Ferran Soriano is a big believer in the future of football in the United States. He’s been wanting to make an investment in a NYC-area MLS team since before he left Barcelona. This is a long game, and they have the patience and bankroll to do it.
Stadium Discussion
- Thread starter Gene
- Start date
This discussion is now eating its own tail.
They don't need transfer fees to keep the club afloat. The Abu Dhabi Royal Family is worth $150 billion. NYCFC is also not strictly a business venture. There are other geopolitical goals in play, and none of those require NYCFC to have a stadium. Some of those goals have actually directly conflicted and delayed the stadium process.
CFG made a strategic decision to not try to push through the Flushing Meadow stadium even though they believed they had the political muscle to do so because they were afraid of bad press for Abu Dhabi/UAE.
Michael Lewis asked the question. The answer while in short is "no changes", goes in many directions.
Without COVID it’s certain that we’d all have print outs of the stadium plans on our NYCFC fan walls and be taking trips to watch them construct the NY soccer Mecca.
let me rephrase it. Are we sure COVID wasn’t as big of a deal to our stadium plans as they want us to believe?
it’s not like we have shovels in the ground. What specifically could not have been over Zoom that delayed our progress?
From what I remember the community committees responsible for a lot of the moving forward processes weren't meeting for a significant amount of time when lockdown first started.
This is right. COVID has had an impact, but not nearly as much as they want us to believe.
This is my theory, no evidence to support it, but i think the lack of income due to covid pretty much delayed any motivation for them to push forward with anything. they knew they were going to lose money.. they wanted to make sure they didn't lose even more. and worst case was they upset supporters another year and according to Sims, the number of members have increased since the initial drop off after the first couple seasons. so, appeasing unhappy fans, wasn't exactly on their mind
As a general rule, City land use applications were delayed by 9-12 months by the pandemic - with larger projects delayed proportionately longer. If there is a State component, I am not sure of the average delay as I wasn't involved with any State projects at the onset of the pandemic, but I would suspect it to be similar.
In brief, claiming a one year delay is valid with respect to government action. More than that, then it is business related.
I have no idea and I am guessing but the way Sims phrased that City Members increased. I believe Full Season City Members have decreased, but they have seen an increase in the partial season ticket plans and new individual game buyers, who are City Members as well. I think he couched it as City Members for that specific reason.
What do you mean "as a general rule" they were delayed by that long?
My understanding is that the developers weren't ready to file their application prior to the pandemic, and that there were still several issues that needed to be worked out before they could file their application. Working out those issues has likely taken a bit longer due to the pandemic (I'm guesstimating 1-3 months), but there was still a good amount of time and effort needed on those items.
Now, had they been looking to file the application last April/May, then I could see a much larger impact to the schedule. And perhaps there still is a schedule impact due to the pandemic that hasn't "hit" the project yet as perhaps there is now a backlog of projects created due to the pandemic that have yet to be reviewed, etc.
