The 16-acre compound, with multiple turf fields, some offices and a large swath of parking space, has attracted the interest of San Francisco real-estate firm Prologis, which is offering to buy the property for $24 million.

Just under half of that money would go to Oakland, which co-owns with Alameda County the facility at 1150 Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda, atop the flatland that leads to the scenic ocean harbor.

It would be a much-needed financial boost for a city dealing with a budget deficit of historic proportions. But the larger impact would be to the property’s current tenant and one of Oakland’s fastest-growing cultural institutions: the men’s soccer franchise Oakland Roots SC.

Should city and county officials approve the purchase this month, Prologis intends to continue leasing the compound to both the Roots and its new companion women’s team, the Oakland Soul.

The soccer fields may also continue to serve as a training ground for European soccer clubs seeking a warmer region during the winter months, including potentially a role in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, some of which is set to be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

“The World Cup is the largest sporting event in the world, and this use would shine a global spotlight on Oakland and the East Bay,” the report states, before noting that the facility would need significant maintenance, including a $3 million upgrade to the roof of the building that once served as the Raiders headquarters.

The Roots, meanwhile, have been striving to remain in the city whose tree insignia inspired the franchise’s name and branding, as well as its guiding ethos — to be rooted in Oakland amid the departure of other sports franchises. But the task has proven difficult.

Team officials had anticipated that they might be booted from the property when the city and county decided to sell, especially if the new owner was more interested in, say, building new housing on the property rather than hosting sports franchises there.

Ahead of key dates this month, including a City Council vote next Tuesday, Roots officials have declined to comment on the pending sale.

The Raiders facility is where the Roots practice, but it will play home games during the entire 2024 season at Cal State East Bay in Hayward — the second season at the soccer field there, after the team ditched Laney College over a turf issue.

The Roots’ goal is to play the following season in a modular stadium built on the parking lot of the Coliseum complex, plus a longer-term stadium in a large adjacent space, the Malibu Lot.

Ongoing negotiations between the Roots and Coliseum officials over a stadium at the giant East Oakland property have mainly centered around scheduling games on nights when A’s baseball — perhaps in its final season — isn’t already using the property.

The team’s temporary agreement with the Coliseum would constitute a “special event,” which would require the team to be there for no more than 60 days in 2025 — a stopgap measure while the team tackles the complicated task of finding a semi-permanent home.

“I’m hoping we are nearing the end,” said Henry Gardner, the head of the Joint Powers Authority, which oversees the Coliseum site on behalf of the city and county.

The baseball franchise, which initially had tried to get out of sending the money so quickly, sent a letter Thursday to Nate Miley, chair of the county’s Board of Supervisors, acknowledging that it will “satisfy the obligations” that remain outstanding from the parties’ 2019 agreement to purchase the land for $85 million.

The sale entitles the A’s to 50% ownership of the Coliseum complex, which includes the ballpark, the nearby arena and the vast parking space in between, even though the 2024 season may be the team’s last there.

And while the deal doesn’t formally close until 2026, its terms required the A’s to pay out the rest of what they owed to the county if the team ever announced it was leaving Oakland — which it did in April, when the team first secured a land deal for a Las Vegas ballpark.

That detail of the agreement — and the notion that the A’s owed the county $45 million within 180 days of the announcement — garnered attention after an opinion columnist for this news organization pointed it out last month, prompting weeks of confused responses from both the team and county officials.

County officials, including Miley, did not respond Friday to requests for comment, nor did the A’s.

The team hasn’t said what it intends to do with the 155-acre property, which has a murky future. A’s president Dave Kaval said at the time of purchase that the deal would help keep the team in town, but that outcome now appears off the table.

“I have not had any discussions with board members about what the A’s want to do with the property, because the A’s have never articulated them,” said Henry Gardner, the head of the Joint Powers Authority, which oversees the site on behalf of the city and county. “I haven’t seen or heard from the A’s what a redevelopment would look like.”

The other half of the property is owned by the city, which is in negotiations with the African American Sports and Entertainment Group, a Black-led development group to transform the site into a large commercial hotspot with live sports, hotels and nightlife, though the project has faced difficult early hurdles.

A local soccer franchise, Oakland Roots SC, has made overtures to play in an adjacent lot or even on the ballpark grounds after the A’s lease at the Coliseum expires at the end of 2024.

Separately, though, the A’s purchase is tied up in litigation after the lobbyist group Communities for a Better Environment challenged the county’s decision to sell the property.

The Bay Area’s chapter of the group alleged that the county did not sufficiently follow the Surplus Lands Act, a longstanding California law that requires public agencies to prioritize affordable housing for land.

Meanwhile, the deal cannot close until bonds taken out by the city and county in the 1990s for improvements at the ballpark and arena are fully returned, with the final payments expected in early 2026.

Where the A’s will play after their lease at the Coliseum expires remains a mystery.

Back in June, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority president Steve Hill said the A’s could play in Reno in the interim. Since then, three other options have been presented by Kaval: staying at the Coliseum and extending the lease, playing at the A’s Triple-A home in Las Vegas or sharing Oracle Park with the San Francisco Giants.

ESPN reported in September that MLB owners would want to know the A’s plan for a temporary home before voting to approve their move to Las Vegas at the owners’ meetings in November. But the vote was unanimous in approving the relocation — without the A’s announcing their intentions.

Fisher has said that MLB will ultimately make the decision.

Asked about it at a press conference immediately following the vote, commissioner Rob Manfred said: “We’re exploring a variety of alternatives, including staying at the Coliseum for the remaining years in the interim.”

In order to qualify for their hefty payouts from NBC Sports California — the A’s reportedly received $67 million from the regional sports network last year — the A’s must play at least half their home games in Northern California.

Both MLB and the MLB Players’ Association will have to sign off on any plans before they can be finalized.

Through her waning days in office last year, Schaaf campaigned with unending optimism for the team to build a new ballpark and remain in the city they’d called home for five decades. But that dream has mostly evaporated after Major League Baseball owners this week approved the A’s relocation plans to Las Vegas.

The outcome of the vote was widely expected, but Schaaf and other fans, business owners and officials around Oakland see it as emblematic of what wealthy baseball owners really think of their communities — they don’t.

“They’re going to act in their own self-interest to support one of their own,” an unsurprised Schaaf said of the owners’ vote. “Everyone knows, including [MLB Commissioner] Rob Manfred, that Las Vegas would’ve been a very good expansion city for the MLB,” she added. “But to rip the hearts out of Oakland’s suffering sports fans was beyond demonic.”

It is a tone that belies the beaming optimism that Schaaf once displayed — even in her final news conference — toward a possible new waterfront A’s ballpark and housing village at the Oakland port.

Indeed, in the months since the A’s first announced a land deal in Vegas in April, some around town have hardened to the grief of losing Oakland’s last major professional sports franchise.

Fans who packed the stands during certain summer games to urge owner John Fisher to sell the team are already planning an Opening Day boycott. This time the plan is to fill the Coliseum’s parking lot, but not actually enter the stadium.

Coliseum officials have begun planning for a future without the A’s, discussing an expansion of concerts at the ballpark, while the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer franchises are negotiating to begin playing games on an adjacent lot in 2025.

“Nobody from the A’s has reached out to us,” Henry Gardner, the Coliseum board’s executive director, said in an interview. “In the meantime, we’re marketing the facility for anything that will bring us more dollars.”

The MLB vote is not the final straw. The A’s still need to complete the logistics of building on the Las Vegas strip and numerous additional hurdles stand in the way, including a lawsuit by one of Nevada’s largest teachers unions, which is also trying to force a third of $380 million in state funding onto next year’s election ballot.

Chris Daly, a former San Francisco supervisor who now lobbies for the teachers union, said in an interview that the group had “always felt that we were the bigger obstacle for the A’s than the owners’ vote.”

If the union succeeds in getting a third of the state’s guaranteed money for the ballpark on a ballot referendum or kills the entire spending package in court, then Daly and other union officials are confident that Fisher won’t find the financing he needs to complete the ballpark.

The A’s could not be reached for comment.

Schaaf, who served two terms as Oakland’s mayor, said during this week’s interview that she’d hoped Fisher would settle for a short-term stadium deal at the Coliseum while the team and city officials worked out the fine details of the proposed development at Howard Terminal.

But when the pandemic drove up costs, Fisher could no longer stomach the risks of such an ambitious stadium-and-village package, so he opted for an easier — if ultimately less lucrative — venture in Vegas, Schaaf said.

Still, she believes the legal and regulatory hurdles cleared by Oakland to support a Howard Terminal development have left the site ripe for “someone else with better luck and more cojones” to benefit from the investment.

Die-hard A’s fans have followed the stadium saga closely for years; the drama has stretched on for so long that it often has overshadowed the actual baseball.

But for Tony Duncan, who grew up an A’s fan and now owns multiple bars in Oakland — including 2101 Club, a prime spot to watch the team’s games — the sports aspect of it all still resonates strongly.

The mere recall of Mark McGwire’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series, or Ramon Hernandez’s clutch squeeze bunt in 2003, is enough to give Duncan chills.

A more recent memory: when the A’s in 2020 eked out a Wild Card win over the White Sox, and the crowd gathered outside Laurel Lounge, another of Duncan’s bars, “went nuts, just absolutely crazy.”

It was a rare moment of collective joy during the pandemic, but one that was short-lived. Not long afterward, A’s management began trading away most of the team’s promising talent to save costs.

“Oaklanders are very proud people,” he said in an interview. The A’s “wanted all of our dollars, but in the end, when we’re the ones who get hurt, they don’t turn around.”

Around the city, whether it’s those who barely care about the A’s or those who watch every game, the descriptions reserved for the franchise ring similarly.

“They’re an old-boys club,” Councilmember Dan Kalb said in an interview. “They care about sucking us dry the best they can.”

But for Oakland natives like Alexis Gray Lawson, who appreciate the unquantifiable value that sports can bring a community, the loss would be incalculable.

“Growing up here, being able to see professional athletes made you want to aspire to something greater,” said Lawson, who played multiple seasons in the WNBA and now teaches youth sports at Oakland Tech High.

“These kids see Marcus (Semien) or Marshawn (Lynch), they want to play for their town and represent it,” she added. “That’s what sports provides.”

The A’s, who have played at the Oakland Coliseum since arriving from Kansas City in 1968, are seeking to relocate their franchise to Las Vegas, where they plan to build a stadium on The Strip after failing to strike a deal to build a new stadium in the East Bay.

Oakland officials have been adamant that they did their part to raise money for a stadium, and they are preaching positivity to a fanbase poised to lose its second team (third counting the Warriors’ move to San Francisco) in five years.

The league’s owners are set to put the A’s relocation plan to a vote sometime during the meetings, which begin Tuesday and end Thursday.

Here are five things to know about the situation:

1. The owners are likely to vote yes

A’s owner John Fisher needs 75% approval (23 total ‘yes’ votes) from his fellow team governors for the relocation bid to pass.

Fisher has likely frustrated some of his fellow owners with the negative publicity generated by the proposed move, as well as the A’s cynical management of their payroll and moves to receive payments via MLB’s revenue sharing model.

Still, most MLB owners would be very careful not to establish precedent of voting against a team governor making changes as he pleases.

2. There are plenty more steps to come

The vote is a major hurdle, but it’s hardly the last one before relocation is official.

Fisher and the A’s franchise does have $380 million in funding in place from the state of Nevada, but that may be in some jeopardy as a Nevada teachers union is working to gather signatures to put some of those funds on the 2024 ballot.

Beyond that, the team must sort out how to privately finance the remaining estimated $1.2 billion in construction cost, finalize renderings and put into place agreements to build and operate the stadium.

3. The A’s will play at least next season in Oakland

The team’s lease at the Coliseum runs through 2024, so there will be at least one lame-duck season in Oakland if relocation is approved.

Dave Kaval has floated three locations for the team to play home games between 2025 and 2028, when the proposed Vegas stadium is expected to open: Oracle Park, the Giants’ stadium in San Francisco; Las Vegas Ballpark, the home of the A’s Triple-A team in Summerlin, Nevada; and the Coliseum itself.

Oakland mayor Sheng Thao has said that before agreeing to an extension of the team’s lease, she wants to discuss with Major League Baseball the possibility of an expansion team coming to Oakland, as well as the Athletics team name and colors remaining here to pair with a potential new team, though the odds of expansion to Oakland soon seem quite slim.

4. Moving to Vegas would downgrade the A’s ballpark capacity and market size

The A’s are looking to build a 33,000-seat ballpark on the Vegas strip with a retractable roof for especially hot summer days, plus a casino development on 9 acres of adjacent land that the franchise would lease from the current landowners.

City officials are quick to point out that this is a much smaller haul than what the team had sought at Oakland’s harbor: a 35,000-seat waterfront ballpark with a surrounding village of 3,000 new homes, plus massive commercial developments and office space.

If the A’s were to scale down their dream development at the Oakland port to something closer to the Vegas proposal, then the team could still end up owning far more land than it would in Vegas, with major regulatory hurdles in the Bay Area already cleared.

Another note: The Coliseum is the MLB’s largest ballpark, whereas the Vegas stadium would be the league’s smallest.

And by ditching Oakland, the A’s would give up a share of the country’s 10th largest media market to occupy the 40th-ranked city on the list, according to Nielsen data.

5. The A’s need a binding stadium deal by January or risk losing important revenue

The A’s posted the league’s worst win-loss record this season on the way to finishing dead last in attendance, though a couple “reverse boycott” games over the summer led fans to pack the stands.

The MLB’s revenue-sharing model guarantees the struggling franchise a critical stream of millions of dollars annually. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, meanwhile, has waived the team’s relocation fee.

But the shared revenue available in 2024 and 2025 comes with a condition: The A’s must have a binding agreement for a new stadium by Jan. 15.

If Fisher’s fellow owners surprise observers by siding against him, it’s possible he would scramble to secure a ballpark deal within the next couple months — and Mayor Sheng Thao said last week the door in Oakland would be wide open.

“This is not over, not by a long shot,” Thao told A’s fans last week at a public rally. “We are urging the MLB owners: It’s very simple — vote no.”

“This is more than just a game,” Thao, at a City Hall event, said of the A’s, who will need 75% approval from the owners next week to secure the right to relocate. “These are intergenerational memories, tradition, culture.”

It’s unclear if the public showing by Thao and the City Council — which later on Tuesday approved a resolution affirming that the “A’s belong in Oakland” — will move the needle among MLB owners. While some retired A’s players and many fans have called for the team to stay, none of the MLB owners have indicated that they will get in A’s owner John Fisher’s way.

The A’s are focused on clearing legal hurdles in Nevada to build a 33,000-seat ballpark on the Las Vegas strip, plus a casino development on nine additional acres of adjacent land leased from owners of the Tropicana Hotel there.

Thao was quick to point out Tuesday that the Vegas ballpark — which would be the MLB’s smallest — is a far less ambitious proposal than the new digs the A’s had originally sought in Oakland.

The city raised over $400 million in grants and other outside money to support the waterfront stadium, thousands of homes and millions of square feet in commercial and retail space at Howard Terminal, in the city’s harbor.

Thao and other officials made clear that if the A’s are willing to scale down their development dreams closer to the realities of their Vegas proposal, they’re ready to reopen talks for a Howard Terminal ballpark, if not a new stadium at the Oakland Coliseum.

In the six months since the A’s first announced a land deal in Las Vegas, prompting Thao to end negotiations over a Howard Terminal ballpark, the mayor’s office has traded barbs with the MLB over whether Oakland had done enough to support the A’s.

“I want to address some of these shenanigans around how ‘No one’s helping the A’s get to a stadium’ – I think that’s utter bulls—t,” said Thao.

She noted that the city had outlasted a legal challenge by shipping companies and cleared a decisive hurdle with a Bay Area coastal regulatory body.

A’s fans filled the council chamber for Tuesday’s event, chanting “Stay in Oakland” and “Sell the team.”

Thao entertained the latter phrase, noting that the city would be willing to work with another sports franchise owner across the Bay — alluding to Warriors owner Joe Lacob — who has offered to buy the team.

She also reiterated that a lease extension for the franchise at the Coliseum — the Vegas ballpark’s construction is currently expected to last at least until 2028 — would be contingent on Oakland being guaranteed a future expansion team and retention of the A’s branding.

An A’s worker in attendance, who declined to give his name because he is still employed by the team at the Coliseum, said he hasn’t been told anything by the franchise about his job’s future. The A’s lease at the Coliseum ends after 2024.

Keith Brown of the Alameda Labor Council, meanwhile, said the A’s promise to create thousands of new jobs at the Vegas ballpark was facetious — given that those weren’t new jobs, but jobs taken from Oakland.

“If (A’s owner) John Fisher turns his back on our jobs, on the hard-working folks of the Oakland Coliseum, on our Black and Brown workers, that’s his misguided choice,” Brown said. “But MLB should not follow.”

The union is seeking to force a referendum on nearly a third of the state’s $380 million spending package for the A’s stadium onto next November’s election ballot, but Nev. Judge James Russell ruled that the group’s petition is confusingly written and incomplete.

Monday’s hearing could be the first of more battles to come over the A’s desired move to Las Vegas. A particularly impactful milestone, the MLB owners’ vote on the team’s proposed relocation, is expected to take place next week.

While union officials said Monday’s decision is only a temporary setback to the larger anti-ballpark movement — dubbed “schools over stadiums” — they may soon find themselves in a race against time to gather enough petition signatures to compel a 2024 ballot referendum.

“Their goal is to fight us on this in court every step of the way,” Alex Marks, a spokesperson for the teachers union, said of the referendum opponents who brought the legal challenge.

Those opponents, lobbyists Thomas Morley and Danny Thompson, have strong ties to the A’s, with clients that include construction unions known to strongly support building the proposed 33,000-seat ballpark on the Vegas strip.

Morley also represents the Las Vegas Review-Journal, one of Nevada’s largest newspapers. He declined to comment ahead of Monday’s hearing.

Judge Russell sided with the lobbyists’ argument that the teachers union improperly omitted large portions of Senate Bill 1 — the $380 million public spending package for a Vegas ballpark — from its petition for a referendum, calling for heavy revisions.

But the judge did not shoot down the union’s efforts to selectively target just $120 million of the overall bill, money that could be withdrawn at any time because it comes from Clark County-issued bonds.

Union officials believe that’s all it would take to stop the A’s stadium development in its tracks.

“This whole (development) is a house of cards built on conflicts of interest,” Marks said. “There are so many unknowns: We don’t have actual renderings, we don’t have MLB approval yet, we don’t have John Fisher’s private financing plan. That’s a lot of stuff you need to know to build a stadium.”

The teachers union will need more than 25,000 signatures from each of Nevada’s four congressional districts, and don’t see that as a particularly challenging feat. The signatures must be turned in to each district by next summer.

There were 14 petitions for ballot referendums in Nevada last year, but only one made it to voters, largely because the others didn’t receive enough verifiable signatures.

The A’s have invested heavily in winning support from Nevada’s legislators, registering 18 lobbyists with the state, including team President Dave Kaval, according to records.

The approach worked: Gov. Joe Lombardo signed SB 1 in June after the legislature approved a version of it that guarantees numerous benefits to Clark County residents.

If the union is successful in putting the spending bill into the hands of voters, then the A’s will have a much larger group of people to convince that building a new home for the A’s is worth the investment.

“California is known for voting down these initiatives, whereas other states tend to be more likely to approve them,” said Nola Agha, a University of San Francisco sports economist who has written academic criticisms of the A’s previous ballpark proposal at the Oakland port.

Back in Oakland, city officials on Tuesday will likely pass a resolution — following a news conference by Mayor Sheng Thao — urging the owners to agree that the A’s remain, given the city raised $400 million in grants and other outside money to support the planned stadium at Howard Terminal.

With much of the A’s faithful following the legal battles unfolding in Nevada, one superfan in Oakland is adamant he would not want existing taxpayer money spent on the A’s at the expense of local education.

“We believe billionaires should fund their own stadiums, especially when it affects the school system over there in Nevada,” said Jorge Leon, a member of the Oakland 68s fan club. “These teams should be a community staple.”

On one side is a Nevada teachers union challenging the state’s plan to provide $120 million in public money to build a $1.5 billion ballpark on the Las Vegas strip. The group is seeking a November 2024 referendum on state Senate Bill 1, the ballpark spending deal signed in June by Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo.

“Nevada voters should decide whether their tax dollars are used to subsidize a billionaire’s stadium,” said Alexander Marks, a spokesperson for the Nevada State Education Association. “We’re confident Nevada citizens are going to choose schools over stadiums next November.”

The teachers union is opposed by a coalition of lobbyists and construction union leaders assembled by A’s ownership. They accuse the teachers union of submitting an “inaccurate, misleading and argumentative” petition that improperly targets only portions of the Nevada legislation, instead of all of it.

The case is scheduled to be heard Monday at 1:30 p.m. at the First Judicial District Court in Carson City.

The courtroom drama is playing out a week before MLB owners are expected to vote on the A’s move to Las Vegas. A’s owner John Fisher needs relocation approval from 75% of the MLB owners. They are expected to approve the deal and waive the relocation fee.

The complaint against the teachers union was filed by Danny Thompson and Thomas Morley, who have strong, if indirect, ties to the A’s organization. Morley was for 27 years the president of Laborers Local 872, a union that has come out in strong support of the A’s ballpark development, and which he now represents as a lobbyist. He previously helped organize the Oakland Raiders’ move to Las Vegas, according to a webpage for his consulting firm.

State records show that Morley is registered as a lobbyist for other Nevada construction unions, as well as for the Las Vegas-Review Journal, one of the area’s largest news publications.

Reached Friday, Morley declined to comment on this story.

Bradley Schrager, an attorney for the complainants, said the legal challenge is meant to ensure that the teachers union follows Nevada law in their efforts to bring the $380 million package before voters.

Marks, the spokesperson for the teachers, sees the litigation as more of a stall tactic. He doesn’t expect Monday’s hearing to be much of a holdup to the teachers’ agenda.

“There’s not a scenario in which the A’s come out of this going, ‘Ha, we beat the teachers, take that!’” Marks said. “That’s probably what they’d like to hear. But we think the court will say, ‘you’re clear, go out and gather signatures.’”

According to the office of the Nevada Secretary of State, a petition to create a ballot referendum must contain at least 10% of the ballots cast in the last general election. That means the teachers would need 102,586 signatures, and 25% of them would need to come from each of the state’s four congressional districts.

If the signatures are collected by June 26, 2024, and verified by each district, the issue could make it to the ballot next November.

“The teams and team owners will always prefer that this doesn’t go to the voters,” said Nola Agha, a University of San Francisco sports economist who wrote critically about the A’s previous development plan at Oakland’s Howard Terminal.

There were 14 petitions submitted in Nevada last year, but only one succeeded in getting its targeted legislation placed on the ballot. Many of them died because they didn’t have enough verifiable signatures.

“It’s doable,” Marks said of the teachers union’s chances. “We’re not concerned about it.”

The teachers union points out that an estimated $120 million of the stadium funding package will be handed over via county-issued bonds. And according to sections 29 and 30 of the spending bill, the Nevada Legislature can later repeal its approval of that money.

That’s what the teachers are hoping to get on the ballot next November. And if the voters decide they don’t want to give $120 million in county-issued bonds to the A’s, it could kill the entire deal.

“(Fisher) would have to figure out where that other money is coming from,” Marks said. “I don’t think he has that ability to get that money because he said specifically they need $380 million.”

During the World Series, which concluded this week, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was asked about the teacher’s union’s efforts to get a referendum on the ballot.

“If there was an adverse development with respect to that referendum, that would be a significant development,” Manfred told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s all I can say about that.”

Back in Oakland, city leaders are focused on trying to convince the MLB’s owners not to side with Fisher’s relocation efforts.

Mayor Sheng Thao plans to host a news conference flanked by A’s supporters to convince the team to stay. A resolution on the City Council’s table next week would affirm “that the Oakland A’s belong in Oakland.”

The legal complaint filed this month ensnares one of the six partner organizations in the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group. Two of the eight members within the flagship entity are alleging their equity shares in the project were unfairly diluted.

None of the parties involved in the complaint — filed in the Alameda County court — agreed to be interviewed on the record, but documents and video evidence obtained from the group paint a starkly different picture than the one presented in the complaint, calling its central claims into question.

The group ultimately plans to acquire Oakland’s share of the Coliseum property for $115 million, and earlier this year it unsuccessfully tried to buy the site’s other half-ownership share, which belongs to the likely departing A’s.

Last month, it whiffed on one of its most prominent goals: securing a long-anticipated WNBA expansion franchise. The league instead opted to partner with the Warriors and establish a women’s basketball team in San Francisco.

But the whole legal ordeal could strain AASEG’s commitment to a locally driven, community-based project, one that remains rooted among Oakland residents and keeps outside corporate interests at the door.

It could also pose another hurdle to AASEG as it gears up to meet key deliverables in an agreement with the city to convert the A’s ballpark, Oakland arena and intervening parking space into new restaurants, nightlife, retail shops, hotels and housing.

“We will fully participate in the legal process and will show the complaint to be without merit,” cofounder Ray Bobbitt said in a statement responding to the complaint. “In the meantime, the AASEG is hyperfocused on the tremendous task, responsibility and commitment we have to our community to redevelop and revitalize East Oakland and the Coliseum Site.”

The dispute is contained within AASEG’s flagship group, which is comprised of eight Oakland natives who collectively did not have much prior real-estate experience before they became involved in one of the East Bay’s largest commercial redevelopments.

The other partners include billion-dollar Black-owned investment firm Loop Capital, prominent sports agent Bill Duffy and a business-consulting group run by former Oakland city manager Robert Bobb.

The origins of AASEG trace back to Bobbitt, a local businessman, and Levant Ogbulie, an education administrator, who began looking into how major professional sports could return to Oakland following the departures of the Warriors and Raiders.

Among the other founding members they recruited were fellow grieving Raiders fans Brien Dixon and Karim Muhammad — the two men who are now threatening to sue Bobbitt, Ogbulie and the larger consortium for damages.

Dixon and Muhammad allege their shares in AASEG were wrongfully diluted when Bobbitt brought four new members into the fold without their approval.

The eight members, including Bobbitt and Ogbulie, equally own 12.5% of the flagship entity, which itself may hold as little as 5% of the overall development once outside pre-capital investments arrive ahead of construction.

Still, the complainants accuse Bobbitt of unfairly designating himself the project’s lead decision-maker and “deceptively” creating separate LLCs in Delaware that could be interchanged with the official AASEG branding — part of a larger effort to consolidate power.

“Not only is this a patent violation of Bobbitt’s obligations to AASEG and the other three members, it usurps a business opportunity from AASEG and could also be considered as an act of fraud committed against the City of Oakland,” the complaint states.

Documents reviewed by this news organization rebut this point: An email sent to Dixon and Muhammad in late 2021, for instance, specifically outlines how those various LLCs would interact and streamline future investments, contradicting the notion that Bobbitt established the other companies secretly.

The complaint alleges that Muhammad only learned during a late 2021 company retreat that four new members — Samantha Wise, John Jones III, Jonathan Jones and LaNiece Jones — had been promised equity in AASEG by Bobbitt and that he eventually muscled them into the group by overruling the complainants.

All of the four members are Oakland residents, and perhaps the most prominent is Jones III, a violence prevention advocate in the community.

Video of a December 2021 team meeting — which took place two months after their addition — paints a different picture. In it, Dixon and Muhammad offer high praise for Bobbitt’s work on the project, reflecting positively on a more recent company retreat.

The eight members took votes together with no apparent objections, and Bobbitt is listed on the meeting’s agenda as AASEG’s “managing member,” a title that the complaint alleges he assigned himself months later in an operating agreement.

Whatever the outcome of the legal complaint, it marks a divide within the flagship group, which has spent several years building relationships with Oakland’s leaders, helping AASEG to secure the Coliseum redevelopment among tough competition from other bidders.

AASEG is also in negotiations with the Roots and Soul, upstart men’s and women’s soccer franchises that want to build a temporary stadium by 2025 in one of the Coliseum’s parking lots. Those discussions alone created tension within AASEG’s flagship entity as not everyone was on board.

It is yet another sign that in its quest to complete one of the largest-scale commercial redevelopments in recent East Bay history, AASEG — originally a group of fellow grieving Raiders fans who decided to start a business together — must also reckon with its small-town origins.

That could spell trouble for Oakland, where officials are expecting the sale to yield millions of dollars by next year. The revenue would help patch up what city leaders call the largest budget deficit in Oakland’s history.

After an auction in the summer saw zero bidders step forward, officials in Alameda County and the city of Oakland — the agencies that jointly own the property — won’t disclose much about their plans, saying only that they are “discussing next steps.”

The compound sits on 16 acres divided into two parcels on Alameda’s Bay Farm Island, a stone’s throw from the coast and a few miles from the Oakland Airport.

It includes a slick athletics training facility, some offices that once served as the Raiders headquarters, multiple turf soccer fields and vast concrete parking space — all set against the scenic backdrop of the flatland that leads to the ocean harbor.

After the Raiders ditched Oakland for Las Vegas, upstart soccer franchise Oakland Roots SC moved into the compound in 2021, paying rent to use the facility as a practice grounds and headquarters, but the planned sale may jeopardize their stay.

The team’s lease ends this year, but Roots representatives said the franchise is in talks with the city to be granted an extension. Buying the site isn’t a priority for the Roots, not when the minimum bid at the county’s auction in the summer was just under $36 million.

Oakland expects to take in nearly half of that — over $17 million — and put it toward a $360 million deficit that earlier this year led the city to squeeze some of its departments and leave job positions unfilled.

“It seems like they were desperate to generate as much revenue as they could,” said Dan Lindheim, the former Oakland city administrator who is now a professor at UC Berkeley, said of the city’s inclusion of the Raiders facility sale in its budget. “You’d expect there would now be some designation that they’re no longer assuming that revenue.”

Why hasn’t the property been sold? It has been popular among sports franchises, including European soccer clubs that have used it to train during the winter months, during the Roots’ offseason.

Oakland is rapidly losing its professional sports teams, but the property isn’t dedicated to athletics; after Candlestick Park changed hands, the San Francisco ballpark was razed because its new owners cared more about the land underneath it.

Alameda currently designates the Raiders training facility land for “commercial manufacturing,” or light industrial uses — an intuitive fit in an area populated mostly by warehouses, factory labs and a few airport hotels.

The problem, though, is that potential bidders in the Bay Area aren’t concerned with sports or industrial properties as much as they are with housing.

“It would be a very difficult proposition to get your money back if you bought it and leased it out,” said Spencer Hsu, a Bay Area real-estate expert. “The fact is, if they can’t sell as commercial, they should really explore the opportunity to do so as residential.”

A’s President Dave Kaval rejected a purchase offer Thursday in a letter to the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, which a day earlier had proposed acquiring the team’s half-ownership share of the 155-acre Coliseum complex.

The local, Black-led group is in negotiations to buy the other half of the site from the city of Oakland, with plans to transform the baseball stadium, nearby arena and vast concrete parking space into a new hotspot for retail and nightlife — a $5 billion venture.

But the group has found itself in an unusual relationship with the A’s, whose billionaire owner John Fisher appears to believe the Coliseum real estate is worth holding onto as a failsafe for his dreams of a Las Vegas ballpark, or perhaps as a future revenue stream.

“While we appreciate AASEG’s efforts to acquire and redevelop the Coliseum site, we are not interested in selling or otherwise disposing of our interest in the Coliseum at this time,” Kaval wrote in a letter to the group’s co-founder, Ray Bobbitt. “Thank you for your understanding.”

How would an impasse between the two sides be resolved? The legal pathway isn’t immediately clear, but it’s no secret at City Hall — according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions — that there’s a legal option on the table.

That option would be to seize the Coliseum site from the A’s through eminent domain, a process in California law that allows government agencies to wrest away properties from private ownership, even without permission.

Under the law, the city must first prove that its attempts to negotiate a purchase of the property were unsuccessful and that acquiring the site would be in the public’s interest.

Is that a realistic path? Oakland’s power players aren’t shying away from the discussion.

“Eminent domain is a very specific legal proceeding and has very specific terms under which you can activate it for good reason,” said Leigh Hanson, chief of staff to Mayor Sheng Thao, in a recent interview.

Claiming land for ventures that serve the public, such as building a stadium, is a common practice across the state.

In 2018, a restaurant and some privately owned tennis courts in Santa Clara had their leases forcibly broken when the city sought to build a retail and entertainment complex across from Levi’s Stadium. The redevelopment entered its first phase last year.

Inglewood’s efforts to build out public transit to the SoFi Stadium and a forthcoming arena have also involved uprooting dozens of businesses near those venues.

A key difference, though, is that obtaining land for the public’s benefit does not often entail transferring it to new private ownership — in this case, the local sports group, which plans to eventually buy the city’s half for $115 million.

“If Oakland wants to do this, they can probably figure out a way to do it,” said Roger Noll, a Stanford sports economist who has followed the A’s situation closely. “It may be that they would end up having to own it themselves, and they’d change the lessee from being the team to this other group.”

Bobbitt and other AASEG cofounders declined interview requests, citing the city’s insistence that they do not speak to the media during negotiations.

Hanson said the group’s leaders have not broached the topic with Mayor Thao’s office, while Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, whose district includes the Coliseum, directed questions about eminent domain to the city attorney’s office, which did not provide a comment.

“My biggest thing is that I don’t want the site to remain vacant and blighted,” Jenkins said. “I’m very much in favor of getting to the developments so we can create positive new memories for East Oaklanders.”