New York City FC: Major League Soccer's alternative blueprint for success
NEW YORK – Two hours before New York City FC would play its first ever game at Yankee Stadium, the much-discussed temporary home, there were plenty of team jerseys, scarves and hats to be seen on a train platform 50 miles away. The closer you got to the Stadium, the more light blue filtered into the mob of travelers on a cold and gusty afternoon.
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Finally, having arrived at the iconic baseball venue, the concourse surrounding the stadium entrance gates was so thick with people that there was no pushing through them to get to another gate, leaving only the street as a passable route.
The people had come.
Like all baseball venues, Yankee Stadium is very open. The sound leaches out every which way. It isn't made to keep the noise in, like a soccer arena. It hardly ever gets loud, but for the occasional tense and all-important Yankee playoff game. But on Sunday, it was loud. The nascent NYCFC supporters groups were loud, and the fans of the visiting New England Revolution were loud.
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This was all supposed to be a disaster. When the second New York metropolitan franchise was allocated and its nearly completed stadium deal fell through, parent-club Manchester City and the Yankees, the minority owners, huddled and decided that Yankee Stadium would be their solution. For now. Until they could build a proper soccer stadium, which would take at least three seasons.
Critics cried that this was a huge mistake – that taking up long-term residence in a stadium so obviously unsuited to soccer would prove a huge step back for Major League Soccer and its growth and spell doom for its all-important New York City-based club.
Plainly, this is an awkward arrangement. The soccer inconveniences the baseball and vice versa. It will take several days to convert the field from one sport to the other, making these overlapping regular seasons something of a logistical nightmare. You can't help but feel that the Yankees don't really want their soccer brethren there and that NYCFC doesn't want to be there either. This is mightily inconvenient to both of them. Yet they're stuck with each other. So they've put on a brave face and are making the best of it, for the sake of both their investments.
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But on Sunday, the fans seemed to have a mighty fine night. To state otherwise would be disingenuous. For all the angst, it all came off joyously. No fewer than 43,507 people packed into a place that couldn't seat a great many more. The mood was festive. And the home team won 2-0 in a technically unflattering but otherwise entertaining game.
The sky blue jerseys looked crisp against the green sod, which was in remarkably good shape, considering it had been put just days earlier, and playmaker Mix Diskerud's magnificent manes whipped happily in the wind.
"For me, it was fantastic," NYCFC head coach Jason Kreis said after the game. "The fans were great. It was a nervous moment, I think, for me, to not know what the fans would be like here, to meet them for the very first time. I couldn't be more happy with the support that we had and with the atmosphere in the stadium and with the job the Yankees did to welcome us in."
So how could the narrative and expectation going into this game diverge so wildly from what actually unfolded?
The inconvenient truth here is that we, the media, probably care more about the state of the fields and the appropriateness of the venues than anyone who really matters. Fans voted with their feet. They turned out. And they will keep turning out.
NYCFC currently has the fourth-highest season-ticket holder base in the league at more than 15,000 and doesn't need much to overtake the third-placed Portland Timbers. According to the club, 60 percent of that base is made up of first-time season-ticket holders in any sport. They make up a mix of Millennials and families, those classic Major League Soccer demographics.
Clearly, this club has discovered a chasm in the market for live sports and has tapped into it effectively. So all of our ideology and accepted wisdoms as a soccer community – about what a stadium should be and look like; how a roster should be built; what, exactly, is needed to thrive in this league – fall flat when a club can prosper in spite of disregarding all that.
By the hard-learned lessons of almost two decades of MLS, NYCFC has done a lot wrong. It built around stars, rather than having stars complement a sturdy foundation. It fit its players to its system, rather than the other way around. And, horror of horrors, it's playing in an ill-fitting baseball stadium. But it works. In spite of all that, it works.
"The support was obviously unbelievable," said Grabavoy, a veteran midfielder. "So for us, as a group, I don't think we could be happier with the conditions that we had."
Even with a sample size of one, we must accept the possibility that different roads to success have emerged in the American club game. Sunday's NYCFC opener seemed to demonstrate that if the right stars are brought in, if a non-soccer stadium is set up in the right way, if the right kind if buzz is generated in the right kind of market, people will come, will watch and will care. That's all that really matters.
Maybe that's to the credit of this young league's development. Set to the context of MLS's history, soccer at Yankee Stadium shouldn't work. But it is working – for now anyway. Maybe it's an aberration. But more likely, MLS has consolidated the requisite credibility and cachet where its margin for error just isn't so narrow anymore.
For all the criticism, for all sorrows, this supposed folly has been a roaring success.
NYCFC plays its next home game at the Stadium against Sporting Kansas City on March 28. Unless the sheen has worn off by then and the skeptics are proved to have been right all along, MLS now has an alternative blueprint.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
