New York City Football Club faces off against the New England Revolution during its inaugural game at Yankee Stadium, in March. PHOTOGRAPH BY ELSA/GETTY

The New York City Football Club was a marketing concept before it was a club. Its début season, this year, followed a relentless promotional campaign via e-mail, social media, and youth soccer programs across the city, which culminated in a countdown to the inaugural match as relentless as that of the shopping days before Christmas. Yet it turns out the club has something worth promoting. I went to Yankee Stadium for the first two home matches (the third is tonight), and they were surprisingly enjoyable: an authentic New York experience in ways that at once fulfilled the marketers’ expectations and sloppily defied them.

Two years ago, on the last Saturday in May, I took my three sons to soccer practice at one of the rooftop playing fields at Pier 40 on the West Side, knowing that they were among the few players in their club, Downtown United, who had stuck around the city on Memorial Day weekend. All through practice, there were hints of a surprise afterward, and when the session ended a fresh group of players came up the cockeyed staircase and onto the field: half a dozen members of Manchester City F.C., aglow in powder-blue warmup suits. Man City was in town for a friendly game at Yankee Stadium against Chelsea, another club in the English Premier League; the players were at Pier 40 to lend their celebrity to the rollout of Major League Soccer’s newest franchise, which had been announced earlier in the week by Don Garber, the league commissioner. They passed and dribbled and took shots on Downtown United’s U8s, U9s, and U10s, and handed out T-shirts emblazoned with “New York City Football Club” in Helvetica, the typeface used on subway signs.

N.Y.C.F.C. is owned in part by the Yankees, and in larger part by Manchester City, and the campaign that followed was an exercise in marketing to the third power. A short list of team logos was presented to the public for a vote last spring, and the final choice was unveiled at the Adidas store on Houston Street. It blends motifs from the earliest Yankees logo and old New York City subway tokens; it combines light blue (Man City), dark blue (the Yankees), and orange (the old New York Giants baseball team, the Knicks, and the Mets). In e-mails, sent two or three times per week, we were urged to become founding members—to buy season tickets, that is. The team kit was previewed online and then put on sale just in time for Christmas, along with hoodies, baseball caps, and scarves, the last a soccer tradition. A star player—David Villa, from Atlético Madrid—was signed, and then a second—Frank Lampard, from Chelsea— just in time to boost sales of those founding-member season tickets. It later was disclosed that Lampard would play for the parent club, Man City, and would join the New York club only at the end of Man City’s season, in June. Single-game tickets went on sale in January. I bought five, for a little less than two hundred dollars. They were marked “Obstructed View.” I hoped it wouldn’t matter.

On Sunday, March 15th, we set out for Yankee Stadium and N.Y.C.F.C.’s home opener against the New England Revolution. Nearly forty-four thousand other people did, too. The temperature had dropped into the thirties by kickoff time, at 5 P.M.—those scarves would come in handy.

I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I had gone with my sons to several M.L.S. matches at Red Bull Arena, in New Jersey. We might as well have been in San Jose or Salt Lake City, such was the symbolic distance between the ovoid, silvery stadium, plopped down like Orson Welles’s meteorite in the industrial flatlands near Newark, and the many-angled city in which we live. I expected little better from N.Y.C.F.C.—I expected the Red Bulls in microengineered shades of blue and orange. I expected to be grateful (for convenience’s sake) to have an M.L.S. club in the city, to be grudging about admitting it, and to be resentful of the M.B.A.’d sports marketers for overmanaging one more experience in the proverbially unmanageable city.

Our seats were in the corner behind the right-field foul pole, the big elbow of the stadium like a bend in the river. While the section might have an obstructed view for baseball games, for soccer the pitch is chalked over the infield in such a way that one corner is at the foot of the pole. The corners are where corner kicks are taken, where players push and claw at one another out of sight of the officials. The corners are where the action is, and watching from one feels like watching a street scene from a candy store or tavern where the entrance is cut on the diagonal. It turned out that some of our neighbors from Brooklyn had bought tickets in the row just ahead of us. Our boys and theirs—teammates on Downtown United—went down to the wall edging the field, pens in hand, hoping to get some players to autograph the souvenir schedules given away at the gate, as at home and at ease as at Pier 40. My wife went to the Yankees Store and returned with the last N.Y.C.F.C. knit cap in the joint: basic New York black. Another neighbor arrived, settling in as nonchalantly as if he had just been out walking the dog. The section behind the foul pole felt, all at once, like our section. I imagine that it was how fans felt at New York Giants football games at the old stadium in the fifties, or at the Grambling-Morgan State college football games in the seventies and eighties, or at Yankee games before seats behind the foul pole cost ninety-five dollars each.

The match began. We rose as one every time the ball came into our area. When a Revolution player fouled an N.Y.C.F.C. player and wasn’t booked for it, our shouts of indignation were legitimate. It wasn’t like a called third strike in baseball, about which we could complain all we wanted but really weren’t close enough to know for sure what the call should have been. We did know: we had seen our guy get clipped and their guy get away with it. David Villa scored, earning his keep right away. Late in the match, with N.Y.C.F.C. up 2-0, a cry rose from the crowd. It was a cry I’d first heard at the stadium in 1978, when the Yankees, once fourteen games behind the Red Sox in the American League East, beat the Sox six games out of seven in September and went on to win the division. “Boston sucks ... Boston sucks ...”

The second match at home, two weeks later, was a setup for a letdown. Several N.Y.C.F.C. players were sitting out for reasons that my sons understood and I didn’t. The weather was even colder. The start time was two hours later. The opponent was Sporting Kansas City. Yet this match was, in a way, even more enjoyable. The upper deck was closed off (and normally will be for home matches), so the fans—twenty-seven thousand five hundred and forty-five of us—were packed in the way they used to pack ’em in at Ebbets Field. Our seats were in the corner by the right-field foul pole again.