Soup with Brad

The Outfield's Chris Campbell sat down with New York City FC CEO Brad Sims to talk about the economics of international games, stadium construction timeline, and Founding Member brick selfies.

Editor’s note: This interview was edited for clarity.

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The Outfield: One thing we see some European leagues considering is hosting league games in the U.S. Other American sports do the same overseas. There's also some language in the pre-development documents around the stadium that seems to allow for this. Is the league looking into hosting league games, not just preseason games, outside the country to help build the brand?

Brad Sims: Not currently, but I could see that happening at some point because to your point, all the other leagues are doing it. I've talked to the MLS about it. Honestly, I have proactively asked the MLS over the last couple of years, ‘Let's do a New York City FC game somewhere else’. You know,  we’re ‘The Wanderers’. We haven't had enough home stadiums. Let's try to have some more. We have a hard enough time finding dates for games. If we can go play a home game, in Mexico City, or we can go play a home game somewhere else, in our current world, I felt we should look at it. 

The way the economics of those games work in other sports, whether the NBA, NHL,NFL, or MLB, is that the league for all intents and purposes buys the home game from a team. So they'll say, if you're the Kansas City Chiefs and you have a home game and they want to take your home game and put it in Germany. If you average a $7 million home gate, the league might say, we'll give you $7 million for a game and we'll just take your game, you don’t have to worry about it. If you're the Jacksonville Jaguars and make $2 million, they’ll say I’ll give you $2 million for your game and we'll put in London and then you don't have any expenses. You get everything taken care of and then the league takes that as an asset and the league monetizes that asset. 

MLS, right now, the response that I had is that's not something they're looking to do at this point in time. And there's just probably not the bandwidth with everything, in the last two years alone, [they] started a whole new league, MLS Next Pro. They started a whole new tournament, League’s Cup. So they're doing huge things in the league and onboarding all these things. And their response to me is ‘Brad, we got enough on our plate right now’. But down the road could that be different? Maybe. 

I think that the advantage for us, or the interest that I would have in it, is in a scenario where we already have trouble finding dates in different places. And so if the league wanted to pay me a guarantee and take a game off our hands and go market it somewhere else. Position it as ‘how about play in Vegas? How about test drive for some of these potential future MLS expansion sites like Phoenix, take a site that you want to go to and put a New York City FC home game there. And maybe our fans would love to ‘hey, a game in Vegas is good’. Just like NFL fans who get to go to London or they get to go to Germany. 

So that was kind of an idea over the last couple of years, hasn't gained any traction. But ten years from now? Do I see MLS games being played overseas? I think probably. I'd be surprised if they weren't. 

As it pertains to the pre-development agreement, I think the language in there was with no preconceived thoughts of something specific happening. It was just a just in case, have ourselves protected in case, the league or some scenario that is unforeseen at the moment comes up, that we’re covered up on that. But nothing premeditated or preconceived. 

We're spending a lot of money on the stadium- a lot. We've wanted, our fans and our players have wanted the new stadium forever- since the beginning of this club. As we get that, we're gonna play every freaking game. We're not going anywhere. We're not moving anywhere. We're not moving games anywhere. We're trying to play as many games as we can possibly play in that place.

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TO: The Environmental Impact Statement presented to city agencies indicated that construction would begin in March with excavations and foundations. However, Glenn mentioned that we’re expecting groundbreaking in September. How is the schedule looking? How confident are we that we can have the first MLS game in early 2027?

BS: Very confident. Early 2027. That’s the plan. Ultimately, this stadium construction should be 30 months from the time we start really getting into the ground. The good news is that everything is going to be ready to go from day one. So 30 months from, rounding up, say October 1 would be April 1, 2027. I think there are ways that we can move the time frame forward. These are all also based on Monday through Friday, 40-hour-a-week work weeks. That’s just one example. There are tons of ways that you can move timelines forward. 

I think generally you see with projects like this, most teams, in every sport, when you’re opening a new building, will start with a road trip. Sometimes an extended road trip. Just to make sure you buy yourself enough time and you’re ready to go. We’ve started on the road every year, for at least the first two weeks of the season, every single year. So I don’t think that will change in 2027. We won’t be hustling to open the new stadium in February, but our plan fully right now, and we’re very confident, that we’ll be able to play a full season at the new stadium in 2027.

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TO: Regarding the stadium design that recently passed conditionally through the Design Commission, you can see where the Founding Members Wall is located. Are there any details you can share about that? Specifically, will fans be getting a brick?

BS: Our plan right now is fans will be getting a brick. We promised a brick. Founding members, I should say, will be getting a brick. 

We’ve been in close consultation with our supporters’ groups throughout this whole process in trying to figure out what makes sense. The most traditional kind of brick is on the ground. Citi Field has bricks on the ground and they take quite a beating and also kind of tough to take a selfie unless you’re lying down on the dirty ground on your back which people like to do. They get weathered. People are stepping on them. It’s not great. In consultation with them [the supporters groups], we said, ‘We can either do it traditional, on the ground, or we can build a wall next to a facade on the stadium somewhere and it was very overwhelming in favor to do a wall instead.

Is the wall going to be a brick wall, or is it going to be something else? Essentially, how are we going to memorialize those names? And so we’re still working through what that looks like. But the idea is we want it to be somewhere, ideally situated somewhat close to the supporters’ entrance because of the connotation of the connectivity with supporters. We want it to be big enough and at a height that is close enough that people can take pictures with them. There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into it, but we haven’t actually finalized the exact application. We’ve looked at a lot of different memorial sites, in terms of, are they indented, or are they etched in, or what does that look like? We’re still working through all that. Ultimately, we’re really excited and the supporters groups have been super helpful in driving what the end result of the location and what it looks and feels like. ❧

Image: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler