Exclusive | Brooklyn FC taking baby steps in entry to New Yorks soccer scene before home opener

Professional soccer is kicking off in Brooklyn. In name and in spirit, if not in geographic reality — yet. Brooklyn Football Club has launched this fall, an ambitious start-up betting that the local soccer landscape — which includes Major League Soccer’s New York City FC and New York Red Bulls and the National Women’s Soccer League’s NJ/NY Gotham FC — has room for one more entry at a boom time for the sport. Brooklyn FC’s women’s team, which began play earlier this month, is an original franchise in the USL Super League, an eight-team league in the top flight of the U.S.women’s soccer pyramid that in practice is a notch below NWSL. Brooklyn FC’s men’s team is set to begin play in March 2025 as an expansion team in the second-rung USL Championship. It’s the rapid turnaround of a vision that hit the proverbial back of the napkin in early 2022, guided by an ethos of “if not now, never,” in the words of president Matt Rizzetta, who is also chairman of Club Underdog, the team’s parent company that also operates several lower-division clubs in Europe. “My dream is for Brooklyn Football Club to one day not just compete but beat an MLS team on the men’s side and an NWSL team on the women’s side,” Rizzetta told The Post.

“But you know, we’re going to be doing this in baby steps.We realize that we’re the new kid on the block and the new game in town and we have to be incredibly respectful.

And we just want to help the New York soccer landscape, and we want to put a great product on the field.” Bootstrapping a new sports franchise is an undertaking far vaster than filling out a roster, from negotiating the eight-figure league ante to securing the proper facilities to building a brand identity. “There’s imperfections of a short timeline, but the benefits just outweigh the risks in terms of: the time for women’s sports is now,” said Mack Mansfield, the founder of Two Bridges FC, which merged into being Brooklyn FC�...