Brooklyn Football Club will bring top-tier professional women’s soccer to New York City in August as the club is proven to be one of eight that will play in the inaugural 2024-2025 USL Super League season.
The USLSL, as clumsy as the acronyms we’re trying to do, also announced that it won the U. S. Soccer Federation Division 1 sanction. The first 8 clubs will launch the new women’s league later this summer.
The Division 1 sanction puts the USL Super League at the same point on the women’s soccer pyramid as the NWSL, the most established U. S. women’s league that has existed since 2012.
Brooklyn’s addition of a women’s team to the USL Super League was first reported in my previous Hudson River Blue article about the club’s move to Maimonides Park in Coney Island. The timeline is short for the launch of the Brooklyn women’s team, given their now-confirmed arrival for the inauguration. 2024-2025 USLSL season.
The principal owner of Brooklyn Football Club, Matt Rizzetta, said of adding the women’s team, “The vision was always to create an all-in-one platform with men’s and women’s franchises and youth academies under the Brooklyn banner. When we originally bought the men’s franchise, we had optioned the women’s franchise, too—but at the time, the league was subject to sanctioning, so we ran a bunch of scenarios to make sure we were prepared for each one. There were a lot of moving parts and variables, but with the sanctioning in place, we can now roll out our plan.”
That plan will only have a few months to be revealed, as the USLSL will begin in August and make plans to adhere to a “fall to summer” schedule that largely mirrors the schedules of teams playing in European leagues. NWSL, which begins in March and ends its seasons in November, a schedule that followed throughout the men’s Division 1 league, MLS.
A lot has changed between the plans for the inaugural USL Super League season since it was first announced in May 2023. While Division 1 penalties and the fall-summer schedule are in place, the original equipment bracket has been reduced from 10 to 12. Only 8 when the league starts play in August.
The USL Super League market roster for the inaugural season and the coming years has also changed since that announcement in May. Phoenix, Arizona and Tucson, Arizona were on the list of clubs that made it to the USLSL in their first season, but none of the teams will make their league debut in August.
Tucson rarely appears on the USL Super League’s online page as one of the markets for further expansion in later seasons, even though Phoenix remains. These long-term expansion markets planned for the USLSL now include Chattanooga, Tennessee, Indianapolis, Indiana. , Madison, Wisconsin, Oakland, California, Palm Beach, Florida, and Jacksonville, Florida, so there’s a chance the league will quickly grow from 8 to more than 14 groups.
How will it work for the United States to have two first-division women’s leagues competing for fans, attention, and talented players? The NWSL has a huge head start on USLSL, as it somewhat pettily pointed out in the league’s official statement on USLSL receiving its Division One sanctioning: NWSL has set recent new record highs for attendance, viewership, franchise expansion fees, among other things, firmly established as an ascendent professional women’s league.
The USL Super League comes into play as an unproven startup of a league looking to fend off the NWSL while competing with it for attention in other local markets spread across the United States.
Here in the New York City area, the NWSL-USLSL festival will be hyper-local, with reigning NWSL champions NJ/NY Gotham FC just adding 4 superstars from the U. S. Women’s National Team to the NWSL-USLSL festival. In the U. S. , he was in NWSL free agency. Gotham has only been betting on the Red Bull Arena. in Harrison, New Jersey for a few seasons, and his attendance has struggled in 2023 despite the team’s success, averaging 6293 enthusiasts across the 11 games played in Harrison, compared to an average attendance of 4415 in 2022.
Maimonides Park is not on par with the soccer-specific stadium over in industrial Jersey, though the Coney Island baseball stadium’s Atlantic Ocean backdrop is nice, as is the stadium’s accessibility via multiple forms of New York City public transportation. Will New York City’s women’s soccer fans, who are numerous, be numerous enough to consistently support two professional women’s clubs separated by only a few miles?
Brooklyn Football Club has ambitious plans to build from the ground up, whether male or female, embracing the mindset of underdogs and start-ups, as one would expect from a club owned by an investment organization that runs a soccer club múltiple. club organization nicknamed “Club Underdog. “
Their plans concentrate on Maimonides Park as the venue, but they still need to check the main points about the rest of their football infrastructure, such as educational facilities or official club members on the women’s side.
We know that it has been proven that Brooklyn FC’s women’s team will begin play in Coney Island later this summer, much is still unknown about the new team and how it will compare to their new NWSL geographic rivals, Gotham. While time will bring more facts about Brooklyn FC. The women’s team, USL Super League news, and Brooklyn’s involvement mean we’re approaching a potential peak for top-tier women’s soccer in the tri-state area.
I hope it works for them. I plan to watch one or two games of their season.
I have to see what it means for NYCFC’s plans to box with a women’s team in the future.
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