Making a soccer team successful in New York looks tough for the New York Red Bulls and New York City FC. Not only must each club compete with a host of established major league teams in more established sports but also with a local rival for the city’s core of soccer fans. So how have New York’s pair of soccer teams set about this difficult task? The apparent answer, as the March opening of this crucial season approaches: not well. The Red Bulls and New York City FC have found themselves dealing with self-inflicted PR disasters that have put them at odds with their fans — a situation neither can likely afford. For the Red Bulls, it has been the sudden sacking of a popular head coach and former player. For New York City FC, it has been the handling of a superstar’s arrival — or, more precisely, nonarrival — for the team’s debut season. Both scenarios have had something in common: a misunderstanding and subsequent alienation of core fan groups that should be their most natural constituency. “I was blown away that they’d done something so monumentally stupid to the fan base,” said Mark Fishkin, a longtime New York Red Bulls fan and a host of the popular independent team podcast “Seeing Red,” describing his reaction to the news that the team had sacked Head Coach Mike Petke just days before preseason training started. “It’s almost as if they sat around over the holidays and said, ‘What’s the one thing we could do that would totally take all this good will and flush it down the toilet?’ and it was to blow out the team’s folk hero of a coach who’d delivered them their only title in 18 years and led them to within one game of a final … It was baffling …disbelief.” Fishkin has not been the only one shaking his head over the decision to fire Petke, a former player for the team, who in his first year as head coach won the team the only trophy in its history, the 2013 MLS Supporters Shield, and who last year guided the Red Bulls past Sporting Kansas City and rivals DC United in the playoffs, only to fall a goal short of making MLS Cup. The timing of the decision seems especially alarming, since the Red Bulls were already entering a challenging new era with the arrival of New York City FC, a new MLS team owned by the City Football Group (CFG, whose primary holding is the English champion Manchester City). New York City FC has been aggressively marketing its debut season in the five boroughs for the past year, eating into catchment areas that the New Jersey–based Red Bulls have historically targeted. Any schadenfreude NYCFC might have been feeling in watching the Red Bulls’ struggles has recently been tempered however by its own crisis. Frank Lampard, a player who was a cornerstone of the club’s first marketing push, has been the subject of a battle for resources that has illustrated what critics see as a core structural flaw in the City project.

‘It was to blow out the [Red Bulls’] folk hero of a coach, who’d delivered them their only title in 18 years and led them to within one game of a final … It was baffling.’ Mark Fishkin host, “Seeing Red” podcast

Lampard, 36, along with the Spanish international David Villa, is one of two designated players (marquee players whose wages exceed the salary cap) signed for NYCFC’s first season at the height of last summer’s World Cup–driven peak of interest in the game. At the time, the deal was described as a two-year deal starting on Aug. 1, but with the team not yet in play and its first MLS preseason not starting until this month, Lampard needed to keep fit in the interim. At that point the developing ecosystem of clubs that CFG owns looked to be a nominal advantage, as Lampard joined up with Manchester City until Jan. 1 and Villa went on loan to CFG’s Australian A League team, Melbourne City. But when Lampard began to play an influential part in Manchester City’s Premier League campaign, the first rumblings began for his deal to be extended. It seemed that the sporting priorities of the CFG, namely the Manchester team, were on a collision course with the more holistic ideals of the global project outlined by CFG chairman and onetime Barcelona President Ferran Soriano — who envisioned a network of independent international local clubs able to draw on a central set of resources, both financial and technical. Early supporters of the New York team were therefore dismayed, though not surprised, when Lampard agreed to an extension with Manchester City to the end of the English season in May. But as the story unraveled, it was revealed that Lampard had agreed to only a non-binding commitment with NYCFC to join the MLS side in January and that the deal he signed in 2014 was with the CFG. The fallout was swift and left NYCFC scrambling. Sporting Director Claudio Reyna and Head Coach Jason Kreis — widely seen as two very astute signings for the new project and very much their own men — were forced to spin Lampard’s absence as demonstrative of what an asset the team would land when he did make his way to New York. Fans were less sanguine. As Alexander Schaeffer, a member of the first independent supporters group for the new team, the Third Rail, put it, “The playing out of this has been one of the situations we were scared about when the team was announced — that Manchester City would be calling our shots … It not only made NYCFC look foolish. It made the fans look foolish.” He added, “Personally, I was never supportive of the Lampard move. For me, it represents an older model of MLS — older international stars. But there are a lot of fans that watch BPL [Barclays Premier League], and for them, Lampard’s a big deal in legitimizing the club, and I could see them being frustrated.” Certainly some fans who had bought season tickets on the strength of the Lampard deal called bait and switch when his Manchester stay was extended, and the 1,600-strong Third Rail issued a statement condemning the mechanisms of the deal. “We came out very strongly against the secrecy of the deal and the lack of transparency, the misrepresentation,” Third Rail President Chance Michaels said. “We have long said that we want to be the voice of the fans in New York City, and that usually aligns with the interests of the club and with City Football Group’s, but we can’t just rubber-stamp everything that they do.” While the club looked to calm things by arranging for Lampard to sign a contract to start play with the MLS side on July 1 this year and then moving to sign promising young U.S. international Mix Diskerud to re-emphasize the club’s early strong impression on the recruitment side, the first divergence of fan priorities and club priorities arrived earlier in the team’s history than anyone could have expected.

‘We have long said that we want to be the voice of the fans in New York City, and that usually aligns with the interests of the club and with City Football Group’s, but we can’t just rubber-stamp everything that they do.’ Chance Michaels president, Third Rail