Professional soccer is kicking off in Brooklyn.
In name and in spirit, if not in geographic reality — yet.
Brooklyn Football Club has launched this fall, an ambitious start-up betting that the local soccer landscape — which includes Major League Soccer’s New York City FC and New York Red Bulls and the National Women’s Soccer League’s NJ/NY Gotham FC — has room for one more entry at a boom time for the sport.
Brooklyn FC’s women’s team, which began play earlier this month, is an original franchise in the USL Super League, an eight-team league in the top flight of the U.S. women’s soccer pyramid that in practice is a notch below NWSL.
Brooklyn FC’s men’s team is set to begin play in March 2025 as an expansion team in the second-rung USL Championship.
It’s the rapid turnaround of a vision that hit the proverbial back of the napkin in early 2022, guided by an ethos of “if not now, never,” in the words of president Matt Rizzetta, who is also chairman of Club Underdog, the team’s parent company that also operates several lower-division clubs in Europe.
“My dream is for Brooklyn Football Club to one day not just compete but beat an MLS team on the men’s side and an NWSL team on the women’s side,” Rizzetta told The Post. “But you know, we’re going to be doing this in baby steps. We realize that we’re the new kid on the block and the new game in town and we have to be incredibly respectful. And we just want to help the New York soccer landscape, and we want to put a great product on the field.”
Bootstrapping a new sports franchise is an undertaking far vaster than filling out a roster, from negotiating the eight-figure league ante to securing the proper facilities to building a brand identity.
“There’s imperfections of a short timeline, but the benefits just outweigh the risks in terms of: the time for women’s sports is now,” said Mack Mansfield, the founder of Two Bridges FC, which merged into being Brooklyn FC’s grassroots youth academy. “Let’s be part of the change and not a couple years down the line when the road is smoothly paved. Let’s be a part of paving it.”
About those imperfections.
Brooklyn FC has a deal to play its home games at Coney Island’s Maimonides Park, also known as the home of the Mets affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones.
The club paid to have a U.S. Soccer-certified turf surface laid down on the baseball playing field, but the turf was damaged beyond repair during installation. That led to the postponement of the women’s team’s scheduled Aug. 31 opener (“deficiencies that have rendered the field surface unplayable,” the team’s statement said) and ultimately the abandonment of Maimonides Park as their venue until the spring, following a winter break.
Brooklyn FC’s women’s team will play their home games this fall, beginning with Wednesday night’s rescheduled 7:30 p.m. home opener, at Columbia University’s Rocco B. Commisso Soccer Stadium (capacity: 3,500) on 218th Street, which is, you know, in Manhattan.
“Although we’re disappointed we’re not getting to debut at our home in Brooklyn … we’re going to make the most of it,” Rizzetta said. “We’re trying to do this thing in the Brooklyn spirit: It’s not going to come easy.”
Another difficulty was in onboarding the team’s first head coach. On Monday, Brooklyn FC announced the hiring of Jessica Silva, a Canadian who made her bones coaching in France, to lead the women’s team after a delay related to visa issues.
The team conducted its preseason without a formal head coach in place and was led in its first two road games by interim coach Kristen Sample.
“Like any club starting up, there’s growing pains. We’re using all the tools at our disposal to navigate that,” defender Sam Rosette told The Post before the season. “The most important thing is the players on the pitch and us finding chemistry, and I think we’re doing a really good job with that.”
Despite the displacement, the team has leaned into its essential Brooklyn-ness. They refer to the team colors as “brownstone” and “limestone” (a la the Brooklyn Bridge); the logo is a capital B that evokes the Dodgers of yore. Brooklyn FC’s backers believe the world’s game has a market in a borough of bountiful cultural diversity.
“For us, it was like, if we’re gonna put money in soccer, it’s got to be Brooklyn,” Mansfield said. “We just felt like there’s a massive gaping hole of soccer there. There’s an appetite there. So it was always Brooklyn. It’s got such international appeal and international recognition, you go anywhere in the world, people know Brooklyn. … We didn’t really even look or consider elsewhere.”
Brooklyn FC’s owners ponied up approximately $20 million across both clubs for expansion fees and associated costs.
The ownership group added some soccer star power in Timothy Weah, the Juventus and United States men’s national team winger who was born in Brooklyn.
“He genuinely wants to help,” Rizzetta said. “He wants to be involved. This is not a sort of ‘put my name on something and use me for licensing purposes.’ He wants to be hands-on in the community doing clinics. … He’s been an incredible partner.”
The women’s team, whose games all stream on Peacock, is off to a 1-0-1 start. There may be some names familiar to soccer aficionados (Taylor Smith, for instance, appeared for the U.S. women’s national team and most recently with Gotham FC), but the roster mostly comprises players such as Rosette — a Bronx native who had been playing overseas and for years coached youths in the Downtown United Soccer Club program — who are thrilled to have more spots open up in a domestic pro league.
“The thing that I’m most excited about is they’re gonna see the birth of something,” Rosette said. “This is going to be the first time for everyone, and you get to see that happen in real time, which is so exciting.”
