The Bay Area is preparing an extremely bold bid for the next World Cup

When the final whistle in the USA-Bosnia and Herzegovina match blew at 7:06 p.m. on Wednesday, it ended the Bay Area’s time hosting the World Cup — and capped off a whirlwind 18-month stretch of marquee sporting events. 

It started with the NBA All-Star Game in February 2025. One year later, there was Super Bowl 60. And now, a successful six-match run at the FIFA World Cup, making Levi’s Stadium the only stadium ever to host both the Super Bowl and the World Cup in the same year.

“It feels pretty surreal,” Zaileen Janmohamed, the CEO for the Bay Area Host Committee, told SFGATE in an interview before a private event in San Francisco on Tuesday, one day before the USA-Bosnia match. “When you look at all of the events in front of you, it feels like there’s a lot to do and you don’t know what the end looks like. So now that I can see the end, from a core-event perspective, it feels pretty amazing because we were able to do what no one’s done before.”

Janmohamed and the BAHC hosted Tuesday’s event as half-celebration of what they’ve accomplished, half-declaration that there’s more to come. Earlier in the day, the BAHC announced the formation of a “Leadership Council” that will “transform” the committee into a permanent organization to continue to bring top sports events to the Bay Area.

“There have always been kind of ad hoc committees created around [bidding for and hosting events],” San Francisco Giants President and CEO Larry Baer told SFGATE on Tuesday. “It’s a lot of work that’s re-creating the wheel. Now, [the BAHC] can do it as an ongoing, sustaining group.”

Baer joins pretty much every other major Bay Area professional sports team’s president as a member of the BAHC’s board of directors. Golden State Valkyries President Jess Smith said the board’s monthly meetings have been a valuable resource for the leaders to build stronger connections with each other and deliver for the community.

“I think it puts us all at the table to understand our shared responsibility and the impact of sport,” Smith told SFGATE on Tuesday. “Sport is a reflection of society. Also, access to sport creates better outcomes for everyone — whether that’s for the youth and what it means for their future or adults and what it means for their job opportunities and event opportunities. All of us agree on that.”

Keeping the BAHC intact allows the region to continue to dream big. Smith told SFGATE the Valkyries are interested in hosting a WNBA All-Star Weekend, though she didn’t have a concrete timeline as to when that could happen. There have been multiple reports that the Giants would likely host the 2028 MLB All-Star Game if there’s an agreement reached for MLB players to participate in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Then there’s the next World Cup. The United States is set to co-host the 2031 Women’s World Cup alongside Mexico, Jamaica and Costa Rica. The Bay Area is one of 28 American regions applying to host, and Janmohamed is hoping to use the success of this year to sweeten the bid.

“These are all competitive bid processes, so when you get an event, you have to do it very well, and you have to try to do it a little bit differently,” Janmohamed said, citing the Innovation Summit the BAHC held during Super Bowl week as an example. “The leagues want to see a difference in thinking, they want to see innovation, because they’re trying to increase and expand their fan base.”

She added, “When the event is done, or even when you’re bidding, it’s a competition, and so you have to do all of the things that a competition requires. You have to build relationships. You have to make sure that the teams know you have the capacity on the host committee or sports commission to be able to pull something like this off.”

The BAHC didn’t just apply to bring soccer back to Levi’s Stadium. It also submitted Oracle Park as a possibility. The Giants have hosted soccer several times at their downtown San Francisco ballpark, including setting an NWSL attendance record when Bay FC played a match there in August 2025. (That record has since been broken.)

Leslie Osborne, a co-founder of Bay FC and a former U.S. women’s national team player, said Bay FC has explored returning to Oracle Park for another match in the very near future and believes in its ability to host soccer as a premier venue. 

“It has a great pitch, and name a better scenery, name a better area,” Osborne told SFGATE on Tuesday. “That is like the epitome of dream-like stadiums.”

Still, the challenges are very different for any possible World Cup match at Oracle Park. FIFA tends to demand complete control of a facility for weeks before play begins. (Just look at what FIFA’s branding restrictions have done at Levi’s Stadium.) There’s also the work of getting a soccer field set up within a baseball stadium, as well as the work of balancing out how this would impact the Giants and their schedule, as they play in the summer, unlike the 49ers. As Baer told SFGATE, “The team can’t be away for six weeks.”

While stressing that baseball comes first to the Giants, Baer said the team is “open-minded” about the possibility of World Cup matches at its home. When explaining why, Baer turned over his shoulder and spotted San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie in the crowd at the private BAHC event, pointing at him as he made his point. 

“It’d be great for the city, for that guy,” Baer told SFGATE. “We try to look through the lens of, ‘What’s good for the city, for San Francisco?’ This would be massive for San Francisco.”

Baer took note of the passion he’s personally witnessed from international fans at the Olympics and the World Cup. Oracle was also packed when it hosted the 2018 Rugby World Cup Sevens. 

“You feel like the world’s coming to you, and you actually feel better about the world when you have people from all these countries that are coming in,” Baer said. “I think that dynamic is really something the Giants would love to see, but it has to work.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Janmohamed said she “very purposefully” presented FIFA with the opportunity to host matches at both venues in the Women’s World Cup bid.

“Both venues offer a different experience depending on which one you want to go to,” Janmohamed said, also noting FIFA’s different stadium requirements for each tournament stage.

There is precedent for this split-venue setup. Back in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, the Bay Area had San Jose State University’s Spartan Stadium (now CEFCU Stadium) host two doubleheaders — one in the group stage and one in the quarterfinals — before moving to the much larger Stanford Stadium for the semifinal. That match had an astonishing 73,123 fans pack in to watch the U.S. women’s national team beat Brazil, 2-0, on July 4, 1999.

Janmohamed admits she thinks it will be “interesting to see” what FIFA thinks of their proposal. But she’s confident the Bay Area has made good use of its time in the spotlight in 2026.

“Hopefully, what FIFA has seen this time around is that, no matter which team comes through this market, it’s going to be a great experience for them,” Janmohamed said.

Osborne, the Bay FC co-founder, thinks the proof goes back further than this summer’s festivities.

“If we have the World Cup here in five years, who says we can’t play in front of 70,000?” Osborne said. “That [2025 Bay FC match at Oracle Park] was validation that we can play in big stadiums, that people will show up here in the Bay Area. 

She concluded: “If we get games in the Bay Area, I know we’re going to break records.”