Gotham FC to play Washington Spirit at Citi Field, marking first NWSL game inside New York City

NEW YORK – Gotham FC are set to play the Washington Spirit at Citi Field, home of Major League Baseball's New York Mets, in a summertime matchup that is part of the NWSL's strategy around the men's World Cup.

The match will take place on July 15, four days before the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Gotham's usual home of Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, N.J., home of MLS' New York Red Bulls, will be unavailable that week as a potential training site for the World Cup finalists, posing a challenge -- and an opportunity -- to the NWSL club.

"It was a year in the making, if not more," Gotham owner and club governor Carolyn Tisch Blodget said. "The genesis was the World Cup. When we started talking [and] knew the men's World Cup was going to be in our region, then we knew we were going to have the final, we all kept saying this is a moment where we want to be an iconic global brand. We want to be the first-ever women's sports brand that is known globally. The entire world of soccer is going to be in New York, going to be in this region. What can we do about it? How can we activate? How can we make our presence known? And then the idea came, the idea that we could actually play a game here and we could not just show up at fan fests, which we will do as well, but even show our product to the world of soccer."

The match at Citi Field will be a landmark moment for the NWSL as it attempts to draw eyeballs during the World Cup. The league will return to play during Fourth of July weekend, while the knockouts of the World Cup are still taking place, and will also host the Challenge Cup in late June at Columbus' ScottsMiracle-Gro Field.

"I think our approach is to lean into the momentum and ride the wave as opposed to try to counterprogram so we have two really unique moments now -- the Challenge Cup, which is in Columbus, Ohio on June 26 and that one is quite intentionally in a market that has no World Cup matches," NWSL chief operating officer Sarah Jones Simmer said. "We expect that there's going to be pent up demand for world-class soccer. To be able to bring Gotham vs. Kansas City [Current] there, we think we'll really meet the needs of the market. Then you'll see us actually link that programming in some very strategic ways here the week of the men's World Cup final but again, I think it's about the groundswell of support and excitement and momentum. It's not trying to counterprogram. It's really trying to participate in the momentum in ways we can uniquely bring it to life in the women's game."

This is also the latest in a growing list of NWSL fixtures to take place at baseball stadiums and other regional venues. The move is designed to attract larger attendance figures, with several league-wide attendance records set in matchups like this one. The current NWSL attendance record is held by Oracle Park, home of MLB's San Francisco Giants, for a game between Bay FC and the Spirit last year that welcomed just over 40,000 attendees.

"I think baseball stadiums are often in really iconic, important locations that are accessible to fan bases," Jones Simmer said. "Think about where Oracle is in the Bay area. Think about where Wrigley Field is in Chicago. They have a smaller footprint than a football stadium. In many cases, football stadiums are more on the outskirts of a metro area and for us, the size of a baseball stadium is an an attractive step up from the size of a lot of our stadiums now. We have a lot of confidence and excitement about filling them and showing what 30,000, 40,000 people feels like to our players and to the fans there experiencing it."

Gotham hope to use the game, which will be the first women's sporting event to take place at Citi Field, as a touchpoint to grow women's soccer despite the focus on the men's game this summer.

"We have the opportunity to now have the foresight to think about how we want to leave things after things after this World Cup," Gotham general manager Yael Averbuch West said.  "What's really important is that we have these marquee events and Americans love marquee events -- the World Cup, the Olympics -- but we have that excitement all the time. We have the highest caliber in the game playing week in and week out, some of the best players in the world at what they do, World Cup champions play here at our club and people need to know about that and continue to follow it past this moment."

This will not be the first time Gotham play inside the city limits of New York -- they played at Icahn Stadium on Randall's Island for a Concacaf W Champions Cup match last August -- but it will be the first NWSL match in the city, but not the last. Gotham will return to Icahn Stadium on July 18 for a league match against the Seattle Reign, allowing the team to build on their fooprint. Tisch Blodget said the team currently has just 2% awarness in the region and hopes a game at Citi Field will raise Gotham's profile in the area.

"The idea that we can introduce 40,000 people to Gotham here is a different scale than we have at Icahn but yes, we know that accessibility to the stadium, getting to games is difficult," she said. "We have fans that raise their hands and say they're interested in Gotham and then they can't get there or they can only get there once or whatever reason so being able to have these really accessible moments for our teams, particularly the one-two punch, is really important to us.

"We've always been the New York/New Jersey team -- our players live in Jersey, our staff lives in Jersey, we play in New Jersey. As much as we've always been New York/New Jersey, we've only really delivered on the New Jersey part of it."