{"id":297840,"date":"2026-07-16T17:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T17:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/297840\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T17:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T17:35:08","slug":"gotham-fc-just-proved-new-york-is-ready-for-womens-soccer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/297840\/","title":{"rendered":"Gotham FC just proved New York is ready for women’s soccer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, more than 40,000 fans packed Citi Field in New York. They were surrounded by reminders of Mets legends, but they weren\u2019t there to watch baseball. They were there\u2014through a flash thunderstorm and air-quality alerts<\/a>\u2014to watch two women\u2019s soccer teams face off on the field. <\/p>\n

Gotham FC, the New York\/New Jersey National Women\u2019s Soccer League team, and the Washington Spirit demonstrated the appetite for women\u2019s sports fandom in New York. The league\u2019s biggest star, Trinity Rodman, played for the Spirit, and incoming superstar Sam Kerr made her latest Gotham debut<\/a> after the team recently pulled off a coup by signing her away from Chelsea. <\/p>\n

The game, dubbed the Queens Classic, broke New York\u2019s all-time women\u2019s sports attendance record, set when 28,000 fans watched Coco Gauff play at the U.S. Open in 2023. While fans have been packing stadiums across the country for the World Cup all summer, now the women\u2019s professional league had its own stadium moment. And Gotham beat the Spirit, 1-0. <\/p>\n

I was watching from Citi Field, alongside Gotham owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, who bought the team<\/a> in 2023. Her family co-owns the New York Giants, and she decided to extend their sports legacy from football to women\u2019s soccer. Tisch Blodgett and I walked the 100-level of Citi Field, where we saw thousands of fans thrilled to be taking part in this historic event. Lines for Gotham merch were running as long as an hour. Screens proclaimed this a record-setting night for women\u2019s sports. The apple next to Citi Field\u2019s scoreboard had been swapped out the Mets logo for Gotham\u2019s. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe took a big financial bet. We took a big life bet,\u201d she told me. <\/p>\n

But as much excitement as we saw for the team last night, Gotham has faced some headwinds in building the kind of fandom that has been growing across the NWSL. Teams in Denver and Kansas City have had sold-out crowds throughout the season. Gotham hasn\u2019t been hitting those attendance benchmarks at its usual stadium. \u201cWe\u2019ve invested as much, if not more, than every other team in the league, and our results weren\u2019t really coming. It was frustrating, looking at all these other markets: Why are they getting sell-out crowds? Why are they continuing to raise their attendance, and we\u2019re kind of not?\u201d Tisch Blodgett was asking.<\/p>\n

New York is an amazing sports market\u2014but it can also be challenging. There\u2019s an endless variety of entertainment competing for potential fans\u2019 time, money, and attention. Gotham\u2019s biggest hurdle was that it played at a stadium in Harrison, New Jersey. The team had many loyal New Jersey fans, but had a harder time convincing others to get on the PATH train. <\/p>\n

Last night, 70% of the 42,175 fans who bought tickets had never been to a Gotham game before. They came in from Long Island, Connecticut, Westchester, and Queens\u2014all new metros for the team. Gotham has made moves to keep these fans; it will move to Etihad Stadium in Queens, right across the street from Citi Field, for its 2028 season. Its challenge will be to keep these fans\u2019 attention between now and then. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor us within the league, this is an amazing reminder of\u2014yes, we can do this in New York,\u201d Tisch Blodgett said last night. <\/p>\n

These exhibition-style games have proved to be a huge hit with fans. The Professional Women\u2019s Hockey League sold out Madison Square Garden<\/a> in April. Women\u2019s sports fans want\u2014and deserve\u2014a world-class game-day experience. Whether they\u2019re building their own arenas<\/a> or capitalizing on some of the world\u2019s most iconic venues, teams are figuring out how to make that happen\u2014so the fans keep showing up. <\/p>\n

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune\u2019s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES<\/p>\n

Five romance writers accounted for 7% of all U.S. fiction sales last year.\u00a0One of them was Emily Henry, whose six books have sold 12 million copies. More on how Henry and other romance writers are driving the publishing industry in this Bloomberg piece<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fora is a new female-founded unicorn.\u00a0The travel agent platform just raised a $60 million Series D<\/a> at a $1 billion valuation, led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures. Henley Vazquez is one of the startup’s cofounders<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nubank has a new Latin America CEO. Livia Chanes had been CEO for Nubank Brazil and is now taking over all of Latin America<\/a>, which accounts for the bulk of the digital bank’s business. Chanes was No. 95<\/a> on this year’s Most Powerful Women list. Meanwhile, Nubank cofounder Cristina Junqueira is leading Nubank’s expansion into the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

ON MY RADAR<\/p>\n

How Mary Kay built an empire out of other women’s dreams\u00a0New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

How Erin Andrews, Charissa Thompson built an NFL podcast that goes beyond football\u00a0The Athletic<\/a><\/p>\n

How French police skirted European privacy laws to hunt a serial rapist\u00a0WSJ<\/a><\/p>\n

PARTING WORDS<\/p>\n

“From the shoot and video to the storytelling and designing, I\u2019m not at the point in my life where I want to just lend my name to something, if it\u2019s going to be a real collaboration.”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Hailey Bieber on the new Hailey Jean she created with Gap<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last night, more than 40,000 fans packed Citi Field in New York. They were surrounded by reminders of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10069,18346,18347,9,24,55,54,18348,56,400,319],"class_list":["post-297840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-career","tag-most-powerful-women","tag-mpw-daily","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-no-copyright","tag-ny","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}