It seemed like a fairly straightforward assignment: go and watch New York City FC play Philadelphia Union at Yankee Stadium for a Thursday night midweek game.
But then …
As you’re in the city, could you head out to Red Bull Arena on Friday night for New York Red Bulls v San Jose Earthquakes? And isn’t Raúl making his debut for the New York Cosmos on Saturday? Yeah, go to that as well. And stick around on Sunday – NYCFC are playing at Yankee Stadium again, facing Portland.
It’s become a commonplace to talk about a crowded soccer market in New York, but the glut of live options for the game is a recent phenomenon, with the re-emergence of the Cosmos and now the addition of New York City FC to MLS this season. Thus far, with the two MLS sides in the market generally having their schedules staggered, and the Cosmos’ NASL season only just getting under way – and starting on the road – the different factions of regional soccer have been kept away from each other.
But this weekend was different: four games in three very different venues, and three very different visions for what the future of the city’s soccer scene could look like. So notebook in hand, handful of laminates round my neck, #SoccerWarz hashtag on macro and batteries dwindling dangerously, I headed out to see how it all went down.
Thursday: New York City FC v Philadelphia Union
Having parked as instructed in the cheerfully price-gouging garage across from the stadium (only $30 for a parking spot in the Bronx – how do they do it and make a profit?), I make my way across the street to the press entrance. And yes, I know that for the full experience I should have got the subway from Columbus Circle, serenaded by the City Beats band, but I was driving in from Pennsylvania and anyway I am at best ambivalent about any form of entertainment that involves being held hostage by it on a New York subway car, having once observed an engrossed reader be kicked in the face by a backflipping breakdancer.
Having navigated Yankee Stadium security, with its TSA-style conveyer belts, pat-downs and intolerance for belt buckles, I pick up my credential and make my way to the press seats which, what with this being a baseball stadium and all, are perfectly positioned for views of just where a pop fly ball is landing, and marginally less well-positioned for figuring out what’s going on beyond the center circle, “over there”.
What won’t be going on, we’re informed pre-game, is the sight of Jason Kreis looking pensive in the dugouts. The City coach is in the building but “too ill” to appear on the touchline, we’re informed, which given Kreis’s legendary toughness conjures the image of the knight with his limbs cut off in Monty Python’s and the Holy Grail coming up against the limits of his fighting availability.
The press corps are rather more used to being sickly, of course – the first person I recognize at Yankee Stadium is Michael Lewis, the veteran New York soccer writer whose Forgotten Stories series graces these pages. He looks exhausted after flying in from the US game in San Antonio and arriving at this game on a few hours’ sleep. As the weekend progresses I’ll see him cropping up repeatedly, and we will exchange the weary nods of battle-hardened men sustained only by press buffets and not particularly onerous trips home for showers between games. (Me, that is. Lewis probably covered 27 high school games in the same period.)
The game gets under way, serenaded by some loud jeering from a small but vocal traveling support just down to my left. “No one likes us, we don’t care” sing the Sons of Ben – indifferent to the threat of Millwall’s notoriously litigious copyright lawyers.
Neither set of supporters has a lot to chant about. New York City have been slow starters in all their games so far, and the same happens in this game. The most notable incident of the first half, against a similarly moribund Union side, is when David Villa all but puts a chance on a golf tee for Mehdi Ballouchy, with the most perfectly placed backheel, only for Ballouchy to sky his attempt at sidefooting home. Villa clutches his head and concentrates on his salary.
The second half starts a little better, despite the withdrawal of the injured Villa. Evidently Ballouchy’s miss stuck in his craw, as early in the half he picks up a diagonal ball from the promising Khiry Shelton, cuts to his left and smacks a beautiful finish across Jon McCarthy in the Philadelphia goal to give New York City the lead.
A little more pressure from NYC though and they seem to head home early, as the Union throw on positive substitutions in pursuit of the game. They duly get their reward late on, when CJ Sapong forces the ball home to grab a point.
Afterward I head down into the concrete corridors towards the locker rooms. First to arrive outside the NYC entrance, I pass David Villa, already in his street clothes and looking both ways up and down the corridor for stray journalists, before heading for his car. (It’s the last I’ll see of him, it turns out, as he’s absent entirely for Sunday’s game.) No sign of Kreis, who can’t be feeling much better at the sight of his team giving up another late goal to the same opponents who beat them earlier in the week.
Most of the 20,461 crowd have dispersed by the time I leave the stadium. Not for the first time this weekend, I find myself comparing that number with the evidence of my eyes – a generous interpretation suggests that some season ticket holders, counted among the attendances, appear to be holding out for Sunday night’s game. I pay my car park tax and head for the BQE.
Friday: New York Red Bulls v San Jose Earthquakes
Friday starts with a press conference in midtown Manhattan at the Bayern Munich offices (in yet another sign of the coming soccerpocalypse, Bayern opened a New York office last year), with club ambassador Franz Beckenbauer in attendance. Beckenbauer spins out anecdotes of his time with the Cosmos, then attempts to defuse his “ski boots” remarks about Dante’s performance against Porto by remarking that the whole team looked like they had taken sleeping pills. Diplomatically done, Herr Ambassador. A sausage and white beer breakfast follows, but your correspondent makes his excuses and leaves.
It’s a balmy afternoon, and having made an early run out of the city to avoid spending quality time with the tailpipes in the Holland Tunnel, I get to Red Bull Arena early. Security is less hi-tech than Yankee Stadium (open your bag, have a stick poked around in it a bit, get a piece of paper on your bag) but reassuringly officious – I’m held outside the stadium for the six minutes it takes till the press room is officially open, while catering workers arriving around me are berated for not bringing their personal possessions in clear bags. (“You can leave your purse here, and if it’s still there afterwards pick it up then.”)
Inside the stadium, it’s slow to fill up. Work-night games are notoriously difficult for crowds at Red Bull Arena, and it’s not uncommon to see people drifting in throughout the first half at the stadium. The team has also been under scrutiny for how it holds up in the newly crowded New York soccer market, and has seen off-season upheaval with the departures of Thierry Henry and Tim Cahill. Most critically, they have acquired a new sporting director, Ali Curtis, who swiftly appointed a new coach, Jesse Marsch, to replace the much-loved fan legend Mike Petke. That in turn has focused popular criticism on the team’s owners, Red Bull, and their presumed appetite for dealing with the new era in the city.
Incidentally, in Beckenbauer’s genial earth-scorcher of a press conference earlier on, he had referred to Red Bull owner Dieter Mateschitz, whom he had advised on the purchase of the team, as “a marketing genius” for whom “the brand is number one” – hardly what longstanding fans (who had suspected exactly that fact) wanted to hear. In fairness to Beckenbauer, he managed to maintain an equal opportunity offense by also affecting not to know that New York City FC existed and recalling the absurdity of playing on a baseball field in his time with the Cosmos.
On that note, Red Bull Arena is the only dedicated soccer stadium of the three I will visit, and it’s a beautiful, compact venue. By the time of kick-off there are still plenty of empty seats, but at least the South Ward, the supporters’ group section behind one of the goals, looks to be full and in impressive voice. The fans there chant throughout the game and the acoustics of the stadium allow their voices to carry around the ground – especially to the open-air press seats just behind the team dugouts (which also allow me to carry out my favorite indulgence of watching Technical Box Masterpiece Theater).
Comparing it to the distant chants of NYCFC’s Third Rail supporters’ group floating off into the sky above the Bronx, it’s a reminder that the expansion team needs to find a permanent home sooner than later, as the novelty of their presence wears off and the more awkward contingencies of their temporary home begin to press.
The game itself is a physical one. New York have started the post-Henry era unbeaten, with a collective pressing game that teams are beginning to prepare for by fouling to break up their rhythm. Yet San Jose don’t appear to have any answers in the first half. Sacha Kljestan, the off-season signing who along with last year’s Golden Boot winner Bradley Wright-Phillips is the nearest the current team has to a star, opens the scoring, and Mike Grella adds a second.
After the game Kljestan will tell reporters that Red Bulls are going to play “with a chip on our shoulders” all year, and it’s been an impressive start under new coach Marsch, who will use his own post-game remarks to suggest it’s time we “move on” from the pre-season controversy.
That may be wishful thinking. The team will inevitably face a period of adversity when the current good feeling is tested, and with the memory of the circumstances of Petke’s firing, the fans may be inclined to be unforgiving of any stumbles by the new regime. On Friday night though, the team wins 2-0, the fans remain in good voice, and on the field at least the Red Bulls are punching their weight in the New York #SoccerWarz.
Saturday: New York Cosmos v Tampa Bay Rowdies
Hofstra University’s stadium is the most suburban of the three venues I will visit, set among leafy residential streets and campus buildings in Long Island. Tonight is the home opener for the Cosmos and their newly signed marquee player Raúl.
Perhaps knowing the local stakes have been raised, the Cosmos are going all out to market this game. Pelé is scheduled to make an appearance along with Beckenbauer, though the latter turns out to have flown back early to Germany to deal with an “urgent” team meeting (at the time I speculate on Twitter that he may be proposing to play instead of Dante in the Porto return leg). The two did show up together the previous day to light up the Empire State Building green, and Pelé shuttles into Hofstra on a golf cart for a pre-game ceremony.
The Cosmos play in the North American Soccer League – officially a second-division league, though that designation does not reference promotion or relegation. There is no pyramid as such, more a series of leagues that run in parallel, vertically or horizontally depending on who you talk to. Either way, the present-day Cosmos are a more modest proposition than the historic incarnation that featured Pelé and Beckenbauer in the late 70s, but they and the revived NASL manage to be effective gadflies for the first-division MLS. Whether there is a connection between that and the fact that the Cosmos are up against three local MLS games on the weekend of their home opener, I can’t say. Schedules are mysterious.
The Cosmos are lobbying to build a stadium at Belmont Park, also on Long Island, but for now they’re based at Hofstra. This normally being a college (American) football field, with all of the viewing conventions that come with it, the Cosmos press box is a glazed room high above the field. It makes for a decent though slightly alienating perspective, as the action unfolds below to a muffled soundtrack in which the laconic chatter of the press is too high in the mix.
My seat is close to the stadium announcer’s perch, so I have a further soundtrack of agitated walkie-talkie alerts (“Dave said to do it. Did Dave not say to do it? You’re seriously killing me right now. Use your head …” “… I’m going with Empire State of Mind, Dave.”).
Initially the audio action is more pronounced than the action on the field. The Rowdies are marginally the more lively team early on, with Raúl loping around the field looking for the space where his intelligence can do what his legs no longer can. The Cosmos settle though, and after they earn a first-half penalty converted by Marco Senna, they never really look back. A quick counterattack brings a second goal for Leo Fernandes early in the second half, and despite a late flurry from Tampa the Cosmos win.
It’s a small stadium, and as with the Red Bulls the night before traffic slows the arrivals, with people lining up at the corner gates of the complex throughout the first half. But by the time the second half gets under way it’s visibly full, and the announced crowd of 12,500 (a record for the revived Cosmos, though nothing like their Giants Stadium heyday in the late 1970s) seems a credible one. Among the crowd is the US Soccer president, Sunil Gulati, who stops by the press box, as does Bayern’s New York head, Rudi Vidal, who watches the Long Island scene in polite bemusement.
I head back to my temporary berth in Brooklyn, taking a last look at the next glass booth over where Mike Petke is starting his new job as an analyst for One World, the Cosmos’ TV partners. He’s in his iconic sweater vest, which makes the incongruity of him not being on the sidelines especially pronounced. He sits with headphones on, effectively at the end of the same row as the journalists he might reasonably have been expected to address from the interview room dais at Red Bull Arena the night before. In that moment he is a personification of how the soccer scene in the city is changing rapidly.
Sunday: New York City FC v Portland Timbers
Sunday is cooler but it’s still a sunny day in New York as I round out my mission. My Brooklyn host (I moved to Pennsylvania a few months ago) wakes me with a coffee and an offer to save me a seat at 11th Street Bar to watch Aston Villa v Liverpool – a reminder that whatever’s on offer domestically has to compete with the globalized TV version of the game that’s been making aggressive inroads the past few years.
It also reminds me that the night before there was a mild buzz in the Cosmos press box about a tweet sent earlier in the day by someone at CBS LA asking “What happened to this country?” in the wake of Fox showing the other FA Cup semi-final and NBC simultaneously screening Chelsea v Manchester United.
These kind of straw man pronunciations crop up in US soccer circles from time to time. Yet the time was when the reaction would have had an edge of hysteria to it – as if the haters of the sport might actually shut it down if only they focused their attention on it. In these changing times, that sort of action has largely been replaced by eye-rolling. The debate has moved on from “Will soccer ever make it in the USA?” to “How big will it get and what will it look like?”
Answering the latter part of that question will inevitably see the conversation turn to NYCFC at some point – for better or worse they’re part of a proposal about what a 21st-century soccer organization might look like, masterminded in Manchester though not, the team’s New York front office insists, defined by it.
Will it work? Maybe. But New York is an unforgiving sporting and media market to compete in, and the team’s struggles to find a site for a stadium will continue to offset even such impressive developments as the 16,000 season tickets the team has sold for their debut season, and the interesting demographic wrinkle in that number that has seen two-thirds of those buyers purchasing their first-ever season tickets for any sport.
On Sunday night those supporters present are greeted by a healthy contingent of Portland Timbers fans – some 450 are in attendance, which given the logistics of road travel in a territory as large as the one covered by MLS is a truly impressive number.
It’s possibly even more impressive when you consider that the Timbers have hardly been in inspiring form thus far this season – though the absence of playmaker Diego Valeri may have something to do with that. They duly look pretty uninspired during the first half of Sunday’s game, though New York, while on the attack, are not faring much better at creating clear chances.
They too are missing players – a whole bunch of players. Center-back Jason Hernandez is out, Mix Diskerud has turned an ankle in training the day before, and that sighting of David Villa heading out of the stadium on Thursday evening turns out to be the last part he will play in this New York soccer weekend. When fringe player Tony Taylor departs with what looks like ligament damage before half-time, the stadium screen shows Jason Kreis, lips pursed and seemingly deep in thought as he stalks the technical box.
You need the big screen for sightings such as these, as the technical boxes are situated way on the far side of the field in the outfield area, near the normal habitat of the Yankees’ bleacher creatures. In the soccer configuration of the stadium it must be a slightly uncanny place to experience the game from, with everything at a slight remove and advertising hoardings further blocking off the technical areas.
The pattern of the game is partly an inversion of the pattern of recent NYC games. Portland start the second half stronger and New York finish the game well, creating chance after chance. By then, however, they’re 1-0 down after a Dairon Asprilla shot has taken a couple of wicked deflections past Josh Saunders. And despite five minutes of injury time NYC and their patchwork team can’t force a breakthrough.
Afterwards Kreis insists there’s no pattern to the late goals his team have conceded and states there are positive signs in how the team are playing. Luck will even itself out over the season, he claims.
The locker room is quiet, as losing locker rooms often are, but perhaps not as somber as the same team’s locker room in Philadelphia the week previously, after the team’s injury-time loss. It seems the players are prepared to accept Kreis’s view that progress is being made.
It’s part of a new reality of New York soccer that progress inevitably invites comparisons – his side sit outside the playoff spots in the East, while the Red Bulls are top of the standings. For now the incumbent team is in the ascendancy, on the field at least.
But the season and the new era is in its early days. I head out to the concourse and back to my car, and leave the city to its new rivalry.
