The day will soon come, New York Cosmos Chief Operating Officer Erik Stover said, when the colors green, red and blue – indicative of his club, the New York Red Bulls and the forthcoming New York City Football Club – will dominate the Empire State’s soccer landscape.
In due time, he added, perhaps the clubs will also steal the back pages of major metropolitan newspapers and fuel conversation on local sports talk radio with the fervor generally reserved for their counterparts on the diamond, hardwood, ice and gridiron.
But for now, Stover said, he is focused on reintroducing the Cosmos to New York, a task that has included reminding the city of the club’s five championships in the 1970s and ’80s while igniting interest through a recent North American Soccer League title and stadium proposal at Belmont Park.
“It’s certainly a monumental task to start any professional sports team, especially in the New York market,” Stover said. “It’s crowded and there’s a lot of competition and a lot of noise clutter to get yourself known.”
“We’re truly building a new market for ourselves,” he said. “We’re a club that’s immediately recognizable, but converting that into people buying tickets and going to games is another story.”
For Stover, that’s meant getting the Cosmos brand in front of as many soccer fans as possible, both in person and virtually.
The club has made relationships with several supporter groups throughout New York City, held clinics and sports camps on Long Island and utilized social media to the tune of more than 84,000 Facebook likes and 25,000-plus Twitter followers.
Combine that with public appearances from the players of yesteryear and nostalgic merchandising opportunities incorporating the Cosmos’ past success, and New York returned to action last summer with a sellout crowd at Hofstra University’s James M. Shuart Stadium for its NASL opener against Fort Lauderdale.
The team performed on the pitch, too, winning the 2013 NASL title and continuing its ascent by topping the Red Bulls in this summer’s U.S. Open Cup tournament.
“We knew the club was recognizable and that people wanted to see it come back, but there’s also a lot happening here,” Stover said. “If we have a game that’s not as attended as we’d like, we just accept that as a step sideways and we just have to keep working hard. Our metrics show that our fan base is growing, we just have to use the urgency to get a lot of people to come out.”
Stover’s metrics include tracking how often Cosmos fans interact with the team’s social media pages and analyzing where game tickets are sold.
“I think for any professional sports team, you’re looking at five to 10 miles of where your stadium is, your immediacy to the stadium,” Stover said. “That’s the area you need to focus on.”
But the club does not plan on remaining at Shuart Stadium for long, having already proposed a $400 million privately-funded 25,000-seat stadium to the Empire State Development Corporation as part of a commercial development within Belmont Park that also includes nine new restaurants, 250,000 square feet of retail space, a 175-room hotel and 4.3 acres of public park space.
Securing a fan base in New York City, Stover said, is just as crucial to the Cosmos as expanding the club’s brand to Nassau and Suffolk counties.
“We need our own stadium, and if we have that our commercial viability will improve dramatically and would improve the quality of players we can bring in,” Stover said. “That, along with the loyalty of our fans, will show how essential going to a game will become. But these are the islands we have to hop to to ultimately be successful.”
