In a press conference at Manhattan’s Yale Club on April 1, United Soccer Leagues officials announced plans to give the world’s game a base in Queens. In 2010, the borough will be home to a new soccer club called FC New York; it will compete in the first division of the USL, which contains 13 teams just one rung below Major League Soccer.
“It’s extremely exciting for me. It’s been a long [period] of preparation,” said club president Doug Petersen. “Only 375 days before our first game, but who’s counting?”
Those 375 days culminate in an opening game at Hofstra University, the team’s interim home, in April 2010. Until then, Petersen’s main task is to build support — from the fan base, from a European club “foundation partner,” and from civic leaders in the area. Team officials met recently with Queens president Helen Marshall to discuss the building of a soccer-specific stadium in the borough.
If you’re concerned that the club’s start is outside of borough boundaries, worry not: Queens runs through FC New York’s veins, from its Jamaica-born president to its club crest, which is based on the Queens flag. Most of the team’s player personnel, too, seem likely to have roots in the borough. Petersen plans to hold tryouts in the area in June.
“We really believe that there are people out there, whether they’re working their day job or not, that have the ability to play at this level if given the opportunity,” he said.
Behind the foundation of any new team, especially a soccer team, lingers one big question, of course: whether fan support will be sufficient to make the venture a success.
Three factors appear to increase the likelihood of FC New York’s staying power. First, the (eventual) location is prime real estate in the soccer world, home to an enormous collection of foreign-born or foreign-rooted populations.
“A hundred different languages are spoken in Queens, so it’s really the ideal spot for the world’s game,” said Petersen, who discovered soccer as a result of international travel. “Whether they’re from Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, Europe, Asia, they follow the sport from their own country. We want to give them a team here that they can follow live.”
The club also appears likely to have an affordability advantage over other sports franchises in the area — “economic family entertainment,” Petersen calls it — and perhaps even a creativity advantage. Team ownership has a lot of ideas; one of them, the “Grapple for the Apple,” has seen the player-less, coach-less squad challenge Red Bull New York to an annual trophy match reminiscent of the baseball Mayor’s Cup. The Meadowlands-based MLS club has yet to respond.
Either way, Doug Petersen has a dream and a plan.
“It’s not just about soccer coming here,” he said. “It’s about the jobs that are created along with it, about promoting better physical health and nutrition, and there are a number of arrows in our quiver, I will say, that the team itself will [have] as far as just coming up once a week and playing a match. … We’re bringing the world’s greatest sport to the world’s greatest city.”
