In front of the entrance to Citi Field, the home of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, New York City councilman Francisco Moya addressed the hundreds of fans gathered together.
“How ya feelin’?,” Moya began, stirring up the New York City FC (NYCFC) supporters. Assuming the disposition of an entertainer at a children’s party, he called for more energy. “It’s a little light, no? HOW YA FEELIN’?”
Moya was euphoric. Saturday evening marked the first home game for the Major League Soccer franchise since it received approval for a new 25,000-seat stadium at Willets Point in the borough of Queens, a stone’s throw from Citi Field and walking distance from the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home to the U.S. Open. Architectural firm HOK has been appointed, having previously designed showpiece arenas such as Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Hard Rock Stadium in Miami and CityPark, home to another MLS team, St Louis SC.
For Moya, an Ecuadorean-American born and raised in Queens, it represents the culmination of his personal odyssey. He says he learned to play soccer across the way in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and had worked for the best part of a decade to bring a soccer stadium to the area.
This project represents the first soccer-specific stadium to be constructed in any of the five boroughs of New York City. It is slated to open in 2027 — the year of a Women’s World Cup the U.S. and Mexico are bidding to co-host, and within a year of the men’s World Cup final being hosted across the city at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
“(Councilman Moya) made this happen for New York City, he made this happen for Queens,” said NYCFC chief executive Brad Sims.
NYCFC’s following is young and diverse. Statistics provided by the club say 37 per cent of their season-ticket holders identify as Latino or Hispanic, while around 65 per cent are aged 45 or below. The club’s Hispanic supporters’ group, Los Templados, form a blur of fluorescent orange jerseys and sky-blue baseball caps, bringing atmosphere, pounding drums and leading chants at the pre-match rally. Pop-up stalls sell tacos and beer, there are booths for children to play arcade basketball and PlayStation games.
One supporter, Jose De Jesus, brought his 11-year-old son, after discovering soccer through the docuseries “Welcome To Wrexham.” Some fans wear baseball caps from the NBA’s New York Knicks, while one lady is wearing a Manchester United jersey, with their Argentine forward Alejandro Garnacho’s name on the back.
NYCFC’s planned $800million stadium (NYCFC)
Here in Queens, nicknamed the “World’s Borough”, local meets global. Twenty per cent of NYCFC is owned by baseball’s New York Yankees and the rest by City Football Group (CFG), which has full or partial stakes in 12 more soccer clubs, the most famous of which are reigning Premier League, Champions League, Club World Cup and FA Cup champions Manchester City.
CFG’s majority owner is a company belonging to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a member of a family valued by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to have a net worth in excess of $300billion (£241bn at current rates).
NYCFC’s quest for a permanent home stretches back to the club’s founding 12 years ago.
Previous proposals included a site in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, then a location closer to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and along the Hudson River in Manhattan. In the interim, NYCFC’s home games have largely occurred at Yankee Stadium and occasionally at Citi Field – but soccer in a baseball stadium makes for unusual sight lines.
The club has also played home games in neighbouring Connecticut and in New Jersey at Red Bull Arena, home of local rivals New York Red Bulls. Recently, supporters have “needed a different GPS every week to figure out where they got watch us play”, according to Marty Edelman, vice-chairman of CFG.
New York City mayor Eric Adams called the stadium project “the goal of the decade” before posing for photographs on the field ahead of the team’s 2-0 victory over D.C. United.
Speaking to reporters, Mayor Adams said this has been a “story of a little boy from Ecuador, hoping one day he could dream and make his mom and dad proud, and bring a soccer stadium here”.
“This is America,” the mayor added, “where dreams come true.”
The reality, though, is far more complex.
This is a project financed via a fund owned by one of the UAE’s most senior politicians, and that has raised questions and scrutiny over the tax breaks extended to it — not to mention questions over the real cost to the New York City taxpayer.
It is also a story of diverging fortunes; a boon for a district councilperson with roots in Ecuador, but also anxiety or displacement for local business owners, many of whom are also immigrants from that South American nation.
Saturday was a display of apparent unity as politicians, executives and NYCFC joined hands in celebrations.
Yet take a walk down the street, or venture a little further to the next neighbourhood over, and it becomes clear that some doubters still wish to be heard.
Willets Point has, over time, developed some nicknames. Few have been complimentary.
Locally, it is known as the “iron triangle,” so called due to its abundance of auto body shops and junkyards. Almost a century ago, it was the inspiration behind F Scott Fitzgerald’s “Valley of Ashes” in The Great Gatsby, referring to the industrial air created by the novel’s Brooklyn Ash Removal Company before the firm was forced out in 1930 to make way for the World’s Fair.
In 2024, beside the empty, gravelled plot of land where a stadium will take shape within the next three years, a line of auto body shops remains. These businesses, their premises made of corrugated tin, their paint fading, are run almost entirely by male immigrants, and have substantial Ecuadorean representation.
It is somewhere transactions take place in cash, customers barter between one business and another, and a small community economy takes shape. They are rivals, but they are friends. And they do not all share Moya’s vision of greater times ahead.
Multiple business owners say they have been given a matter of months to relocate, as the owners of their premises, from whom they lease the space, have agreed to sell the land. Many of these businesses have been on rolling annual contracts for almost two decades but say they are not currently being offered compensation or assistance in restarting their businesses elsewhere.
One mechanic, who did not want to be quoted by name, said he has three months to get out before he is evicted. He says there is little point in talking, because “they only want to hear the big fish, and we are tiny fish”.
Edwin, aged 44, manages the American Auto Repairs Shop. He claims the authorities have carried out spot-searches for technicalities or regulatory breaches in order to force businesses out more quickly.
Luigi Ceballos, another Ecuadorean owner of an auto repair business, says: “It is a real blow to us. Here, there are 130 people that depend on this company for work and we are not going to be supported because we do not own the land. The owner of the land will take the money, but we will be the ones kicked down, without work, without a source of money to be able to sustain our family. What are we going to do? We just don’t know.”
Rosa, who has run a small Ecuadorian cafe nearby for 18 years, adds: “People live off their jobs here for their family, for their children. And if you bring a stadium here, it will close us down. Where are we going to go? I don’t have a plan. We don’t know what is going to happen. We expect to be moved out, and only God knows what will come to us.”
(Adam Crafton/The Athletic)
The mayor’s office, councilman Moya and NYCFC would argue that far more opportunity will be created than is taken away.
The projects around Willets Point are led by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, NYCFC and developers The Related Companies (owned by billionaire Stephen Ross, whose holdings also include the NFL’s Miami Dolphins) and Sterling Equities (a real estate firm controlled by former Mets owners the Wilpon Family and Saul Katz).
They say the stadium will yield $6.1billion in revenue, as well as 14,000 unionised construction jobs, 1,550 permanent jobs and 2,500 units of affordable housing. The pledge is of full-blown regeneration; promises of a hotel, a school for 650 children, community centres and retail space, while the club will also be providing $1m to go towards scholarships for local young people at the City University of New York.
Special report: City Football Group
Many will see positives, eliminating the eyesores of industry and creating a hub for major sporting events, while also securing investment into the local community.
Even body-shop manager Edwin, among those facing eviction, says: “It won’t be good for us, but it’s going to be good for a lot of people that actually are looking to live in affordable places and will live in a better neighbourhood than right now. We would just like a little bit of help on our way out.”
City Council member Shekar Krishnan, who represents a neighbouring district and was the only representative to vote against the plans at a City Council meeting earlier this month, is more inclined to question whether investments might be better served by more pressing needs than building a soccer stadium.
“We face a bunch of different crises,” Krishnan says. “Our immigrant workers are the essential workers of the city, from our delivery workers to our taxi drivers. They were the ones who carried the city through the pandemic. Yet housing is deeply unaffordable. We don’t have access to park space.
“My district in Jackson Heights has the least amount of park space in all of New York City. We have a public hospital, Elmhurst Hospital, that opens its doors to everybody. It’s a public hospital. It’s open to everybody, but it’s utterly overwhelmed with less than one bed for every 1,000 patients that come through its doors.
“We were the epicentre of the epicentre of the pandemic. So we are a community of essential workers. And frankly, the investments that we need for our communities are investments that are going to address those issues first and foremost. And those are investments that really benefit all New Yorkers.”
NYCFC fans at Yankee Stadium last month (Stephen Nadler/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
Moya insists the team’s community investment is significant: “This is not just about giving free tickets to a couple of soccer leagues. There’s a real investment here. They’re truly being leaders in this community.”
After the supporters’ rally, Moya is asked by The Athletic about the displacement of these auto-repair businesses. He responds: “There is absolutely no one that’s on the property (relating to the stadium) right now where we’re building this right here.”
His answer seems extremely specific, saying the stadium itself will not cause the relocations. But is it not an impact of the broader regeneration that is facilitating the stadium? “That has nothing to do with this project. That’s something you have to talk to the city about.”
The Economic Development Corporation (EDC) insisted no businesses on city-owned land are currently being displaced. The EDC added that earlier phases of the regeneration saw outreach to local businesses between 2012 and 2015 and it says $16million was invested in small-business assistance. Those earlier initiatives, however, are of little benefit to the voices heard in this piece, whose premises are a matter of metres away from the stadium plot.
An EDC spokesperson said: “The Willets Point transformation has been decades in the making, spanning multiple mayoral administrations, but ultimately Mayor Adams’ vision for this long-neglected site is what is getting it across the finish line.
“From working with other city agencies and Queens Development Group on the painstaking environmental remediation of the site after years of neglect to the building of essential infrastructure including new streets, sewage, a new water main that will serve all of Queens and raising the floodplain, the Willets Point project is a model of public-private partnerships truly changing the landscape of a city.”
As momentum grew towards approval for the stadium, Mayor Adams repeatedly pledged that the deal will bring no cost to the taxpayer. Advocates of the stadium proposal have made much of the fact the stadium itself will be privately financed by CFG, to the tune of $800million.
Saturday’s speeches to media and supporters, however, brought no mention of Abu Dhabi funding and barely any recognition of CFG’s broader club network. Only Moya mentioned the word “Manchester” when he presented the club’s community work in that northern English city as an exemplar of what can follow in Queens.
That may be because New Yorkers would never wish to consider themselves a satellite of a more famous footballing institution in Manchester. It may also be because NYCFC as a franchise is growing in value, calculated by Forbes to be worth $800million, and a more independent branding may be useful to enhancing a valuation that will likely soar beyond $1bn once NYCFC has its own stadium.
Perhaps, too, it is because NYCFC has not become as visibly associated with Abu Dhabi as its sister club in England.
Manchester City play at the Etihad Stadium as they are sponsored by one of the flag-carrying airlines of the UAE. City are also facing more than 100 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial regulations — all vociferously denied — pertaining to the club’s sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi-linked entities. Yet those conversations about “sportswashing”, where it is alleged politicians or states seek to use investment in sport to enhance the image of countries that may be known by some for human rights abuses, have not been present to the same degree with NYCFC.
Mock-ups of the NYCFC stadium call it ’Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium’, and it would surprise few if a UAE-based company swiftly takes over title rights for their new home.
CFG has always been conscious about their ownership since arriving in New York and a series of leaked emails from 2013, between some of the club’s most senior staff, offered a window into the anxieties.
At the time, CFG was eager to secure the Flushing Meadows location for the stadium, and an email sent by Simon Pearce, a board member of CFG and also a special advisor to the chairman of the governmental Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi, insisted that the support of both City Hall and MLS would be required as “proactive partners”, because opponents of the plan may scrutinise the club ownership and cause “real damage to UAE/Abu Dhabi’s reputation”.
A further email between Pearce, CFG vice-chair Edelman and its chief executive Ferran Soriano listed some of the assets and liabilities involved in pushing on with the Flushing Meadows project. One of the risks identified said: “AD/UAE vulnerabilities put in play: gay, wealth, women, Israel.” It also said that, at the time, there was opposition from the Mets and the U.S. Tennis Association, while a live mayoral race made political support unstable.
CFG put the stadium plans on hold, beginning the NYCFC franchise without it having a permanent home while developing strong relationships with City Hall, MLS and local stakeholders, and showing it could be a trusted partner before eventually securing a stadium a decade later. Even Mets owner Steve Cohen appears to have now dropped his opposition: the deal includes an agreement for 4,000 of his baseball team’s parking spaces to be used by NYCFC, while it is agreed that fixtures for the two sports should not clash.
CFG has, over time, worked extremely hard to ingratiate itself into the corridors of power in New York and within the U.S. soccer ecosystem. Ultimately, however, it has required deep pockets. While many stadiums in the U.S. have been known to receive vast public subsidies, this project is an exception, with CFG shouldering the cost.
GO DEEPER
NYCFC stadium passes key city vote
However, the land the stadium will sit on has not actually been sold to CFG or its development partners. Rather, the city has leased the land to developers Related Companies and Sterling Equities, who in turn are sub-leasing the stadium to NYCFC. This means there will be no property taxes to be paid by the MLS franchise.
A preliminary report carried out by New York City’s Independent Budget Office (at the request of The New York Times) in early 2023 claimed in its analysis that property taxes to the tune of $516million, in today’s money, would have entered New York City over the course of the 49-year lease. There will be annual rent, but this will start at $500,000 and only reach $4m per year towards the end of the lease.
Such an arrangement is not unusual for a sports venue in New York City.
Citi Field’s controlling organisation also pays no property taxes, but does pay around $1million per year in rent and additional payments in lieu of taxes (often referred to as PILOT) that apply toward the bonds used to construct the stadium. Yankee Stadium, too, pays no property taxes, and about $1.7m per year in rent plus PILOT money. Indoor arenas Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden enjoy similarly-arranged tax breaks.
The argument by the Independent Budget Office (IBO) and local councilman Krishnan is that a better deal for New Yorkers might have been struck had the land been sold, and therefore subject to property taxes, rather than leased to developers and in turn subleased to NYCFC.
NYCFC’s stadium deal stipulates that no PILOT funds will be paid for the parcel containing the stadium.
Chief executive Sims said the club “obviously disagree strongly with the report” by the IBO, and pointed out that it was preliminary and still to be fully published.
Malek Al-Shammary, the IBO’s press secretary, told The Athletic: “The $516million number reported on in the Times only reflects our estimate at the time of the property taxes that the City might otherwise collect on the property. Given the inflation seen last year, adjusting this to 2024 present-day dollars might yield a slightly different number.”
He added that the IBO plans to publish a “comprehensive report” on the impact of the broader Willets Point development later this year and insisted the stadium tax breaks represent a “small subset” of the associated costs to the city.
Councilman Krishnan told The Athletic: “The stadium is paying zero dollars in property taxes, no payments in lieu of taxes and next to nothing in rent. And this is for a franchise owned by one of the wealthiest men in the world in Sheikh Mansour. All of those things lead me to question, and say this is fundamentally an unfair deal for New Yorkers.
“Queens loves soccer. I wish nothing but success for NYCFC. We deserve a great soccer stadium, but it has to be a fair deal for New York City. And that’s the issue here. What is the public benefit for the immense amount in public cost? The city could have played a much stronger hand here in negotiations, and it did not do so. And that is the heart of the problem.”
He also points to hundreds of millions of dollars invested by the city already to decontaminate the area and facilitate the redevelopment. He adds that an original request for proposals for Willets Point, first drawn up in 2008, set initial targets for 5,500 new units of housing, of which it was stated that “35 per cent needed to be affordable to a mix of incomes”.
Moya counters by saying a significant percentage of the proposed 5,500 would have been at market rate, therefore pricing out local residents. “I don’t understand where anyone would be complaining about the 2,500 units of 100 per cent affordable housing, 220 of those going to go to senior housing, 15 per cent going to formerly homeless people.
“You saw virtually no opposition to this project from anyone. The community board, I believe, was 37 (votes) to two, unanimous in the borough board and it was only one ‘no’ in the council.”
NYCFC’s Sims concludes: “We think this is an incredible deal. If you look at how sports stadiums around the country are financed and how many of them have significant public financing, ours is 100 per cent privately financed. This is land that has been generating zero dollars for decades, and we’ll be paying millions of dollars in rent. And that’s going to start immediately. And that’s money that’s going to go straight into the city’s budget.
“The city of New York is going to have no debt. We’re doing the whole thing.
“It’s a great deal for the city.”
(Top photo: NYCFC)
