Why every sports fan belongs at Bay FC games

As the excited CEO of a new women’s soccer franchise, Bay FC’s Brady Stewart arrives early to matches at PayPal Park in San Jose, helping people navigate the stadium and answering questions.

The fans she sees are a veritable cross-section of the Bay Area , she said.

“The Bay area is such a diverse tapestry of people,” she said. “You’ve got a group of guys coming together just because the game is gonna be really exciting and really fun ... you’ve got the dads and the daughters, you’ve got the LGBTQIA+ community coming in, all together.”

Bay FC has filled seats by the thousands, ranking near the top of the National Women’s Soccer League in attendance in the team’s inaugural seats. It has done so by bringing in fans from every background and corner of the Bay Area despite a record that, as of this week, stands at four wins and nine losses.

The team’s inclusivity has already drawn positive feedback from fans for producing a unique atmosphere at home games — beyond the sight of a plane landing at the adjacent airport.

Manal Sinha, a San Jose-based soccer fan, said he had been interested in becoming a season ticketholder of a local sports team after moving to the Bay Area from India in 2017. He passed on the Earthquakes, the men’s Major League Soccer team that owns PayPal Park.

But when he learned about Bay FC’s imminent arrival earlier this year, Sinha said, he made the leap. Now, he’s even a member of Bridge Brigade, the team’s supporters group.

“I have attended a couple of Quakes games in the past — not too many — and I did not find the crowd to be as diverse as I would like,” Sinha said.

It’s not that there was rampant hooliganism in the Quakes crowd, but there’s just “a lot more diverse crowd — more women and more kids, more parents, families, being part of the crowd at the stadium” when Bay FC is playing, Sinha said.

Of course, being inclusive doesn’t matter much if hardly any fans show up to games. But Bay FC continues to pack the house despite what has thus far been sporadic on-field performance.

The team averaged about 15,000 fans through six games at PayPal — which has a stated capacity of 18,000 fans — through the first 10 weeks of the season. That was good enough to position Bay FC as the fourth-best-selling team in the NWSL , behind more established teams such as the Portland Thorns and San Diego Wave FC.

Crystal Cuadra-Cutler, vice president of Bridge Brigade, said she has followed women’s soccer since 2014. She attended the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Vancouver and helped organize Los Angeles fans behind Angel City FC, which joined the NWSL. With that experience, she said, she’s not surprised at Bay FC’s success.

“There was a hunger here,” said Cuadra-Cutler, who said that the women’s national team games in the Bay Area have been “some of the hardest tickets to get.”

Many fans now wearing Bay FC merch are from marginalized communities and “people who come in who maybe haven’t felt welcome in other places,” Cuadra-Cutler said.

“There’s been a lot of people that I’ve met over the course of this that have said they have not felt welcome in other places, but they feel like they belong [at Bay FC games],” Cuadra-Cutler said.

Stewart attributes some of the team’s success thus far to “muscle memory for the Bay Area for how to support a team.”

But there’s more to it than that.

“I do think that there is something unique about women’s soccer in that so many people can look and see themselves represented on the field, and so they feel automatically connected to the team” Stewart said.

The team boasts players from around the world. Forward Asisat Oshoala’s hometown is in Nigeria, while goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland was born a short drive away in Vacaville.

Surging interest in women’s sports is also undoubtedly a boon. But Stewart stressed that the team aims to make women’s sports a movement, not a moment.

Fans’ desire to support women’s sports because of its underdog status in America would only get the team so far, but the competition on the field is elite. One only need witness Bay FC forward Racheal Kundananji collide with a desperate defender as she sprints toward the opponents’ goal to verify the quality of play.

The team’s partners also share its values, Stewart stressed.

At home games, Bay FC fans will catch a PSA played on the video board for Lyft’s Women + Connect program, which increases the odds that women and nonbinary rideshare drivers are matched with women and nonbinary riders.

In honor of AAPI Heritage Month in June, midfielder (and Stanford graduate) Maya Doms was featured in a Visa-sponsored video in which she introduced her teammates to boba, the drink now nearly ubiquitous in the Bay Area that she said “shows how much Asian culture has influenced food preferences in NorCal.”

Bay FC has been meticulous about cultivating its fan base and experience, which the team says it is building for the long term and not just a single season.

That includes the lines for the bathrooms, which — like at other sporting events — tend to be longer for women than for men. Stewart attributes this conundrum to the “flow through the stadium,” which was built in the shape of a horseshoe that naturally funnels fans to its ends.

“We want to solve it and we want our fans to have a great experience, but it’s also a reflection of the power of the team and the fact that so many women want to come to the game,” Steward said. “It’s a good problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.”

But problems have been few and far between thus far, as reflected by the 10,000 season tickets the team sold.

“I do think we have an incredibly special fan base that it is inclusive,” Stewart said. “It is diverse, and it — what unites all of us is our excitement about the team and our want, [our] desire to be in the stadium cheering for the team together.”

Those cheers aren’t likely to die down any time soon.

“They’re ready to run through a wall for this team,” Cuadra-Cutler said. “They’re here for it. They’re so excited they have a team.”