now.”
Bay FC, currently eighth in the league table, will be seeking their first win against the third-ranked Spirit, who were 2024 NWSL finalists and have beaten Bay in each of their last four meetings, including a quarterfinal match last November in Washington, D.C.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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