New York City FC, the Major League Soccer club set to debut in 2015, will play its first three seasons at Yankee Stadium, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing unnamed sources.
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caption:Yankee Stadium will host NYC FC for its first three season, a report says.
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The announcement is due next week, according to the report. The new club, MLS' 20th team, was formed in 2013 with a $100 million investment from Manchester City and the New York Yankees.
The new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, had been under consideration as the club's interim venue while MLS negotiated with New York to build a stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, near the home of the New York Mets. Those talks have stalled, according to the report.
Yankee Stadium has hosted several football friendlies over the past two years. The original Yankee Stadium was the home of the North American Soccer League's New York Cosmos in 1976.
According to the report, Yankees president, Randy Levine, said last August that the team was in talks over a nine-acre parcel between the Major Deegan Expressway and East 153rd Street that could accommodate a 25,000-to-30,000-seat stadium with connections to subways and rail lines.
This past February, Mark Holtzman, the Yankees’ executive director of non-baseball events, told the New York Times that the repeated installation and removal of grass for MLS matches, which run concurrently to the baseball season, would not pose a challenge.
"Technology has gotten to the point where I think we can turn it around pretty quickly," Holtzman told the New York Times.
"Baseball is clearly the No. 1 priority," he said in the report. "We wouldn't do anything to put anyone at any risk; there's a major investment here in the players. At the end of the day, we look at these opportunities very carefully, and we wouldn't get into these opportunities unless we were confident in the end result."