Former Gold Pride Owner: ‘Nobody was really interested’

If you’re curious how a team can win a championship and then close up shop just a few weeks later, you really need to read The Equalizer’s interview with former FC Gold Pride owner Nancy NeSmith.

In case you are unaware of the situation in the Bay Area, the WPS soccer team there won a championship with one of the greatest women’s professional teams ever assembled and almost immediately was forced to close its doors.

The reason is actually pretty simple: The owners had grown tired of losing the amount of money they were losing and didn’t see any reason to believe it was going to get better anytime soon.

It’s not like we wanted to make money. We wanted to break even, but we didn’t even see that. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

According to NeSmith, numerous people had told her they were interested in investing, but when it came time to write checks, she couldn’t get anyone to do it.

So I believed when people said they were interested but it was just talk. Nobody was really interested. And so I had all these thoughts like we are going to bring a championship, we are playing great soccer, we have the World Cup, people are going to show up for the games and if we had sold out or even afterwards when we were selling season tickets and were renewing, if we would have gotten like 3,000 season tickets we would have gone forward. I think we got like 400 new season tickets. Our total was like 800.

One of the big problems FC Gold Pride faced had to do with their home stadium. After playing last year at Santa Clara’s Buck Shaw Stadium, they moved to CSU-East Bay’s Pioneer Stadium in Hayward. NeSmith explained that Buck Shaw proved to be too expensive and Pioneer — despite its relatively more remote East Bay location — was one of the only other viable options.

But the complications were obviously much worse than that. Despite giving as good an effort as could reasonably be expected, it’s hard to blame NeSmith for not wanting to lose anymore money.