From Penning the Franchise Bid for Jersey Sky Blue to 42,175 Strong: Gotham FC's Full-Circle Moment

By Jim Gooley, Director, Women’s Football Industry, Ltd (WFI)

In 2013, the average crowd at a Sky Blue FC game was 1,656 people. I know that number by heart, because I was one of the people in the front office fighting to grow it — from writing the pitch for Jersey Sky Blue, the women's soccer franchise that helped give birth to Sky Blue FC to announcing the home games, selling tickets, presenting to potential sponsors, and demanding we sell hats with no budget for hats, and once, quietly, putting numerous mattresses on my own credit card so that players arriving in New Jersey could sleep that night. Nobody asked me to do that. It just needed doing, and we were a small enough operation that if you saw a gap, you filled it yourself.

This week, I stood on the concourse at Citi Field — a stadium the NY Mets built as their dream world for baseball — and watched it fill with 42,175 people for a women's soccer game. It is now the largest crowd for any women's sporting event in New York City history, and the second-largest in NWSL history. I have been trying to find the words for how this feels, and the truth is, the words keep arriving as small moments rather than one big one.

In the parking lot, a large black SUV pulled up next to mine. Security stepped out first, followed by Carolyn Tisch Blodget , Gotham FC's principal owner, dressed for what was very much her Ball. We had exchanged one note a few days earlier — she'd asked how I felt about the move to Queens, and I told her it was like watching your kid move on to bigger and better things: a sadness, but a hopeful joy for what's next. Few words were exchanged, as we both understood the significance of the night. A smile and a congratulatory handshake followed before she was whisked away.

This moment best reflected the gravitas of the event. Walking the concourse before kickoff when I fell into conversation with a woman, forty-two years old (age offered), there with her daughter. She mentioned that she used to go to Sky Blue games years ago, back at Rutgers University. I asked if she remembered the old public address welcome.

Before she could answer, I delivered it with ease: "Gooooood evening, soccer fans, and welcome to Yurcak Field, the home of Sky Blue FC." She stood stunned, recalling it was that same voice, and tears filled her eyes. Her daughter, just looked at her and said, "Mom!" That's it. That's the whole story of these thirteen years, right there on a stranger's face.

Walking to my seat, I passed the merchandise tents — multiple tents, tied together, attracting a line of fans a hundred feet long for hats and hoodies and pins. I was happy for Matt, the merchant who we worked with at Sky Blue. Matt was quite busy this night. Back then, fans who came to games would buy anything they could. But there was little to offer. Now the fight is finding enough sales tables.

Under my arm was the eighteen-foot championship banner pinched by a friend from last year's title game - it simply read 2025 NWSL Champions. I draped it over the rail behind our bench. Before the whistle, a twenty-foot-wide QR code displayed on the video board. The announcer asked the crowd to point their phones toward it. Seemingly half of the 42,000 people did, and the stadium turned into a field of stars, synced and blinking together, like nothing I've seen outside a rock band's stadium tour. That moment we became one voice, one spirit. This included 70% first-timers at a Gotham FC match.

Then the game itself told me everything I needed to know about how far this had come — it was a football-savvy crowd. They groaned when the other side's star forward got the ball. They roared when we built something out of nothing in midfield. That kind of crowd isn't manufactured. It's earned, one season at a time, by people who kept showing up, including when the average attendance was sixteen hundred and something.

And then Sam Kerr stepped to the fourth official to check in. The cheer that went up before most of the stadium could even see her number. Kerr's acknowledgement was one of the purest sounds I've ever heard from forty thousand people — the kind of roar that ripples outward as the people who know tell the people who don't. That's Sam Kerr! That's Sam Kerr! I still get choked up thinking about it.

So what does this really mean to me? I keep coming back to the Brooklyn Bridge. People toiled and even died building it, and many never walked across the thing they made. But it's there, still connecting two cities that used to be separate, still carrying people who have no idea what it cost to build it. I have calluses on my hands from those early years. My voice, even now, is still a little rough from the announcing, the selling, the supporting, the cheering. But watching that bridge finished — watching a sold-out house sing in unison at Citi Field for a team that used to play in front of far fewer dedicated supporters — is its own kind of arrival. It felt, honestly, like I could die now and be at peace with it. That's not sadness. That's completion.

A gentleman from the UN said something at a consulate event a while back that I haven't been able to shake: the product of sport is peace. Not the score, not the trophy — peace. It's the trust between strangers standing shoulder to shoulder in an upper deck, it's the neighbor you wave to, the driveway you shovel without being asked. As sports fans we lost that for a while during COVID, and this game — this whole, improbable, hard-fought fourteen-year climb from a pile of mattresses on a credit card to a sellout at Citi Field — is how we got some of it back. I'll still buy my two season tickets. Because sharing this with someone is what makes you a fan in the first place.

But for the first time in a long while, I'm not chasing anything. I'm just grateful I got to help build the bridge, and even more grateful I got to watch this many people walk across it.

Peace.

Women’s Football Industry Ltd (WFI) partners with stakeholders who recognizethat the future of the women’s game depends on decisions made today. We welcome engagement from federations, leagues, investors, and leaders prepared to shape a governance model worthy of women’s football’s potential