Gotham FC set for record-shattering crowd at Citi Field debut

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 medi...