Edreece Arghandiwal remembers the drive.
It was Aug. 31st, 2019, his 30th birthday, but Arghandiwal didn’t have much time for existential reflection. Oakland Roots SC was only hours away from its first ever match. Arghandiwal, the club’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, had a few hundred things to take care of before kickoff.
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The drive to the game, though, offered him a few final moments of peace. Arghandiwal, born and raised in Oakland, put on Childish Gambino’s “III. Telegraph Ave.” as he made his way downtown to Laney College Stadium. The song tells the story of a man following his girlfriend, both of whom will soon turn 30, to Oakland. The man is anxious about the relationship, and he’s afraid of what steps he’ll be forced to take if it fails.
For Arghandiwal, the song choice was more than a little on the nose.
“I’m thinking, ‘sh*t, I just turned 30 in Oakland,’” he said. “He says that in the song, and I’m helping to try to build this club for the community, this asset that hopefully stays here for a long time. It was just this weird moment, as you’re seeing everything come together, but you don’t really know how it will be received.”
He didn’t have to wonder much longer. Roots didn’t win that first match, blowing a 3-0 first half lead to draw 3-3 against the California United Strikers, but the result was secondary to the response the club got in the stands. More than 4,500 fans filled a sold-out Laney, with Arghandiwal and Roots manager Jordan Ferrell, then an assistant coach, remembering the crowd as being as diverse as Oakland itself; the city ranked in a 2020 study as the second-most racially diverse major city in the U.S.
“I remember looking up and seeing the diversity in the stands — I’m talking ethnic diversity, I’m talking gender diversity, and seeing that everybody felt comfortable,” said Ferrell, one of six Black head coaches in U.S. pro soccer today. “I’ve traveled to a lot of different places around America, a lot of different places around the world, and there’s just very few places in sport where people from all walks of life feel at home. Not just at home in the stands, but feel that the club is supportive of them, their fight for justice, their fight for being treated as human beings equally. And I could see in the stands that that was one thing that, man, it was just… it was really special because people were comfortable in their own skin inside of our stadium, representing our team.”
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In 2021, Roots will have a bigger platform from which to spread their message. The club announced on Tuesday that it is moving from fledgling NISA to the second-division USL Championship. For a club that has thus far felt more like a lifestyle brand than a soccer team, it’s a major step, and a major opportunity. The organization has been built differently than just about any other in American and Canadian soccer. If the club succeeds in USL, it might allow them to inspire change far beyond Oakland.
(Courtesy Oakland Roots)
In many ways, Oakland is a city of immigrants. In addition to having a substantial population who moved to the city from Asia or Latin America, Oakland is home to plenty of people from further afield, boasting pockets of communities from places like Eritrea, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Many of those immigrant communities run their own soccer tournaments. Arghandiwal, a first-generation Afghan-American, grew up playing in the competitions, and is still involved in the scene. One weekend a few years back, a team that was organized by a friend of his won one such tournament. The friend threw a barbeque to celebrate the title, and Arghandiwal, who jokes that he used to be known in his own community back in his playing days as “the Afghan Zlatan,” happily headed over for the backyard party.
Benno Nagel was also in attendance that day. Nagel has been involved in soccer in the Bay Area for most of his life. An Oakland native, he played four years at San Francisco State University, then embarked on a coaching career that took him from tiny Northern California youth clubs to the vaunted academy of Croatian power Dinamo Zagreb and, briefly, to an assistant role at turbulent NASL club Rayo OKC. He landed back in Oakland after he left Oklahoma in the spring of 2016.
Arghandiwal and Nagel had never met before that barbeque, but they had separately considered the idea of starting a grassroots club in their hometown. They got to talking at the barbecue, and quickly found themselves swept up in their shared passion. Arghandiwal had a background in marketing, and Nagel had experience in soccer. The first seed of Roots SC was planted.
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From the jump, Nagel and Arghandiwal wanted their club to use soccer as a vehicle for social good. The idea wasn’t solely altruistic. Lower-division soccer isn’t much of a draw; if anyone was going to show up for their club, they knew they had to build a deeper connection with the community.
“It’s called being an anthropologist,” said Arghandiwal. “When you’re building a community asset, you can’t force the objective of a brand onto the people. That’s just not how sh*t works. … So, we assembled a community advisory board of OGs in the community, people that had a name, had weight, had done positive things. The way Oakland works is you gotta nod to the originals. You gotta nod to the ancestors, you got to know where you come from.”
What they heard in those conversations wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but it was illuminating: Oakland is changing. It’s still racially and economically diverse, but the city is gentrifying. The Black population, perhaps the main driver of the city’s artistic, cultural and political development, has declined over the last couple of decades. Arghandiwal and Nagel said they heard about this trend repeatedly in their meetings with the community. It became clear that not only should they remember the people who made Oakland, they had to use their team to make Oakland better for those people.
“Oakland is in a state of growth, of development, and we kind of have the old Oakland and the new Oakland,” said Nagel. “And there’s been a lot of people that have been left behind and haven’t necessarily had equitable access to the future of Oakland. I think that’s created a kind of a disconnect. Not an intentional disconnect, you have people that are moving here, in a good way, they want to be in the Bay Area, they want to live in Oakland and they’re excited about it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you also have a bunch of people that have been here that are deeply rooted here deserve a right to be a part of the future of Oakland.”
As they continued exploring what their potential team might look like, Arghandiwal and Nagel met with a man uniquely aligned with their vision. Unlike the two initial partners, Mike Geddes isn’t an Oakland native. He had never even visited the city before his family moved there in 2016. Born in England, Geddes worked at the BBC covering the intersection of social issues and football before entering the non-profit arena with organizations including Spirit of Soccer and streetfootballworld USA.
By 2016, however, he had grown frustrated by his experience working with what he called “traditional charity models.” Meanwhile, he thought the professional game was becoming less relatable to the way which most people across the world experience soccer.
“I’m a Leeds United fan so my club is 100 years old. I’m not a fan or haven’t been a fan because they’re a good team, I’m a fan because of something much deeper in that,” Geddes said. “That was always something that surprised me coming to the U.S.: How do you create that when you’re starting relatively recently?”
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Nagel and Arghandiwal reached out, and through early coffee shop conversations, Geddes found that his vision synced perfectly with the duo’s concept for the club. He joined the pair in October 2016, together forming Oakland Pro Soccer. Nagel was named president, Arghanidiwal became chief marketing officer and Geddes became chief purpose officer, a role partially inspired by similar positions at Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia, and one Roots believe was the first such position in American pro soccer.
Geddes had a model in mind for what he thought the club could be. A few years before, he had done some work with a club called Kick4Life FC, a club in Lesotho founded with an eye on promoting health education and awareness in its community. It became the world’s first club dedicated to social change —an organization which truly wanted a symbiotic relationship with its community.
“That, to me, was the embodiment of what I was looking for in my purpose,” Geddes said. “It was reverse-engineering the whole concept of football back to something that I believe it should be. A football team comes from the community first and over time, it becomes this commercially successful thing, but the foundations are deep.”
In their community meetings ahead of the club’s creation, the trio kept coming back to the word “roots.” It was an obvious play to the oak tree, the ubiquitous symbol of Oakland found everywhere from the city’s seal to its street signs. But it was also a call to the city’s proud history, people and culture. They embraced it as their name: Oakland Roots Sports Club.
The founders felt like they had a strong concept, but, as 2017 turned to 2018, the organization stalled out; before they could field a team, they needed more financial backing.
They found it, oddly enough, on LinkedIn.
Nagel used the networking platform to reach out to Steven Aldrich, who was then working as GoDaddy’s chief product officer. He seemed like a natural fit. A men’s league goalkeeper in his spare time who had previously advised the NASL’s San Francisco Deltas on their expansion bid, he wouldn’t need much selling on the value of a soccer club which strove to truly represent Oakland.
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“They saw that I was writing on my LinkedIn feed about entrepreneurship, about soccer, and about social impact in particular,” Aldrich said. “I’m always interested in talking to entrepreneurs.”
Aldrich thought the timing was right, as the Golden State Warriors were set to leave Oracle Arena in Oakland for fancy new digs in San Francisco in 2019 and the NFL’s Raiders were already rumored to be sizing up a relocation to Las Vegas. But the club’s model was the major selling point.
“For me, it really was this exciting idea to bring together soccer, community, entrepreneurship and do it in a pretty different way from many of the existing soccer franchises,” Aldrich said. “It started very much as an independent idea that you could take multiple people, bring them together, create a broad set of support from the community and from investors who don’t have a singular person coming in and say I want a team and then I go by rights to a team. This went from the ground up.”
With Aldrich aboard, the group tapped soccer designer Matthew Wolff to bring their name to life. He came up with a multicolor crest that’s a nod to the town’s diversity, with a tree sprouting from the kaleidoscopic soil. It was an immediate hit upon its reveal in July 2018, and its appeal hasn’t faded since. NBA star Damian Lillard and rapper G-Eazy are just two of the notable Oakland natives to publicly rock the club’s gear, initially released by Oakland clothing shop Oaklandish.
(Courtesy Portland Trail Blazers)
“That first month or two, as you would go out in the community, you would see people wearing Oakland Roots merchandise without even knowing that it was actually a soccer team,” Arghandiwal. “They wore it because the crest represented an idea, it represented inclusivity, diversity, the arts, the culture, it meant Oakland when you wore it, and when you wear it, it makes you feel like you’re a little bit of a superhero.”
There was still the small matter of finding a league for Roots to play in. The group had held prior discussions with NASL, but, by the time Roots launched in July 2018, the league was in a still-ongoing hiatus. Roots had also spoken with the USL, but real estate developer Mark Hall bought the league’s East Bay territorial rights late in 2017, locking the club out of that circuit.
That left the nebulous NPSL Founders Cup. Oakland Roots was announced as one of 11 initial members, but difficulties gaining sanctioning saw many potential participants get cold feet before the first season began. At the same time, the National Independent Soccer Association (NISA), which first hoped to begin play in 2018, was coming back online after significant delays. The league eventually landed Division III sanctioning from U.S. Soccer, which, along with the various issues with NPSL, pushed Roots to ditch the Founders Cup for NISA, which formally kicked off in August 2019.
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The Roots were an immediate draw, and remained that way throughout their first season, with an average crowd of 5,189 at home matches. Ferrell, the current head coach, described their home matches as “just so Oakland.” The club shut down a city street adjacent to their downtown stadium for a pregame block party prior to the opener. Oakland rapper Mistah FAB performed before their final home match last fall, which drew 5,723 fans — the highest total for any NISA match to date.
“In Oakland, we’ve always gotten stuck with bad ownership for our pro teams,” said Jorge Leon, an Oakland native, an original member of the Roots’ community advisory board and a member of the Oakland A’s independent supporters’ group, the Oakland 68’s. “The Raiders leaving, the Warriors leaving, the A’s trying to move for years and years. And that’s made me so I always find something to criticize our teams for, but with the Roots, I cannot find anything. It almost makes me feel like something’s got to give, but they’ve just done everything really well. We’re this city that gets no love, but they’re blessing us with this great soccer club.”
The only problem: the on-field product has struggled. After that blown three-goal lead in their opener, Roots finished NISA’s fall season with a 0-3-3 record. Inaugural head coach Paul Bravo, the former Colorado Rapids technical director, was dismissed on Oct. 31, 2019 by mutual agreement, and Ferrell was promoted to his first professional head coaching position.
Even as the team struggled for results, they were proactive in establishing partnerships in Oakland and beyond. The club lists four official “purpose partners”: Soccer Without Borders Oakland, Street Soccer USA, youth soccer camp organizer My Yute Soccer, and youth writing center Chapter 510. Ferrell, a native of Stockton, Calif., makes it a point to speak to his players about what Oakland represents and how the club tries to reflect that. They also have numerous relationships with community organizations to promote education, artistic pursuits and community-building and are planning a “Justice Match” to benefit the club’s Justice Fund supporting causes promoting racial and gender equity.
Roots also found a way to be a leader within the U.S. soccer landscape. Roots was the first American club to join Common Goal, the global charitable movement started with Manchester United midfielder Juan Mata’s support.
“It’s almost like they’re proving everyone wrong, basically,” said Leon. “They’re showing that you can do this with the community in mind, first and foremost, and I think other clubs should take notice and see how they’re doing it. I think they’ve made a huge impact in Oakland.”
In the 2019-20 season, Oakland hosted six games across fall and spring before NISA — like the rest of the sports world — came to a screeching halt when COVID-19 spiked stateside in March. Early in the break, the league cancelled its spring season with an eye on resuming in August.
During the gap in play, Oakland received an unexpected opportunity to join another league entirely. While the USL announced its intention to expand into East Bay with Hall in 2017, league and ownership hadn’t made any progress on a stadium plan. With Hall running into dead ends and losing interest, Roots moved in, acquiring the territorial rights a few weeks ago.
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After working with NISA and its clubs on a peaceful exit (Oakland will still finish the calendar year playing in its fall season), they were cleared for the move. They’ll begin play in the USL Championship in 2021. Due to COVID-19 curtailing the 2019-20 NISA season, it’ll be their first full campaign as a club.
“The USL is a decade ahead of where NISA is at the moment,” Adrich said. “When the opportunity came up for us to have more of a local rivalry going with teams up here in NorCal as well as have more teams just density-wise, we thought that was a positive. We thought the opportunity to be seen on ESPN+ and other broadcasts are more than we can do on our own.”
Talk to anyone at Roots, and it’s clear that they don’t see the move to USL as a final destination. Clubs like Barcelona and German side St. Pauli, a team known for its activist stance and progressive culture, were name-checked by staff as models for what they feel they can become. On the surface, that kind of talk is absurd coming from a young club in the inherently unstable ecosystem of lower-division American soccer. But Roots, with the relatively big crowds and emphasis on meaningful community work, legitimately feel at least a little different than most of their U.S. peers.
“I’m not going to shy away from saying this… I want to be the biggest sports club in the world, man. Period,” said Arghandiwal. “I don’t know how to properly describe that, but I want to be able to win in every category. Winning in giving back to the community, winning in creating a brand and an asset that no one has seen in sports, winning in creating a game day experience that makes people turn into promoters and advocates of our brand and what we’re trying to accomplish, and more importantly, I want to play soccer at the highest level possible.
“And so when you take all of that you mesh it together, I want to be the sports club out of the States that people see as a way away for common people to have a dream and for common people to break through. I’m really tired of seeing people get marginalized, I’m really tired of even having the notion of marginalized people in the States, and so for me, it’s being a vehicle for that, being an inspiration and trying to really just break through any type of glass ceiling or boundary that comes in front of us.”
For Arghandiwal, that also means getting into the women’s game. He said that the club looked into the possibility before launching the men’s team and has even had preliminary discussions with NWSL. It also means expanding into other sports (the “S” in “SC” stands for “Sports,” not “Soccer”). Arghandiwal specifically mentioned things like skateboarding, even ping-pong. While the planned NPSL second-team launch (Project 51O) was put on hold, they will eventually take the field — whether it’s still in the NPSL or, more likely, USL League Two.
All that said, winning in the USL Championship will be important. Ferrell feels that, naturally, but so do the club’s founders. The better Roots are on the field, the farther they can reach off of it.
“There is a ton of data that says that purpose-driven organizations outperform those which are not purpose driven by huge factors,” Geddes said. “It helps you with revenue, it helps you with organizational health, employee retention, everything. It just makes sense to operate in this way. I think in sports, or at least in the United States as I’ve experienced it, you know, when sports has started as a business first, that purpose gets lost a little bit.”
