New York’s first big-money soccer team was the original Cosmos of Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer. They had their heyday in the late 1970s and early ’80s, playing before capacity crowds of 77,000 at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, with Mick Jagger and Henry Kissinger watching from V.I.P. suites. But the team and the league collapsed in 1985, starting a long, fallow period for professional soccer in the area.

Image John Russo, a.k.a. Johnny Toro, during a Red Bulls game in 2007. Credit... Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Slowly and steadily, however, the sport has come back, spurred by easy access to telecasts of overseas leagues, the spread of computer games, explosive interest in the World Cup and a recent proliferation of playing fields and adult recreational leagues. According to Nielsen, soccer’s audience is young, like the N.B.A.’s, not old, like Major League Baseball’s.

“It’s really amazing to see where the sport was, and where it is today,” said Claudio Reyna, who watched the Cosmos as a little boy before growing up to play for the United States national team, Manchester City and the Red Bulls. Today, he is N.Y.C.F.C.’s director of football. “There was a time when the sport didn’t really exist in the New York area. Now there’s inspiration right here in our backyard, and wave after wave of growth in the coming years.” Even the Cosmos have come back; the team now plays in the second division of soccer in the United States in a stadium at Hofstra University on Long Island.

Given all that, what is occurring with N.Y.C.F.C.’s formation represents a stunning confluence of soccer’s growing popularity, the power of the Internet and the desire among many of the city’s millennials to create a fan culture like those they have seen in Europe, Latin America and, increasingly, the United States.

Chance Michaels, the Third Rail president and, at 43, one of its oldest members, sees the N.Y.C.F.C.-Red Bulls divide on a much grander scale than a mere duel between corporations. For him, it is the embodiment of a cultural struggle between city and suburbs, not just as reflected in the trajectory of American soccer, but in American society itself.

“In the beginning, the MetroStars, and later the Red Bulls, really seemed to have staked out the suburbs, particularly the Jersey suburbs, as their real market,” he said. “That was part of the era we were in — you know, the soccer moms, that big political demographic in the ’90s and early 2000s. They thought that the suburbs were the future of the sport.” But since 2002 the M.L.S. has doubled in size and has found a new vibrancy in urban stadiums, like those in Seattle and Portland, where singing, chanting fans display an enthusiasm as unbridled as any in American sport. To Mr. Michaels, however, the Red Bulls are part of the old, suburban paradigm.