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New York City FC has a new coach, and a brand-new stadium on the way. Why does the merch still suck?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, nearing a decade of existence, a championship, and a brand-new coach, all marching towards the Etihad Park era, New York City FC would try to find a way for its humble supporters to buy into the tenth-anniversary mystique, to put out a product or two we could wear loud and proud while circulating through the five boroughs.

Alas, the club seems unconcerned with such issues—or they’re locked into the same Fanatics contract as everyone else—and has thus released a huge raft of amateurish nonsense out into the market.

First of all, there’s just way too much shit:

I don’t need to point out that having 2,135 different products across 30 separate categories is, frankly, ridiculous. But it is! Truly, for a second, consider what it means for a ten-year-old club to have released 2,135 distinct products. That’s not even considering items that were previously for sale but have since been removed. It’s an overwhelming, almost comical, amount of merchandise to confront—trying to hunt for a gift on this website feels like a futile act because there’s just too many products to take in, even if they were good.

The second problem is, of course, that they aren’t good. Nowhere is this more clear than in the largest available item category: A Boring Thing They Just Kinda Slapped The Name And/Or Badge On With No Further Consideration. For example, here’s a t-shirt that looks like it took five seconds to design:

And don’t worry, if white’s not your color, here’s five more of that exact same thing, or something equally lazy:

Editor's Note: I did the math, and this is actually six boring pieces of merch.

Everywhere you turn on the utter menace that is the league’s apparently mandatory single-sourced merch portal (thank you Fanatics), there’s some lazy garbage you can spend far too much money on. If it’s not a crewneck with a kind of faux-collegiate branding applied based entirely on vibes, it’s a weird little polo or hoodie or t-shirt or whatever with the badge heartlessly slapped atop the left breast.

While we’re here, let’s also note here that most everything on the site still carries the old crest—the club updated the emblem to a lightly redesigned version with a bolder, sans-serif emblem at the beginning of the year, not that you’d know it based on the available merchandise, or the new Excelsior kit.

If laziness isn’t your thing, though, there’s also plenty of over-busy nonsense—items that clearly had an idea behind them and that should have been stopped in the ideating phase before being let out into the wild:

Again, I cannot overstate how bad the Fanatics deal is for anybody with eyes and/or skin, because if an item is not undone by its amateurish looks, then it’s made of some tepid cotton-polyester blend that you should never ever sweat in, or put in the dryer. And that’s before we get to what I consider the crowning batch of absurdity:

This is one of the ugliest collections of nonsense I’ve seen. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to a woman before, but I promise you that they wouldn’t be caught dead in this wacky-ass polo dress. Or the skort—Christ almighty, the skort. Somehow the club has taken a moderately priced, halfway-presentable item from Antigua—it’s not really nice but it’s got a real “brunch at a decent-ish Hell's Kitchen spot with some college friends after a tennis lesson” sturdiness about it—and, by slapping the badge haphazardly across the hemline, jacked up the price by $35 and made it absolutely unwearable in society.

All of this—the huge swath of amateurish products and the astounding visual cheapness completely divorced from actual cost—speaks to a kind of persistent soullessness, a sense that this club can never really rise above its cog-in-the-CFG-machine status. The best-looking, most successful sporting merch ultimately derives a lot of its success by detaching from its club association and, say, becoming the kind of fashion accessory that a young Hollywood leading man would just kinda wear around:

New York is supposed to be good at this, by the way—taking sports and fashion and fusing them into one indelible object of creativity. We’re so good at selling ourselves to ourselves that New York or Nowhere can have Henrik Lundqvist blue steeling around Rockefeller Center just because, and Spike Lee can roll up to Knicks games in custom merch every week, and Jay-Z can plausibly claim to have made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can. It is, at this point, shockingly difficult to imagine an A-list somebody picking up a NYCFC scarf or hat or whatever and committing to it with the full force of their creative brand because so few products exist that, when paired with the club itself, would inspire that kind of loyalty.

The oddest aspect of all of this is that the club does collaborate with good designers because we’ve seen their handiwork. The Parks kit is a gorgeous third kit that nods to those parts of the city we all lay claim to (Dude Wipes logo and all). The rest of the genuinely delightful (and very sold out) OnlyNY collection is a playful, well-crafted assortment of items. The Excelsior kit, too, has a kind of unshowy class about it, like one of those $300 T-shirts that certain tech titans used to rock. And, if you like understated heat, there’s still a few things for you.

Nor does this problem end at the banks of the Hudson—our New Jersey rivals have an equally hard time making their merch look appealing, but they’ve also had a nineteen-year head start and are grafted onto the side of an energy drink brand with such absurd market penetration that a Formula 1 team is merely a fun little side project, so their hit rate is marginally better. Even Inter Miami, the only club that Don Garber can remember exists, has some stupid-ass Three Messi Moon t-shirts mixed in with their (broadly okay) offerings.

There’s an adage among wrestling fans about the nWo, the Attitude-era bad boy squad composed of Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and some racist twerp, that half of why they got so popular was that they didn’t look like wrestling merch. There’s a pointed cleanliness to those shirts, a kind of simplistic statement of purpose that announces, loudly, “Here We Are.” This city has a lot of attitude, heart, and plenty of understated class. We can be bold and in-your-face, loud and proud, or we can tuck ourselves into the corner of a smoky downtown cocktail bar and get lost in a crowd, but we always look really fucking good while we do it.

You’d think that after ten years, our club would look as good as we do. ❧

Image: Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, Andries Stilte as a Standard Bearer