The talk around the San Jose Earthquakes should be about the club’s playoff push as they try to earn their first home playoff match in the nine-year history of PayPal Park.
But instead, the discourse on social media over the past two days is all about owner John Fisher’s seemingly throwaway comment that bashes the team and its stadium.
Buried deep in a recent story about Fisher’s other team, the Oakland A’s, and its fight with the City of Oakland over ballpark issues came a passage where Fisher effectively bashes the stadium that San Jose helped build for his soccer team.
“The comparison between the A’s and the Earthquakes is ‘apples to oranges,’ Fisher says,” ESPN’s Tim Keown wrote in the story. “And, according to Fisher, the eight-year-old PayPal Stadium in San Jose is already outdated compared to newer MLS stadiums — he mentions LAFC, St. Louis and Austin — and lacks the capacity and premium seating that drives the kind of revenue needed to compete for championships.”
It’s an eyebrow-raising comment about PayPal Park, which was built for $100 million in 2015 on land that was purchased from the city of San Jose at significant discounts from initial offerings. When asked for comment on Fisher’s “outdated” remark, San Jose mayor Matt Mahan didn’t seem to agree with the Quakes owner.
“PayPal Park offers an incredible fan experience. My family and I love to cheer on the Quakes — and will soon cheer on Bay FC there,” Mahan said in a statement. ”I hope the stadium’s ownership will continue to invest to ensure it is second to none.”
The comment from Fisher comes just as the Quakes on the pitch are looking to secure a playoff spot for the first time since 2020 and just the third time since 2012, when San Jose was the best team in the MLS regular season. That season was the first year that the now-named PayPal Park was under construction, leaving hope for better days ahead with a new home.
But since PayPal Park opened in 2015, Fisher has not used the new stadium for the Earthquakes to raise spending on the team’s product on the field. As this news organization broke down in May, the Earthquakes rank 21st out of 29 MLS teams in spending in 2023, and they’ve been in the bottom half of the MLS in every season since 2015.
That fact was also cited in the recent ESPN piece, which noted that current A’s president Dave Kaval was the then-president of the Quakes who helped get the stadium built. Asked about the comparison by ESPN, Kaval reportedly sidestepped the question by saying, “I’m a big believer in the revenue opportunity in Las Vegas.”
Kaval was also a big believer in the opportunities in San Jose, and took a lot of credit for the stadium in a 2016 sports management book that was co-written in part by George Foster, who was Kaval’s professor at Stanford.
In “Sports Business Management: Decision Making Around the Globe,” Foster and co-authors Norm O’Reilly and Antonio Dàvila wrote that the very same premium seating that Fisher complained PayPal Park lacked was something that wasn’t initially planned — and took Kaval’s work to get done.
“In order to convince ownership to make the additional investment in these amenities, Kaval and his team packaged and sold all 12 field suites and more than 1,000 club seats over a six-month period in 2012,” the book reads. “This gave ownership more confidence in the endeavor and enhanced the construction budget to accommodate these upgrades.”
Now, not even a decade after the stadium opened near the San Jose Airport, Fisher is citing the thing he needed to be convinced of doing in the first place as something that is lacking.
The comment has sent social media ablaze on X, formerly known as Twitter, with several posts about Fisher’s comments garnering hundreds of likes, reposts and responses.
Quakes Epicenter, a prominent blog that covers the team, has not posted about the team’s on-field playoff push once since the comment began circulating on social media early Thursday morning.
Still, the season will march on for the Quakes, who enter Saturday’s match against Nashville SC in playoff contention in the Western Conference, as they still sit in seventh place at 40 points.
In the new MLS playoff structure, the top seven teams in each conference will play in the first round, which is a best-of-three series that guarantees a home match for each team. The eighth and ninth teams in each conference will play a single-elimination match at the eighth seed’s home.
For San Jose, it means finishing anywhere in the top-eight will bring PayPal Park its first-ever postseason match, and the first hosted by the Quakes at all since 2012. But after suffering a 2-1 loss to the Portland Timbers on the road on Wednesday, the Quakes have only picked up eight points in its last seven matches, making their playoff hopes look slimmer.
After the match against Nashville, San Jose’s final three matches of the season will be against three teams chasing them in the West. The Quakes will play at Minnesota on Sept. 30 and at Dallas on Oct. 7 before hosting Austin on Oct. 21, the final day of the regular season.
In most normal seasons, those matches would be the focus of the fan base heading into a pivotal final stretch.
But thanks to Fisher’s comment, fans in San Jose feel a similar rage against their owner as baseball fans in Oakland do.
