ON MAY 25th Yankee Stadium, home of the New York Yankees baseball team, is due to be the stage for a football (soccer) match between Chelsea and Manchester City, two English Premier League clubs. Four days before the game, the Yankees and the Manchester club announced they were joining forces to create a new soccer team in the Big Apple. New York City Football Club will make its debut in 2015.

Manchester City have reportedly been in talks with Major League Soccer (MLS), America’s premier league, since last year. MLS has been looking to go from 19 to 20 teams for some time, but expansion is not cheap. The fee is said to be $100m. Manchester City will be the majority owner of the new New York team. The Yankees, one of the most valuable global sporting franchises, are said to be putting up about a quarter of the cost. Coaching staff and players will criss-cross the Atlantic, but the goal is to build a competitive team in New York. A healthy rivalry will be fostered with the New York Red Bulls, who are based across the Hudson in New Jersey.

The MLS has a mixture of home-grown and foreign players, mostly at the end of their careers. David Beckham, an English star, spent five years at LA Galaxy. His arrival in America boosted the sport enormously. More high-schoolers play soccer than baseball. Attendance at MLS matches, which was 5% higher last season than in 2011, is higher than at National Hockey League and National Basketball Association games.

Among Latinos aged between 12 and 24, soccer ranks well ahead of traditional American sports, like baseball. It is partly because of this growing group that launching a new team in New York, a city of immigrants, makes sense.

City, backed by Sheikh Mansour, an Emirati billionaire, will not be the first English club to dip its boot into America. Manchester United, City’s local rivals (who just deposed them as Premier League champions), had a licensing partnership with the Yankees a decade ago, which fizzled out. Stan Kroenke, Arsenal’s majority shareholder, owns the Colorado Rapids. New York City do not have a kit yet. Sky blue—like the Manchester lot—is likely; Yankee pinstripes may go down better stateside. Nor do they have a stadium, but the MLS and Mike Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, want to see it in Flushing Meadows Park, home to the US Tennis Open and the Mets, another baseball team.

In nearby Long Island, the new team will have a famous neighbour and competition for fans in the New York Cosmos. Seamus O’Brien, chief executive of the revitalised Cosmos, thinks there is room for three teams: London has five top-tier teams, he notes. The Cosmos, who will play in a second-tier league, retain a loyal fan base from their heyday in the 1970s, when Pelé was part of a glamorous squad. When the great Brazilian signed his $4.7m contract in 1975, he said: “You can say now to the world that soccer has finally arrived in the United States.” He was four decades early.