How Gotham FC Is Building A New Playbook For Women’s Soccer

One night earlier this month, the Empire State Building lit up in blue across the New York City skyline in celebration of NY/NJ Gotham FC winning the CONCACAF W Champions Cup. The lighting also signaled Gotham’s rising role across women’s soccer and the broader sports, culture, entertainment, and tourism landscape.

“We are writing the playbook for the future of sports,” said Ryan Dillon, Chief Business Officer of the NY/NJ Gotham FC. “I wake up every day and feel a great deal of pressure to justify and prove that women’s sports can be a business, not a charity. For so long, it’s never been seen as that. The tides are changing, and we’re the ones doing the work to prove this is a business.”

Gotham, which competes in the top-tier National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), is staking a claim in the boom of investment and attention in women’s professional sports in the United States from financiers, real estate developers, media enterprises, sponsors, fans, and the general public.

Yael Averbuch West, Gotham’s General Manager and Head of Soccer Operations, said, “There is a global landscape emerging in the women’s game that will be different than the men’s game. And right now, in these next three-to-five years, we believe that there’s a real special opportunity that may never again present itself like this in women’s sports.”

Averbuch West is someone who would know. New York-born and New Jersey-bred, she was a three-time First Team All-America and won two national titles at the University of North Carolina, earned 26 caps with the U.S. Women’s National Team, captured league titles in the U.S. and Europe, and founded the NWSL Players Association and served as its first president and later executive director. Named Gotham’s general manager in 2021, she was the first former USWNT player to hold such a position in the NWSL.

“At Gotham we are talking every day about the way in which we are going to make our mark in this global landscape—and competitively. And we do believe that it starts on the field with having a world-class team and a world class product on the field, and to have competitive differentiation,” Averbuch West said.

On the commercial side, Dillon explained, “We’re flying like a million miles an hour, building like crazy. And that’s what every day is like at Gotham. It’s all about rapid experimentation and ideation to figure out as quickly as possible what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, so we can write can that playbook.”

Parts of the playbook were already written and being implemented when Dillon began engaging with Gotham FC in late 2023. At the time, he served as Head of Portfolio Growth for Next 3, the Tisch Family’s sports and technology investment platform. After six months overseeing the club’s front office, Dillon formally assumed the role of Chief Business Officer heading into summer 2024.

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, CEO of Next 3 and Dillon’s former colleague at Peloton, where they helped scale the company globally, led the investment in Gotham FC. Gotham’s ownership includes founding partners like Tammy Murphy and Governor Phil Murphy, alongside minority stakeholders including sports legends Eli Manning, Sue Bird, Kevin Durant, and Carli Lloyd.

Through their work at Next 3, Tisch Blodgett and Dillon collaborated closely with various strategy-focused departments of the New York Giants, the century-old NFL club in which the Tisch Family holds a 50 percent ownership stake. This connection provides Gotham with access to proven sports business insights while allowing it to maintain the freedom to innovate in the rapidly-evolving NWSL.

According to Forbes’ recent valuations of major league sports franchises, the New York Giants franchise is valued at $7.3 billion, while Gotham FC’s is valued at $110 million.

“When I think about a team like the Giants and a mature league like the NFL, they’re a well-oiled machine,” Dillon said. “They know exactly what they’re doing. There’s a system, there’s a machine, and it works. And when I think about where the NWSL is, and in particular Gotham, we couldn’t be any more different.”

Balancing established practice and new action shapes Gotham’s approach to growth. It means managing the tension between continuity and change as the club grows its place in the world’s most popular sport and without losing sight of the fan community that has been there since before the recent boom in women’s sports.

For years, Gotham supporters mingled freely with players before and after matches and around practice sessions. Those close connections helped build a dedicated community of fans. But as Gotham and the NWSL have professionalized with the increasing investment in and attention to women’s sports, scheduling, security, and media policies have led to a reduction in that level of access. Several supporter groups and individual fans told club leadership they understand the changes, but feel that something meaningful has been lost in their connection to the club and players.

From her perspective as a former player and now executive, Averbuch West appreciates the complexities. “Professionalization of a sport,” she said, “is a very difficult process because it requires changes. As we push ourselves to improve, it’s uncomfortable for us and it’s uncomfortable for our fans, for our players, for our staff, and for everybody because we are going to do things differently. And we’re going to push the envelope on things and that means that things will change.”

According to Averbuch West and Dillon, Gotham has been particularly mindful of striking the right balance. They described how players regularly stay for more than an hour after matches to sign autographs for fans, but that, while appreciated, it didn’t resolve the kind of access to players that fans had grown accustomed to over the years. So, the club created new types in-person and online virtual moments for fans to engage with players.

These moments also allow Gotham to include more members of its growing fanbase. And they reflect a value Gotham leadership holds as important to the club and the New York metropolitan area it calls home. As Averbuch West added, “We believe strongly that we need the community to power us to achieve what we want to achieve. We want to make the community proud. It’s a very ambitious group of people who respect winners.”

Gotham’s recent successes on the field have helped earn that respect. Before the CONCACAF W Champions Cup victory, the team clinched the 2023 NWSL championship, a milestone recognized with a gold star above the crown in the team’s logo. And the Champions Cup achievement also earned the club coveted spots in the high-profile 2026 FIFA Women’s Champions Cup and the 2028 FIFA Women’s Club World Cup international tournaments.

The club’s roster boasts some of the biggest stars in women’s soccer. As Averbuch West remarked, “We have some of the best athletes in the world. What we’re doing is top in the world. It is world class and some of the best athletes in the world play here.”

At one point last season, Gotham’s roster included seven active members of the USWNT. This year, USWNT stars such as Rose Lavelle, Midge Purce, Lilly Reale, and Emily Sonnett headline a squad that also features international standouts from Germany, Brazil, England, Ghana, Spain, and Portugal.

Putting a competitive squad on the pitch, creating a welcoming atmosphere on matchdays at the team’s Sports Illustrated Stadium home ground in New Jersey, and promoting match broadcasts and livestreams are part of the marketing mix to strengthen Gotham’s relationship with its fanbase and attract more of the public to the team. Player appearances at events around the community are part of that mix, too. The club is trying some new methods in that aspect of community relations and fan development.

One example of that was Purce’s appearance delivering the opening monologue during a performance of the Tony Award-winning Broadway show “Chicago.” It was a tactical idea within a strategy that draws from Tisch Blodgett and Dillon’s experience at Peloton, where they oriented marketing toward showcasing the fitness instructors—their personalities, talents, and stories—rather than the equipment itself, because that is what resonated most with members.

“There’s an art and a science to it,” Dillon explained. “The science is Broadway: twelve million people go through the door last year, seventy percent are women. They spend money on live events. Science-wise, it is a pretty good audience for us to go after. The art piece is about how it is fun, there’s music, there’s the emotional side of the experience, there’s dancing, there’s storytelling.”

As Dillon further explained, “It’s the art and the science of great storytelling creativity, but delivered to a data-driven audience of who we believe are the next opportunity for us from a fanbase perspective.” Developing that includes thinking-through and delivering fewer initiatives, though ones that are “actually needle-moving.”

Gotham’s social impact work is another portal for driving change, with efforts focused on access to soccer, women’s advancement, sustainability, and advocacy for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.

One result is the Keep Her in the Game program. Launched last year, it’s aimed at addressing the disproportionate drop-off rate of girls participating in soccer. More than a thousand local girls have already taken part in the initiative. Dove, the personal care brand, joined as a sponsoring partner to underwrite, support, and help scale the program’s reach. The club plans to celebrate the first anniversary of the program this August during a home match against the Washington Spirit, including with a fan fest prior to kickoff.

There is a good deal of momentum in what Gotham is building on, off, and around the pitch. As Dillon put it, “Doing well by doing good is very real. … It creates a flywheel of investment back into the game and neighborhood.”

What Gotham is doing is more than an exercise in sustainable business, fan development, and goodwill through women’s soccer. It’s a blueprint for how the present is shaping the future of sports.