NEW YORK – A late August trip to one of New York’s roughly 1,700 parks is a quintessential summertime experience in the city, as ideal a setting as any for Manhattan’s first top-flight soccer match in several years.
Any survivor of New York soccer discourse is acutely familiar with the consternation about stadium locations, potential spectators currently resigned to venturing out to New Jersey or the soccer pitch jammed inside a baseball park at Yankee Stadium to watch the sport. Icahn Stadium on Randall’s Island, where NJ/NY Gotham FC began their Concacaf W Champions Cup title defense with a group stage match against Monterrey on Wednesday, hits a lot of sweet spots for Gotham’s first official game inside the city’s limits. The island is fairly accessible from four of New York’s five boroughs (Staten Island, forever the odd one out), connected to both Manhattan and Queens by three different bridges for pedestrians and bike riders with occasional NYC Ferry service. A picturesque New York excursion felt like a guarantee.
“I know there are people who are like, ‘Finally! There’s a game in New York,’ so it’s been nice to achieve that,” Gotham general manager Yael Averbuch West said.
A block from the footbridge that starts at 125th Street and 2nd Avenue in Harlem, though, Hurricane Erin’s winds meant an umbrella was unlikely to survive the roughly 30-minute walk to Icahn Stadium. A pleasant summer outing was not happening, but a tussle with an umbrella marked the perfect start of a unique evening that highlighted the little-known surprises that walk the line between charming and inconvenient that embody the New York soccer experience.
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Is convenience relative?
Randall’s Island may be nestled in between the Harlem and East Rivers and, in theory, within reach for many New York City residents, but it truly straddles the line of accessibility. The footbridges are scenic but the bus is faster and right next to an exit for the 4, 5 and 6 subway trains. Therein lies the problem – in a city that is known for its railways and all their flaws, Randall’s Island is easiest to get to via the roadways. A fairly robust bus system takes care of that issue, except …
“it’s nice for folks who live in New York to have a somewhat closer venue,” Jen Muller, a longtime member of the official Gotham supporters group Cloud 9, said. “I know it’s not ideal for a lot of them, too, because there’s one bus that comes here but you adapt.”
About two hours before kickoff, the M35 bus was running roughly every 12 minutes, not exactly a signal of convenience but still faster than the 20-minute wait for a PATH train out of Sports Illustrated Stadium after a regularly scheduled Gotham home match. In true New York fashion, spots of bother are balanced out by ease – the M35 stops right behind Icahn Stadium and perhaps more importantly, next to a truck serving tacos and Mister Softee, the ice cream truck that seems to occupy just as many city corners as Starbucks.
Icahn Stadium is the definition of quaint, and on a damp day, it feels like someone transported the nonleague English experience to New York in the hopes of achieving the exact opposite of Wimbledon’s attempt to replicate the environment of their famed hill at Brooklyn Bridge Park every summer. The venue brings its own eclectic mix of the ordinary and the glamorous, true to form for a city that is enjoyably grittier than superficial renderings in film and television generally offer. It may have been dullened by the cloudy conditions but a light blue track rings around Icahn Stadium’s pitch, where Usain Bolt set the then-world record in the 100-meter dash with a time of 9.72 seconds.
“My parents are both track and field athletes and inside on the wall, there’s this list of all the world records that were broken here and my dad is actually here tonight,” Averbuch West said. “He competed at [the] Olympic trials level and stuff, he competed here at times so understanding the historic aspect of this place and being in New York and even the view and everything about it, I think it’s really iconic and really special for us to be here.”
Randall’s Island is not short on soccer history, either – Icahn Stadium was built on the grounds of Downing Stadium, the venue that hosted Pele’s debut for the New York Cosmos in 1975, a nationally televised event on CBS. It was perhaps a fitting destination for the first-ever Concacaf W Champions Cup winners as they began play in the competition’s second season, though Icahn Stadium’s history can be disruptive.
“It is what it is,” Muller said. “It’s obviously not ideal for convenience. You’re further away form the field, too, with the track here but that’s what happens when you don’t have your own stadium, right?”
Gotham go stadium-hopping
Averbuch West did not say that there were scheduling conflicts at Sports Illustrated Stadium, the New Jersey-based home of MLS’ New York Red Bulls that Gotham rent out for their NWSL matches, but that the Concacaf fixtures posed a unique opportunity to hit the road. Last season’s Champions Cup matches were not particularly well-attended so 5,000-seater Icahn Stadium would do, chiefly because it allows Gotham to live up to its own billing as a club with both New Jersey and New York in the name.
By Pardeep Cattry
“We don’t ever get to be closer to our New York contingent so we felt like it was obviously a really cool venue and opportunity for us to be more convenient for a group of our fans that travel to New Jersey every week to see us play,” Averbuch West said. “We always have the debate – are we more New Jersey or are we more New York and we really are both.”
Muller said Cloud 9 boasts a fairly even divide between fans from New Jersey, where the team has historically been based, and New York and that this is not a particularly new development. Groups of fans from New York were traveling to Rutgers University’s Yurcak Field, the team’s home before 2020 in the central Jersey transit desert town of Piscataway. Gotham have played in a handful of area venues in the years since, including a stint at the MSU Soccer Park during the pandemic-era NWSL Fall Series and some one-off games at Subaru Park, home of MLS’ Philadelphia Union. Muller does not want the New York/New Jersey divide to fool anyone into thinking Subaru Park is convenient – Icahn Stadium has it beat, even if it did feel like a throwback to Yurcak Field in some ways.
Outside of the inexpensive concessions with vegan options, the Randall’s Island venue also has something the region’s other stadiums currently do not have – a pristine pitch. A $3 million donation from New York City FC in 2023 did the trick, the club’s MLS Next Pro team now calling Icahn Stadium home. The pitch seemed to survive Wednesday’s wet and wendy elements just fine, a welcome change of pace for the players with Sports Illustrated Stadium’s grass still wearing the scars of a weeks-old concert.
“I don’t really want to talk too much about it but the Sports Illustrated Stadium has traditionally been the best pitch in the league,” Gotham head coach Juan Carlos Amoros said after the match, “and the last couple of games, it’s definitely been far away from that so this pitch here is outstanding.”
It was a perfect setting for a new type of a chaotic Concacaf night, one in which the players had the freedom to enjoy the unexpected. A free-flowing first half in which Gotham scored twice and Monterrey bagged one gave way for a more organized second half, a contrast to the increasingly heavy downpour that resembled fog when combined with the floodlights. The acoustics were incredible, perhaps thanks to the inelegant corrugated metal roof that did its best to provide cover from the rain, even if the wind had other ideas. The typical sounds of a sporting event were hard to miss, cheers from both sets of fans loud and clear. There were plenty of unique audial experiences that reminded of Icahn Stadium’s quaintness – the players were audible from the last row, as were the sirens of the emergency vehicle that passed by in the opening minutes of the match. So was Mister Softee’s iconic jingle that started and stopped three times pre-match, a more authentic New York anthem than anything Frank Sinatra or Taylor Swift ever produced.
“These Concacaf games are always a little crazy,” goalkeeper Shelby Hogan said after the game. “It’s fun. I just think it brings new challenges, playing teams from other countries. I think it’s a cool opportunity just playing teams from all over so I think it just throws new things at us constantly so I think there are always so many fun new components that we don’t always see in the NWSL.”
Concacaf’s shenanigan-focused reputation precedes itself but rare are the days that the confederation matches New York’s entertaining disarray. Much like no one has ever made the argument that Concacaf leads its counterparts for the greatest quality of soccer matches, none of the 858 fans in attendance would make the case that Icahn Stadium should regularly house a professional team. All of this is entirely beside the point – the world’s most popular and diverse sport is not all glitz and glamor, nor has it ever been. One turns on a Concacaf-organized match because they are a soccer romantic (or a soccer sicko, though there’s an argument to be made that they are one and the same). New York is the same, a city often sanitized for the masses but at its best is a combination of lived-in, hole-in-the-wall establishments, tucked inside neighborhoods that are small but mighty.
Surprising as it might be, Wednesday’s match may have just delivered the most authentically New York soccer experience, obstacles and all.
