The biggest home game in Gotham FC history began as a projected road date.
Sports Illustrated Stadium, the NWSL champions’ typical home stadium in Harrison, N.J., is booked for men’s World Cup festivities through Sunday’s final at neighboring MetLife Stadium.
It’s a landmark week in American soccer history — for soccer in the New York area, specifically — and the default assumption was the region’s premier women’s team would have to spend it on the road.
Then, the counterattack.
“We kind of sat around and said … we have to be part of this,” Gotham owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett recalled. “We have to lean into this moment. When soccer is leading the cultural conversation, we want to be a part of it.”
It was from those initial internal conversations last year that The Queens Classic was born.
On Wednesday night, Gotham will host a match at Citi Field, the first-ever regular-season NWSL match in New York City.
With more than 40,000 tickets sold as of Monday, they are set to shatter the franchise’s single-game attendance record (15,569 in the 2024 playoffs) and the mark for the highest-attended women’s sporting event in NYC (28,144 for Coco Gauff’s U.S. Open women’s singles final in 2023).
A sellout of the ballpark’s capacity of roughly 42,000 is in range.
Gotham, building off the example of previous NWSL games in baseball stadiums in Chicago and San Francisco, quickly landed on Citi Field — which is across the road from the team’s future home field at Etihad Park — as the ideal alternative venue.
“We sat down with them really early on and said we want to break the New York women’s sports attendance record, and we need your help,” Tisch Blodgett told The Post. “The entire Mets organization believed in this from day one, and worked really hard with us to make it happen.”
Gotham worked across its departments to market The Queens Classic as a special event.
Laura Petro, Gotham’s VP of brand and fan experiences, ticked off paid media campaigns, social media outreach, working with influencers and a ticket deal partnership with the mayor among the levers they’ve pulled to garner a record-setting attendance.
“Having a really strong narrative … I think that that has driven so much of this,” Petro told The Post. “The messaging that is really resonating [is] around making history and being a part of something.”
Petro said Gotham has sold tickets to “a lot of net-new buyers and first-time fans,” which she attributed in part to the novelty and accessible location off the subway in Queens.
The match being Sam Kerr’s likely debut and against Gotham’s biggest rivals, the Washington Spirit, the team they beat in last year’s final to avenge a heartbreaking semifinals loss from 2024, only adds to the hype.
Expect a few Spirit fans in the crowd to make up the numbers.
Leading up to the 8 p.m. match is an afternoon-long “Footy Fest” hosted by USWNT alum Sam Mewis including a watch party for the England-Argentina semifinal, a live recording of the “Welcome to the Party” podcast with Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach and live DJ sets.
“Our team has done a tremendous job and spent months focused on creating this really special event,” Tisch Blodgett said. “But at some point this will just be the standard that when Gotham comes to town, we sell out — and that’s what we’re striving for.”
