NYCFC: Saviors of New York Sports Teams?

If you’re deranged enough to emotionally invest in local sports, you may have noticed something recently. Something that hasn’t happened in New York City in ten years. 

A champion was celebrated. For realsies. At City Hall and everything.

New York City Football Club, popularly referred to as NYCFC (or, as I want to start calling them, the acronym “Nick-Fick”) defeated the Portland Timbers in the MLS Cup final to bring the trophy home to a title-famished Big Apple. 

And yes, angry grandpa, we know this is soccer we’re talking about. The sport for Frenchies, limeys, commies, and pansies. The game square at the bottom of the American sports landscape. Right?

Wrong! Soccer is now as American as vegan apple pie, pops. You can thank FIFA video games for that. I’ve been watching the Premier League for my entire adult life. Football – the real football where you use your feet – matters in this country. Stateside, the beautiful game is more than generations deep into appreciationdom. And it is, I’m sorry to say, better than hockey – and hockey’s awesome. So right there soccer should be a clean third on the American sports totem pole.

And our city’s representative club in this realm is NYCFC. Those are our boys. The Cityzens. The Pigeons. 2021 Champions of the World!! (editor’s note: just America) 

Granted, granted… NYCFC is problematic, as an entity. They’re basically a wing of the all-powerful, giganto-corporate, really-good-ball-kicking-machine known as Manchester City, complete with the same team colors and bottomless financial backing from an Abu Dhabi oil conglomeration. Oh, and the minority investors are just a ragtag little business group known as the New York Yankees. So, not exactly a grassroots organization here.

Which is an issue because the root of the rest of the planet’s football fandom (I’m just referring to soccer as football from here on out, so leave if you need) is community. It’s utterly tribal. Football teams, to this day, are called “clubs.” That says something. No matter how mighty and oligarchical they’ve become, they are, eternally, clubs. Tied to a particular people and locale forever. 

They’re not “franchises.” Like here in America, where we apparently equate our teams to Church’s Chicken, or H&M. Teams in this country move, for chrissakes. They move homes. All the time, like it’s nothing. Imagine Manchester United leaving Manchester. Impossible. Barcelona not in Barcelona? You wouldn’t pass a breathalyzer with that statement.  

But it happens here, no matter how the public feels. Just ask Raider Nation. Or better yet, don’t.

And when it does, bizarrely, they’ll even  keep the original nicknames. Against all reasoning. Nicknames that were only nicknames because of the birth-towns. Do you think of lakes when Los Angeles comes to mind? Too bad. Their basketball team is the Lakers. Even though they ditched Minnesota (“The Land of a Thousand Lakes”) half-a-century ago. And let’s talk about Utah. That iconic haven of jazz music… said no one freaking ever! I bet John Coltrane never even heard of Utah. But their basketball team, nonetheless, is the Jazz; as they started in New Orleans, a city perhaps better known for its appreciation of that particular genre of music. 

Of course, these relocations are nearly always driven by mega-rich owners looking to get new stadiums paid for by tax dollars. And they often get their way, in one city or another, by holding municipalities hostage and ignoring fanbase sentiment. And that plants a seed of distrust that will always be there in American sports. Which is why you’ll see people with Tottenham or Liverpool or even Millwall tattoos, but not, say, Sacramento Kings or Jacksonville Jaguars or Columbus Blue Jackets ink. Is their place in your city as permanent as your skin art?

What’s unthinkable in Europe is endemic in the U.S. – and you see it in the level of passion. They just do that part of sports better over there. One point to The Old World. Actually, two points. Because they also have promotion and relegation over there, and the whole idea of that is just awesome. Imagine a team was so bad they got fired from the NFL. The Detroit Lions, like, collecting unemployment. Talk about stakes!

With all that said, what can we do. We can only root for whoever’s put in front of us. And, as time passes, what was once a novel new team becomes an entrenched institution, no matter the origins. What were the Mets in 1962 to this city? And what do they mean now?

So, forgive us NYCFC fans for embracing this club like it’s our little mom and pop dinette. There’s always going to be annoying Americanisms in anything American. But this team lives in our backyard (without a stadium of their own, mind you), they represent our giant village, and they play and sweat and twist ankles and pick up women for us! Okay, the last one is more for them, but the first three!

Here’s to many more titles for New York City Football Club. Heck, let’s even get a dynasty going. I sure as hell won’t complain.