Saturday, 8 June 2024.
It’s a sunny morning in Manhattan. I wake up with the alarm clock, worried about sleeping in despite it being a weekend. The temperatures are rising but remain within “warm and comfortable” limits. On my way to the subway, I notice some clouds, but otherwise the sky promises a nice day ahead. Finding my way through the World Trade Center subway station towards the Path station, I realize this is my first time here. I’ve walked by the area a couple of times after a doctor’s appointment, but I have never been inside the Santiago Calatrava-designed shopping mall. I make my way to my intended platform, which is slowly but surely getting busier by the minute, as young adults and families wearing black and sky blue, with rainbow-colored accents, come down the stairs or escalators, waiting for the next Newark-bound train. Friends are getting together, while others check their phones and talk about the day ahead. I check my phone as well, both to see what time it is (even though I’m wearing a wristwatch) and for news on Instagram. When the train pulls up and those waiting on the platform can enter, I find myself a seat, helped by having years of experience taking crowded trains during rush hours in three different metropoles. I look around and confirm my suspicion: most of us are heading to the same destination: Harrison, New Jersey; then a short walk to the Red Bull Arena.
It’s a home match day for NJ/NY Gotham FC, against Angel City FC, their Pride match.
It is also my first time in a soccer stadium, and I am very excited about it.
Growing up in Rio de Janeiro around the time and in the social circle I did, some things just sort of came to me throughout the years: saints’ days (and their respective patronage), a preference for a given escola de samba, having an above-average understanding of the basics of soccer and its calendar around the year, no matter what.
I can be more specific than that: I grew up a ten-minute ride or a thirty-minute walk away from Jornalista Mário Filho stadium, more commonly known as the Maracanã. Inaugurated in 1950 for the World Cup hosted in Brazil, it is Brazil’s largest soccer stadium, and before modernization works (especially in preparation for the 2014 World Cup, but not just) it could host over one hundred thousand supporters (the capacity is now limited at a little over seventy-three thousand). A match day can still disrupt traffic in the surrounding neighborhood, especially when regional classics are being played.
My only time there was during a school trip, to learn about the sports complex’s history and see its installations.
That is not to say that I was disinterested in soccer as a kid. At some point during my late childhood and early adolescence, I would even buy a local sports newspaper every Monday, which recapped the previous round of matches and published analysis and forecasts for the following week. I have no memory of how that started or why I stopped doing it, but sure enough for what feels like a significant period, I read about every single Rio de Janeiro major club every single week, paying closer attention to my chosen team.
If your reference is to the sports landscape in the US, you probably consider hometowns or college affiliations, but soccer in Brazil is a big enough deal that you might have some choices. In Rio, we had four large teams: Flamengo, Fluminense, Vasco, and Botafogo (technically based in Niterói, across the Baía de Guanabara). Most kids will follow their parents’ team, and these things tend to run in the family to a certain degree. My dad has always been a Vasco supporter, for as long as I can remember.
So, of course, I decided to support another team, and that’s how I ended up with an affinity for Flamengo, which eventually went from fiercely following local, national, and international competitions to just a vague sense of what is happening (which hasn’t stopped me from messaging my dad when Flamengo won over Vasco earlier this month, 6-1).
And then there’s the national aspect of it all. Brazil, the only five-time FIFA World Cup champion. I was old enough to have solid memories of the fourth title in 1994 but not old enough to remember many details of it, but I, like many around my age or older, can tell you exactly where I was when we lost the final match to France in 1998 (in a street fan-fest around the block from my dad’s).
And then, during a work trip last year, I met a talkative Romanian driver who was excited to find out I was Brazilian because he was a big soccerhead. He lost virtually no time to tell me he had a very clear memory of where he watched the Brazil x Germany match in the 2014 World Cup, and then promptly asked me if I remembered it.
Of course I did. I don’t think many Brazilians my age do not remember that fateful day, so fateful it has its own Wikipedia page. 8 July 2014 (almost ten years ago, I now realize as I type down the date). Brazil 1, Germany 7.
I was in Paris, hosting friends who had come over specifically to watch the match.
Until very recently, I hadn’t watched a match by the men’s national team since the last Olympic games, but I have nice memories of watching 2018 men’s World Cup matches in bars in Rio, and 2019 women’s World Cup matches during a heatwave in France, and I was thoroughly upset when the women’s team showed some uninspired soccer and got eliminated during the group stage in last year’s World Cup.
Soccer, you could say, is a kind of latent interest, nurtured by my early environment and occasionally amped up by what’s happening around me.
Gotham FC finished last in the 2022 regular season and went on to become the National Women’s Soccer League champion in 2023. This, alongside every other piece of information I have about the club’s history, I have gathered not by being there, but by reading a whole lot on US women’s soccer since early March.
Getting interested in a sports league and jumping into it feels a lot like getting into comics: you can start from the beginning of a new series and you can get a lot out of it just by following the installments, but in order to get a better sense of the lore and of the history, you have to at least read about what came before. Lucky for me, the League is a relatively young one (established in 2012), somewhat easy to catch up with despite its ups and downs and twists and turns (it was preceded by two other professional women’s leagues: the Women’s Professional League between 2007 and 2012, and the Women’s United Soccer Association before that, between 2001 and 2003).
So why Gotham and why now?
The latter question is easy: I decided that this was the year I stopped postponing things I’ve always wanted to do and didn’t for one reason or another, and finally getting to know more about the famous scene of women’s soccer in the US was easily within my reach. It also helped that many Brazilian players are active in the women’s league this year, including the one and only Queen Marta.
A quick search in late February showed me the season would begin in mid-March and so I figured the timing was just right.
And if time was cooperating, why not also call in a handy help from space? Living in NYC, supporting a NY(-adjacent) team was a quick step. Wait, and they won last year’s championship? Sweet!
You probably wouldn’t know this was a newly discovered love affair if you heard me while Gotham was playing or if you saw my tables of matches and where to watch them. The NWSL has broadcasting deals with Amazon Prime, ION, CBS/CBS Sports, and ESPN, plus the matches that get aired through their website/app, NWSL+ (fans abroad have it easier in that basically every match is aired through this website for international audiences). My news algorithm is catching up to my search patterns and more and more I get news about women’s soccer (yay!) and the men’s USA national team (no yay). Frequently, the matches or the championship come up in calls with my dad, who I have roped into following the league’s results. So it should come as no surprise that, after a disappointing loss to Washington Spirit (who played objectively better) on a Sunday, I got a text message from him: “yeah, it wasn’t it.” He knows how not to be a fair-weather fan and I hope I have learned this lesson from him somewhere along the way.
I am not a fan of huge crowds, so the smaller scale of the National Women’s Soccer League matches felt like the perfect opportunity to see in person the players I was growing fond of and to find out what it was that made people come back again and again to stadiums, when watching a match on the television (or computer) was so convenient. Surely, it wasn’t for the overpriced food and water bottles.
Seats found, I realized the midfield upper bowl tickets I had gotten as a birthday gift came with an incredible view. And sure enough, when the ball was rolling, the stadium was not as loud as I had expected, but even in a somewhat quiet section of the bleachers, I got it. The first half wasn’t even over and I already knew I would want to come back. Never mind the full train and its bad weekend schedule, never mind the overpriced food, never mind the heat, the sun, the crowd. I just wanted more of that feeling, whatever it was, that filled me with a sort of excited contentment I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Surely enough, the following Saturday, I didn’t make my way to New Jersey again, but I did find my way downtown, to the Financial District, for a Gotham watch party.
And, surely enough, I can’t wait to go back to the stadium.