Black-led group wants to prove skeptics wrong with big dreams and sports teams for Oakland Coliseum

OAKLAND — For the past decade, the vast Coliseum complex in East Oakland has increasingly felt like a forsaken land, its once proud ballpark and arena on a path to concrete ruin following the departures of the Raiders and Warriors and likely the A’s.

Striding into this bleak outlook are Brien Dixon and Ray Bobbitt, co-founders of the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, which this week finalized an exclusive negotiating agreement with city officials to oversee a $5 billion redevelopment of the 100-acre property and eventually a 50% ownership interest.

The pair say they can turn the fortunes of the Coliseum site around with big ideas and even bigger financial investments in restaurants, nightlife, retail shops, hotels and market-rate and affordable housing. The complex of their dreams would be comparable to the multi-use “L.A. Live” area that houses its own major sports teams in Southern California.

And, indeed, sports remains a top priority for the two-year-old AASEG, which has partnered with retired WNBA star Alana Beard in an effort to bring women’s basketball to Oakland; formed a lower-division soccer club, The Town FC; and made overtures to establish a women’s soccer franchise in the coming years.

“This is a big moment for all of us,” Bobbitt said Thursday at a news conference. “We want to build this complex into a brand-new community.”

The announcement brought rare excitement to the Coliseum grounds, with newly elected Mayor Sheng Thao predicting the project could bring 30,000 new jobs to East Oakland, and community members buzzing about a Black-led, locally based group on the path to half-ownership of the complex.

Besides its own offer of $115 million to obtain 50% ownership interest of the site, AASEG will pay the city a non-refundable $200,000 for the privilege of negotiating the project in the first place, with further plans to reimburse Oakland about $2.5 million to help the redevelopment move forward.

The group is backed by Loop Capital, a Chicago-based and Black-owned investment firm that manages securities funds worth billions of dollars.

But plenty of challenges lie ahead for the ambitious group, and its partnership with Oakland is only just getting off the ground.

The other half of the property is owned by the A’s, which in 2019 acquired its share from Alameda County for $85 million despite the team’s hopes to ditch the Coliseum for a waterfront ballpark and 3,000-home development at Howard Terminal in West Oakland.

A day before AASEG celebrated finalizing its negotiating agreement, the A’s were shopping around for stadium sites in Las Vegas, which looms as the team’s preferred suitor if the Howard Terminal deal ultimately falls apart, according to a report from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Dixon, an AASEG co-founder, acknowledged that it might be an awkward setup to share rights over the Coliseum complex with a billionaire-owned sports franchise. He suggested that the group may try to buy out the A’s ownership stake down the line in order to fulfill its long-term vision.

“You can’t just build a stadium in a park anymore,” Dixon said. “We want Oakland to be in the 21st century rather than be stuck in the 20th.”

AASEG’s plans to attract major sports teams may also be a tough challenge. The NWSL, the country’s largest women’s soccer league, has made it known that an expansion team is likely bound for San Jose to play in the same stadium as the Earthquakes of Major League Soccer. Instead, Bobbitt said the group will pursue a long-term strategy of securing a team.

“We recognize that the Bay Area is a two-market region — there was two football teams, two baseball teams,” he said. “We feel like it’s a big enough market, especially with the growth of the market, that we would still pursue that.”

Could the bay be a two-market region for women’s basketball as well? Both AASEG and the Warriors have expressed interest in a WNBA expansion team, but on Thursday, Bobbitt was vague on the details.

Henry Gardner, who heads the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority, said the city remains an “attractive and competitive” destination for an expansion team, though he acknowledged that the league may instead tap San Francisco’s Chase Center, which the Warriors now call home.

“The WNBA team, while important, is not going to be a deciding factor in whether or how the Coliseum complex is developed,” Gardner said in an interview.

AASEG, founded in 2020, was awarded the city’s negotiating agreement in 2021 after going head-to-head with a group headed by retired A’s pitcher Dave Stewart.

The A’s and their supporters have repeatedly griped that the Coliseum is an outdated and decaying concrete albatross and that the surrounding deep East Oakland area is too remote from the city’s attractions in downtown and Jack London Square.

AASEG’s founders, though, are far more interested in discussing the property’s most attractive aspects, namely its acreage and close proximity to BART and Amtrak trains, as well as the city’s airport and Interstate 880 highway.

Dixon and Bobbitt have raised concerns about the Roots’ plans to build an interim stadium there. Their group’s fledgling soccer club, The Town FC, is headed by Benno Nagel, who helped found the Oakland Roots but was ousted in 2020 and later unsuccessfully sued the team. The Town FC has yet to play any games.

There’s no shortage of tricky obstacles and uneven relationships that AASEG will attempt to navigate in bringing jobs and excitement back to deep East Oakland. But the founders are determined to take up the challenge of redeveloping the Coliseum complex.

“It’s a special part of our lives,” Dixon said. “My dad was born in 1960, and he’s seen it built out his whole life. He’s disappointed to see the state of it now — it’s dead. You still have concerts, but overall it’s dead. And we want to change that.”