A Team Is Born, but Not All Cheer
By CHARLES V. BAGLI and KEN BELSON
A few days before Thanksgiving, as the city still reeled from Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg convened a meeting at Gracie Mansion to jump-start talks for a project he considered part of his legacy to the city, a new soccer stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.
Executives from Major League Soccer were joined by investors from the United Arab Emirates, the owners of the Manchester City Football Club, who were willing to build the stadium for a new American soccer team they hoped to buy. They were at odds with another group in the room: Jeff Wilpon and his cousin Scott, who represented the Mets and who were demanding more than $40 million from the Abu Dhabi investors as compensation for allowing soccer fans to park at nearby Citi Field.
The mayor entered the room and, to break the tension, joked that he would visit the park if there were a golf course there rather than a soccer stadium. Then he cut to the chase: The stadium “would be good for the city,” he said, according to people at the meeting.
“Reasonable people can work this out,” Bloomberg added before leaving the room minutes after arriving.
Almost six months later, the Mets and soccer officials have still not come to terms, and the stadium issue remains intensely disputed among elected officials, youth soccer leaders and parks advocates. But the Manchester City owners — an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi — forged ahead anyway, announcing Tuesday that it would buy an M.L.S. team for an estimated $100 million with an unexpected partner, the Mets’ crosstown rivals.
Those rivals, the Yankees, will be a part-owner of the New York City Football Club, a new team that is expected to begin competing in M.L.S. in 2015 but has no home to move into.
The Manchester City-Yankees partnership, which will no doubt antagonize the Mets, will deepen existing ties because the Yankees’ stadium concessions business, Legends Hospitality, already provides services at Manchester City’s home ground, Etihad Stadium. Manchester City, the recently deposed champion of England’s Premier League, will play an exhibition match against another British powerhouse, Chelsea, on Saturday at Yankee Stadium, and city and M.L.S. officials were eager to announce a deal before that game.
“In the Yankees, we have found the absolute best partner for developing a world-class sports organization and a winning team that will carry the New York City Football Club name with pride,” said Ferran Soriano, the chief executive of Manchester City.
While initially willing to buy the team on its own, Manchester City decided in the last week to team with the Yankees. In doing so, it gained a wealthy local partner well acquainted with building a stadium and navigating New York’s often treacherous political and regulatory shoals. Manchester City’s owners are also hoping that a partnership with the Yankees will shield them from criticism that a stadium project in the park represents a sweetheart deal for Arab royalty, according to team executives.
By joining with one of the top teams in the Premier League, the Yankees — who are investing as much as $25 million in the new M.L.S. team — also hope to turn Yankee Stadium into a marquee destination for high-profile soccer matches.
“We’ve been doing business here a long time and we know how things work,” said Randy Levine, the president of the Yankees, who said the team’s cable network, YES, could broadcast New York City F.C.’s games. “We’ll have their back throughout all of this.”
Mets officials declined to comment on the deal.
The agreement represents the culmination of two years of negotiations involving conflicting interests that included the mayor, city agencies, the Abu Dhabi investment group, M.L.S., parks and community advocates, soccer fans, the Mets and the United States Tennis Association, among others. In addition to paying for the proposed stadium in Queens, the sheik’s investment group would spend about $90 million to replace lost parkland and soccer fields, and on other measures.
To build a home for the team, the city, the league, Manchester City and now the Yankees must win over half a dozen community boards, the city planning commission, the City Council, and potentially state and federal agencies — a process that will take months, if not years. Some of the constituents oppose ceding parkland to a foreign billionaire.
“We’re not even talking about an American businessman who made shrewd investments,” said Peter Vallone Jr., a city councilman from Astoria. “We’re talking about a sheik born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and we don’t need to hand him parkland on a silver platter.”
Getting big projects built in New York can take years, especially sports sites that often become fodder for critics of the use of public resources for wealthy team owners. The Mets and the Yankees each spent nearly a decade lobbying for tax breaks and public subsidies before they poured a combined $2.3 billion into their new stadiums, which opened in 2009.
With opposition growing, the new owners indicated Tuesday that they recognized that building a stadium in Flushing Meadows would be problematic, and that other sites may have to be considered.
“Clearly, a lot of work has been done in Queens,” Levine said. “That’s where the focus is. I don’t know if there is an alternative. But we have some time now to take a step back and breathe.”
Levine added that New York City F.C. could play at least its first year in Yankee Stadium or Citi Field until a new home is built. M.L.S. began exploring sites for a stadium in 2011. The league hired high-level lobbyists, including HRA Advisors and Global Strategies, as well as CBRE, a real estate brokerage firm, and Icon Venue Group, a stadium architect.
M.L.S. initially wanted to build a stadium on Pier 40 along the Hudson River. The league offered to fix the pier and to give youth leagues that play there access to the field. Although some residents from the adjoining neighborhood liked the idea, advocates for Hudson River Park ultimately disapproved.
The league then explored about 20 other sites, including locations in Harlem, Staten Island, Randalls Island and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, as well as four sites in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. M.L.S. officials liked the park because it was close to the many soccer fans in Queens; was near subways, rail lines and highways; and was accessible to parking at Citi Field.
Meanwhile, about half a dozen investors were inquiring about buying the second New York City team (the Red Bulls, a founding member of M.L.S. as the MetroStars, have played in New Jersey since 1996). Only two were considered serious candidates: one from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and the sheik’s investment group from Abu Dhabi, which became seriously involved in negotiations in November.
The Mets have proved a thorny opponent for the Abu Dhabi investors. The team argued against the notion of someone’s not only gaining access to their parking lots, but also using the space for a competing purpose. The Mets demanded compensation, and they wanted to keep all the parking revenue from the lots (which are city owned) and restrict the right of the soccer team from playing games within hours of the start or finish of a baseball game.
The league and the mayor showed confidence in the proposal, but opposition in the community has mounted. When officials from M.L.S. held talks with Queens residents this winter to promote their plan, some opponents were prevented from sitting in the main auditorium, which was filled with soccer boosters.
Many soccer fans in Queens say they favor a stadium, but they do not want to lose access to the public fields that they use. Alfonso Vargas, the president of Allfut, a soccer alliance that comprises 14 leagues, 400 teams and about 5,000 players who compete at the park, said he supported the proposal as long as the local soccer leagues would be accommodated.
“Not only are they going to allow us to use the new facilities, but they’re going to rebuild all the fields with world-class turf and let us use the bathrooms, which the park is lacking right now,” Vargas said. “Maybe the clientele is not so refined. Still, we are human beings. We don’t want to be squeezed out.”
Parks groups seemed more alarmed. Though the park is listed as having nearly 900 acres, the actual amount of land devoted to public recreation there is far smaller, when land used by the U.S.T.A., the Mets, the M.T.A. and the Queens Museum is subtracted.
M.L.S., which last year spent about $2 million on lobbyists largely to promote their plan, argued that the new stadium would take up no more than 13 acres, a footprint that includes the Fountain of the Planets, a fenced-in pond. Manchester City has pledged to improve drainage at the park and to build new soccer fields as well as buy replacement parkland at Flushing Airport, a decommissioned airfield in nearby College Point.
Those promises have not won over park advocates.
“This is the most heavily used park in Queens,” said Holly Leicht, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “It already has so many private uses. This could be the straw that broke the camel’s back as the park tips too much toward the private side, privatization.”
Geoffrey Croft, the president of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, added, “We hope this new deal once and for all puts to rest any further attempts to seize even more public parkland in Flushing Meadows Park.”
David Waldstein, Nate Schweber and John Otis contributed reporting.
