The Oakland Roots drew a huge crowd to the Coliseum. Here's why it matters: | OneFootball

A crowd of 26,575 turned out to the Oakland Roots' USL Championship home opener on Saturday night at the Oakland Coliseum, pumping life into an old venue better known for its days as a baseball and football stadium.

In the process, it highlighted a reality that is driving the ongoing soccer wars in this country: That there is clearly a fan appetite for more high-level local soccer.

The Roots' crowd was larger than all but two of the 13 matches played on MLS Matchday 5, and the second-tier club hopes to average around 15,000 a game in their new-to-them home, following the departure of baseball's Athletics to Sacramento.

What the community response to the Roots shows is what some longtime followers of American soccer can miss, based on their own long-held insecurities about the sport: It's no longer a burden to convince cities that soccer is worth rallyng around, like you would for any other local team.

Oakland in particular is a community in need of that rallying point after the cruel exodus of the NFL's Raiders and then MLB's Athletics. And MLS has already shown that soccer can quite powerfully fill a community need for major professional sports in cities where it is not already met.

Columbus, Austin, Portland, Nashville, Charlotte and St. Louis are all examples of communities who have either lost or struggled to attract teams from the other "big four" major leagues, and for whom soccer has been a perfectly acceptable stand-in.

And as the USL eyes launching its Division One project to attempt to rival MLS as a USSF-sanctioned Division I league, the response in Oakland Saturday is just one point of evidence that the sport doesn't need to operate out of a fear of scarcity.

It helps that we're talking about fundamentally different constructs here. While MLS is the top tier of the pro game in the United States, it has not yet evolved to the poiny where the expenses of running an MLS club are the same as an NFL or MLB team, which both universally considered the most elite competitions in their sports on planet Earth.

While some people may wish MLS had attained that level, that it hasn't has actually liberated the sport to grow, because the level of support needed to sustain it is relatively modest. The crowd in Oalkand Saturday night, while notable, is not an unreasonable ask in a city of over 400,000 and a metro area far greater still.

There's a long way to grow to get USL's project off the ground. And while they've succeeded at earning some attention, what they've largely accomplished is the easy stuff. But if executed correctly, there is plenty of capacity in this nation for it. Saturday night in the Coliseum is just one reminder.