Fowl Play

BEFORE THERE ARE PLAYERS on the pitch and fans in the stands, there is the matter of the burger. Will it be smashed, or a tavern-style slab? Bread-wise, should we expect a potato roll straight out of the plastic or some kind of neo-bun made from shokupan or brioche? Will the ubiquitous butcher Pat LaFrieda make an appearance on the menu? And where does this burger stand on onions: raw, caramelized, or none at all? For now, we don’t know. But what we do know, what we can confirm and celebrate without apology or condition, is that when it is inaugurated in July next year, Etihad Park, the new home of New York City Football Club (NYCFC) and the first stadium built in the five boroughs specifically for the beautiful game, will not open without access to ground beef in the optimal 80:20 ratio of flesh to fat. Relax, everyone! There will be a burger.

And it won’t be just anyone flipping the patties on the grill in Willets Point, the headland of northern Queens on which Etihad Park will sit: Celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson has been engaged to design the stadium’s foundational meat treat. As an eight-paragraph press release spells out, Samuelsson’s “inaugural burger concept” (details forthcoming) is also the “first signature food and beverage offering” at Etihad Park—a double debut with all the excitement and thrusting promise of Lionel Messi’s first gallop around the Camp Nou. Samuelsson’s engagement “says exactly what we want this stadium to be: a place where world-class soccer and culture come together in a brand-new way that feels authentic to this city,” Brad Sims, the CEO of NYCFC, claims.

Samuelsson, for those unfamiliar with his work, is a perpetual presence on food TV who owns three sit-down restaurants in New York, several more across the US and overseas, and a thriving network of fast-casual businesses with outposts everywhere from the Hyatt Regency in Addis Ababa to the Resorts World casino in Jamaica, Queens. His hyphenated background (Ethiopian-Swedish-American); penchant for dressing in boldly colored but culturally ambiguous shirts, caps, hats, and cravats; and rapidly expanding portfolio of eateries—most of them selling some version of Ethiopian-Swedish-American fusion food with various genuflections to local “character” and culinary history—mark him as a personality who belongs to everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

In the kitchen, he presents himself as a bridger of ethnic divides, a culinary Garibaldi as comfortable before the pagan simplicity of the Nordic tuber as he is amid the pre-Coptic puddle of a doro wat. Wherever there’s adventure on a Samuelsson menu, there’s never too much of it; where there’s trash, it’s never too trashy; where there are homages to tradition, they never feel too traditional. Fried chicken ennobled by Aleppo pepper, “Swediopian crudo,” an entry-level injera that will go easy on the brunching parent’s stomach: These are the types of dishes you can expect when Chef Marcus is at the hob. For a franchise that’s barely more than a decade old, at a stadium being built over a vanishing light-industrial slum, on a promontory reclaimed from Flushing Bay, Etihad Park’s incoming burger conceptualist is perhaps the perfect fit: a culinary utopian whose food is every bit as placeless as the soccer club he now serves.

Concept. For once, this perpetually abused bit of food world jargon is oddly appropriate. The economics of sport and stadium construction have propelled the burger into the noumenal realm: No longer simply an inanimate assembly of protein and carbohydrate, the burger is now an idea, an inspiration, a repository of the maker’s highest values and brightest hopes. Getting the burger right is a core assignment for the modern stadium builder. In many ways signing a bankable talent to lead the minced-meat operation is more important than bolstering the playing squad or securing a marquee signing for the team that will take the field. A proven goalscorer, a sturdy presence at the base of the midfield, an on-field general who can cajole and inspire when times are tough: These are all important to the fortunes of the professional soccer club, but the chief burger officer (to borrow the title that NYCFC has already bestowed upon Samuelsson) matters more. The sporting arena is now an all-purpose lifestyle venue in which the food and beverage offerings, corporate hospitality spaces, and opportunities for nonsporting distraction are as critical to the home club’s balance sheet as anything that happens on the field. The actual sport, when it takes place, is incidental to the true sustaining activity of the modern stadium, mere background color to the epiphanies, experiences, meals, and deals that the structure is ultimately designed to serve. A new stadium without a proper burger program today is like a toilet without pipes: doomed to spectacular failure. But who are these burgers, these concepts, this stadium, for?

ON THE DAY IN LATE MARCH when Etihad Park held its topping out ceremony, the news was thick with panic over the federal government shutdown and chaos in the country’s airports. Mass flight cancellations; security lines longer than a West Village queue for matcha; unpaid TSA officers quitting in numbers or staying on the job, overcome with exhaustion; zonked-out travelers huddling around wall sockets and falling asleep on airport floors; ICE agents prowling the terminals to “help” process departures: Such was the shambolic reality of American travel on the morning that NYCFC raised the final steel beam to complete the stadium’s cantilevered roof. NYCFC, a Major League Soccer club founded in 2013, is majority-owned by City Football Group, a global soccer conglomerate whose most treasured asset is English Premier League club Manchester City; City Football Group is in turn controlled by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Marty Edelman, a veteran New York lawyer and longtime adviser to the Emirati state who now serves as the vice chairman of NYCFC, addressed the assembled construction workers, journalists, and weakly chanting fans (“Oh, oh oh OH oh oh oh ohhh,” they sang, to no audible crowd enthusiasm) from the pitch’s future center circle. His snowy hair wisping in the cool spring wind, Edelman promised that Etihad Park—or “Eat a Hard” Park, as he pronounced it—would revitalize this long-neglected knuckle of northern Queens. A procession of speakers followed, each of them offering some twist on the same message. New York City’s World Cup czar, Maya Handa, rhapsodized about the beauty of replacing industry with commerce; Queens Borough President Donovan Richards larded his oration with references to The Great Gatsby and the Valley of Ashes, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lightly fictionalized portrait of the ash heaps that used to dominate the point; labor leaders talked up the hundreds of good union jobs that the stadium and its surrounding development had created.

Jetliners, flying low on their approach to LaGuardia Airport, a mile or so to the west, roared overhead. As I took in this contrast—between the ceremony’s eupeptic talk of urban opportunity and the planes’ sonic reminder of a world beyond Queens—the stadium’s symbolic value came into focus. “The border is everywhere now” has become the mantra of ICE’s trigger-happy enforcement of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. But if the border is everywhere, it is also nowhere: The Trumpian commitment to Fortress America falls apart the moment you consider this country’s extreme porousness as a vessel for global capital, which a project like Etihad Park—named after Emirati national carrier Etihad Airways—makes abundantly plain. The true border of America begins not at LaGuardia or JFK or anywhere else your friendly local ICE officer happens to be lurking but in Dublin, Toronto, the Bahamas, and Abu Dhabi, where travelers (both US citizens and foreigners) can “preclear” US customs and arrive on American soil as if disembarking from a domestic flight. (This preclearance regime, a privilege of global hegemony, was inaugurated in 1952 and expanded over subsequent decades, most recently in March of this year, when Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport was added to the network. The Abu Dhabi facility opened in 2014 following lobbying from the Emirati government, which foots 85 percent of the bill to keep the operation running.) In a territorial sense, the United States is part of the Emirates, and the Emirates are part of America. NYCFC’s future home makes the case that this is also true at a cultural level. More than it is a soccer ground, a community facility, or a job creator, Etihad Park is above all a laboratory for a new idea of the city, a meeting point between Emirati and American notions of the late-capitalist good life.

Willets Point has long served as a place where New Yorkers go to get rid of their problems. Before World War II, this lobe of reclaimed wetland wedged between Corona and Flushing served as a dumping ground for the mountains of waste generated by New York’s coal furnaces; in more recent decades, it has become the main operating surgery of the city’s stricken cars, the “Iron Triangle” of corrugated auto shops made famous by Ramin Bahrani’s tender 2007 drama Chop Shop. Even today, with the bulldozers closing in and a sunny future of mixed-use amenity appearing on the horizon, this is not a neighborhood for lingering; with barely any residents to speak of, it’s not even really a neighborhood. Willets Point is a place to skirt, traverse, scamper through; a place where the most significant movement is the exit. Technically, part of the point sits within Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which extends from the vast campus of playing fields and World’s Fair ephemera to the south all the way to the Flushing Bay waterfront. Along the bay, the cracked promenade and whipped cream peaks of the Candela Structures, two small pavilions from the 1964 fair¹ repurposed as seating kiosks, still attract a strange crowd of kayakers, canoodlers in search of the sunset, anglers in search of toxic fish, and families content to picnic between the Whitestone Expressway and the concrete plants of College Point across the rusty waves. That expressway, plus the two that border the point to the east and west and the elevated subway tracks of the 7 line to the south, barricade Willets Point from the rest of the city, delimiting it as a zone apart. Citi Field, the New York Mets’ home stadium, sits over the road from Etihad Park, but there’s nothing to entice baseball fans to stick around once the Mets have slumped to another loss. The air, the dust, the altitude, the lack of sewerage and sidewalks, stoplights and streetlights, the inundating wateriness of the streets: Everything about Willets Point makes it feel different to the rest of New York. Even the Hole, that flood-prone mafia graveyard on the border of Queens and Brooklyn, seems more approachable to the outsider.

And yet there is also a great vitality to the Iron Triangle’s sodden, powdery streets. Even as Etihad Park has swallowed two blocks whole, rendering 36th and 37th Avenues mere footnotes in the history of Willets Point, life goes on in the shadow of NYCFC’s rapidly activating black box. Workers off the clock banter over games of dominoes under the watchful eye of the giant pigeon that dominates the stadium’s now-almost-complete northern façade. (NYCFC are known as the Pigeons, a winking reference among fans to the fact that New York is the world’s only urban habitat of this exotic, little-known bird.) A scattering of delis keeps the local laborers fueled on encebollado, seco de gallina, ham sandwiches, and salchipapas. The Iron Triangle is more of an Iron Transversal these days, but it has not disappeared completely—not yet, at least. Down Willets Point Boulevard and along 34th Avenue, the air still smells of mud, metal, petrol, and paint; the gleaners and can collectors weave between carcasses of stripped-out cars, eviscerated engines, and iridescent lakes of toxic runoff; fire, soil, and water all fuse somehow into one; and the area’s mostly Hispanic ranks of welders, mechanics, tinters, and detailers shout mira mira mira to each other over a percussion of spray guns, saws, drills, and crashing panels.

All this will be gone soon. Many body shops, under the terms of a $7 million 2022 settlement with the city, have already relocated to Hunts Point in the Bronx, where the government-sponsored redevelopment of the old Spofford Juvenile Detention Center (which will eventually include one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s public grocery stores) suggests the advent of a more equitable vision of the city than the one coming into focus in upper Queens. In renderings of the future, completed Etihad Park and its surrounding streets, Willets Point appears as a well-lit, ordered grid of macadamized roads, midrise apartment blocks, shops, and leafy pedestrian plazas—a neighborhood for the mixed-use normies, far removed from the aquatic dunescape of today’s Iron Triangle. Developers have approached this appendage of Queens as if gazing on terra nullius: Here, the needs of a soccer club have become the stage not simply for a new sporting arena but the design of an entire district (a favored buzzword in the world of stadium architecture).

But unlike other stadium precincts, in which a single vision of the surrounding urban mass usually lends coherence to the transformation, there are now many male egos jostling to put their distinctive stamp on Willets Point. On the eastern side of the point, a partnership between NYCFC, the city, and two private real estate developers (Related Companies and Sterling Equities) will create Etihad Park, plumbing, a hotel, a school, and 2,500 affordable housing units. On the western side, the vast parking lot attached to Citi Field will be reborn under the tasteful direction of Mets owner Steve Cohen and lifestyle conglomerate Hard Rock Entertainment as Metropolitan Park, a complex featuring a casino and another hotel. A twenty-acre park designed by James Corner, the landscaping brain behind the High Line, will separate Citi Field from its adjoining sportsbook and connect Flushing Bay, Corner has predicted, to Flushing Corona Meadows Park. There’s an expressway that runs parallel to the waterfront promenade at one end of the future Metropolitan Park, and the small matter of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center blocking access to Flushing Meadows at the other, but let’s not quibble with the details; as an homage to the Pigeons, what could be more romantically fitting than to negotiate feather-encrusted panels of avian shit under a concrete overpass as you enjoy Corner’s revegetated approach to the water? Major Food Group, the owner of Manhattan theme restaurants Carbone and Torrisi, is overseeing the Metropolitan Park food and beverage offering, which will include a food hall called Taste of Queens that will be sure to keep Samuelsson on his toes as he cooks up his inaugural burger concept over the road at Etihad Park. Reports are now emerging of local food vendors’ exclusion from the hall, which raises the exciting possibility that Taste of Queens will taste nothing like its own part of Queens. The Etihad Park development cluster is due to be completed next year; Metropolitan Park is scheduled to open in 2030. Eventually, once all of this is built, a point, two parks, and a field will jockey for geographical supremacy next to each other. Etihad may mean “union” in Arabic, but I’m not sure this is quite the kind of union NYCFC’s funders had in mind when they approved the money for Etihad Park. What exactly this part of the city will be known as in a few years is anyone’s guess. The ways of urban alienation are legion, but in the New York of 2030 the estrangement of the city from its own people will probably begin with the line “I’m just heading to Etihad Park for the Marcus Samuelsson burger before hitting up Hard Rock casino to catch Kanye and Kid Rock headline Fanatics Fest @ Metropolitan Park @ Willets Point.”

Plumbing, streets that drain, a school, middle-income housing: These are all unambiguously good things. But the closer you consider the betting rooms, sporting bowls, hotels, restaurants, tightly scripted antiparks, and high-kitsch venues for brand stunts and drone-and-laser “experiences” that will soon join them on Willets Point’s magic carpet, the more you understand that these public facilities are incidental to the real urban renewal at work here, sops to secure state consent for the gambling-entertainment industry’s latest assault on the city. Edelman and the other suits at NYCFC never miss an occasion to remind the world that Etihad Park is entirely privately financed. This inoculates the new facility from a traditional criticism, that government subsidies for stadium development represent a poor return on public investment, but it also places the broader development that Etihad Park anchors beyond reproach on more general grounds. This is a gift to the city, NYCFC’s owners want us to think: Be thankful, ingrates!

The property dealings reveal the club to be rather less beneficent. The land that Etihad Park sits on has not been sold to City Football Group; instead, the group will lease the plot from the city for forty-nine years and pay annual rent starting at $500,000. Since there’s no sale of land involved, this arrangement will allow NYCFC to avoid paying property taxes: According to New York City’s Independent Budget Office, the city will forego $516 million in tax revenue over the course of the lease. But it won’t be all take; the stadium will also graft, and a kind of cultural transplantation will join financial extraction as a defining mode of Etihad Park. New Willets Point will be more like Abu Dhabi-on-the-Bay than a twenty-first-century StuyTown or LeFrak City, and that is absolutely by design. Beyond all the military support the US sends to the UAE, a staunch regional ally of the American empire, flows of cultural influence between the two nations have historically been unidirectional. UFC and Power Slap, quintessentially American contributions to the sport of mixed martial arts, are regular fixtures in the Emirates, and the skyline of Dubai, already a desert-plain simulacrum of Manhattan, is now seeing the addition of superslender towers akin to those you’ll find on Billionaires’ Row. But as recent developments in New York indicate, influence is beginning to boomerang—informed, perhaps, by the inauguration of preclearance in Abu Dhabi in 2014, which has lubricated the passage of people and ideas between America and the Arabian Peninsula. Many of the newer Yemeni coffee shops in Astoria and Bay Ridge, all those Zyara Cafés, Moka & Cos, and Mokafés, have a distinctly Emirati aesthetic (minimalist design, clean lines, bright lights, no visible markers of immigrant proprietorship); and now comes Etihad Park. Perhaps the stadium will be the end of it. But there’s another future possible here, in which New York becomes more, rather than less, like the Emirates, a city built on extreme disparities of wealth, low or no taxation, the privatization of everything, and an obsessive focus on safety, where stadium sport and its various entertainment derivatives become the main form of popular recreation.

Well, you might interject: New York is already most of the way there. And that’s partly what makes this Emirati intervention on Willets Point so interesting; it’s an accelerant of post-Bloomberg New York’s existing tendencies, an excuse to paint the city even beiger. In contrast to the world of European football—where fealty to tradition is still of rhetorical value, if not consistently honored in fact—the US is a country where it’s not unusual for sports teams to shift cities as owners, circumstances, and commercial incentives change; today’s Seattle SuperSonics might wake up tomorrow as the Oklahoma City Thunder. American sporting capital has always been frisky. Could the American city, in thrall to sports and lifestyle amenities, also be Emirati?

THE MASTERY OF SPACE is the great mantra of modern soccer. Over the past three decades, under the influence of various Spaniards, Dutchmen, Germans, and Frenchmen, with the occasional Argentine lunatic thrown in for good measure, professional football has evolved from a fairly uncomplicated business of direct running, crossing, stamina, and strength to a system-led sport in which the understanding of space—how to control, organize, and manipulate it—provides the key to success. (A helpful way to sidestep the tediously interminable debate in this country over whether the round ball sport should be called “soccer” or “football”: Use both terms interchangeably and trust the reader to understand what you’re talking about.) A game that was once the province of strongmen, sprinters, tacklers, and triers, in which the muddy, scrumming sloppiness of proceedings on the pitch lent moments of individual brilliance—so often decisive to the outcome—an artistic, almost divine quality is now a hypertactical realm of zones, blocks, and lines; shape, organization, and structure. Pluck and guts remain indispensable attributes of a winning outfit, but the best players and teams also have to be able to think on their feet.

Arguably, the manager who has synthesized and harnessed these fluctuating energies and fashions better than anyone is Pep Guardiola, the Catalan who just left Manchester City after ten years of terroristic domination of the English Premier League. Guardiola is football’s reigning alpha male: In a money-drenched sport, where many prominent players and coaches race to reforest a thinning scalp or splurge on a spanking new set of teeth the moment they get some pennies in the pocket, here is a man so sure of himself he’s been happy to remain perfectly bald well into his fifties, even as riches and trophies have continued to rain on his naked dome. Across his decade at Manchester and through earlier stints at Bayern Munich and Barcelona, the teams he managed before landing in England, Guardiola—building on the Dutch idea of “Total Football”—perfected a game built on pressing when playing without the ball and the perpetual reformation of restless passing triangles when playing with it. Positional fluidity is at the philosophical core of Pepball: The canonical Guardiola team features midfielders who can pull a part-time shift as strikers, wingers “inverting” to play through the center of the pitch, goalkeepers as adept with the ball at their feet as in their hands, and goalscorers who accept that they are also the first line of defense. Goals, tackles, defense-shredding throughballs, and bullying midfield runs can come from anyone. Every player in this system lives under the impermanence of their own identity: The defining trait of the Guardiolan ensemble is a shared gift for metamorphosis, the ability to become whatever the moment demands. To create space and find solutions on the field where none previously existed, modern football asks players to be all things to all people at once.

The modern soccer stadium attempts a similar feat of legerdemain, with rather less impressive results. There is, of course, an important historical divergence in the stadium-building traditions that separate England and Europe, football’s birthplace, from the US. The romance of the old European football grounds is all in their entwinement with the city, the cradling adjacency between the sporting basin and its urban host: One thinks of La Mestalla in Valencia, competing for altitude with the neighboring apartment towers; Anfield, which looms with Haalandesque menace over the nineteenth-century row houses and venerable pubs that line its inner-Liverpool approaches; or Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium in central Athens, an arena so bready and wet it seems to be disintegrating into the surrounding polykatoikíes, becoming one with the urban meze. In Europe, the imbrication of city and stadium, combined with more elemental questions of cost and convenience, means that football grounds have historically evolved a little like medieval cathedrals, with each successive generation tinkering with the structure in response to the needs of fans and the local community. Compromise and incrementalism have been the making of style. Owing to the metro station that hems the stadium on one side, St. James’ Park, the home ground of English club Newcastle United, has developed a distinctive lopsided form, with two stands overhanging the pitch. The cylindrical perimeter towers, steel grid roof, and kasagi-like red trusses that are now the aesthetic signature of the San Siro in Milan were the product of a renovation to add a third seating tier ahead of the 1990 World Cup.

But the courtly companionship between city and stadium is falling apart, even in soccer’s heartland: As private equity money and venture capital, much of it from America, penetrate European football, arenas have been dragged into a market-efficient future in which every asset a club owns must do its bit to generate revenue, squeeze money from the fans, ferret out the arbs, and drive teams forward as commercial concerns. The stadium must please a multitude. This remise en cause of the home venue’s role has led many clubs in Europe to embrace a style of arena closer to those you’ll find in American football (the one with the oval ball, not the round one), in which corporate hospitality, retail amenities, luxury dining, and nonsporting events (concerts, rodeos, monster truck rallies, religious conventions, and various other mass hallucinations) are as important to the structure’s design as the conventional needs of the sports venue (which are, in descending order of importance: sightlines, acoustics, toilets, and carbs). The approximation of the American stadium to an upscale mall is a function of the NFL calendar’s brevity, which guarantees just eight or nine regular games a season for each field; but the model has spread internationally, even to soccer leagues with much longer seasons, where opportunities for revenue generation from game-day gate receipts are more plentiful but ticket prices are generally lower. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, two storied London clubs whose grand old grounds once embodied the ideal marriage between the working-class city and the stadium, now play in blinking modern bowls as vast, adaptable, and jumbo-screened as the yassified coliseums of the modern NFL. A Taylor Swift show, a boxing match, a fourth round Carabao Cup match against Preston North End: These venues are ready for it all. To keep the VIPs watered whenever events on the pitch are not to their pleasure, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which opened in 2019, even includes its own wine vault, along with a chef’s table helmed by Michelin-approved talent. Manchester United has commissioned a one-hundred-thousand-seat stadium that will likely be similar, despite its slightly retro approximation in renderings to the old Munich Olympiastadion’s tensile canopy of translucent circus tents. Even the San Siro, that great late-Brutalist vaffanculo to the skies over Lombardy, is now facing the wrecking ball, with a more helpfully extractive new arena set to take its place on an adjoining plot of land sometime in the next few years.

Arsenal, Manchester United, and AC Milan (one of the two teams that call San Siro home) are all majority-owned by US investors. The result: In its biggest and most lucrative leagues, soccer is now the stage for a curious merger of European footballing traditions and the conventions of American stadium construction, which have been an important influence on global sport since at least the turn of the millennium. Many of the world’s most influential new sporting prosceniums are the work of US architectural firms like HOK (based in St. Louis), Populous (Kansas City), and Manica (ditto). Missouri has become the future of global sport. All the matches on US soil during this summer’s World Cup were staged in NFL arenas, scrubbed of sponsor names and resurfaced with natural turf, and the astonishment of the foreign footballing hordes (those lucky or white enough to secure a visa, at least) as they took in these venues became a favored media storyline throughout the tournament. The stadiums’ size and technological sophistication (air-conditioning, screens of every size on every surface), the decadent concession-stand fare (caviar-topped hash browns, elote lobster rolls, seventeen-hour smoked short rib pastrami buns), the stands rising proud like the wedding-cake balconies of a nineteenth-century opera house: In cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles, where the venues are only a few years old, visitors were awed by it all. Cortés, one imagines, felt something similar on first contact with the tomato. In this neo-Columbian exchange, the influence spreads in both directions: As teams across college football and the NFL race to stay relevant in sport’s new luxury economy, the modern American superstadium is being reimagined along more European lines. No longer is it enough for the franchise, at any level of serious competition, to stick its fans in a roofless low-gradient bowl. Now the stands must be stacked in the Euro style at a forbidding incline, offering sound and vision to rival Dortmund’s Yellow Wall; roofs must provide protection from the elements and perhaps even retract, spin, or light up when asked to; the whole production must put spectators as close to the action as engineering will allow. The stadium must dazzle, yes, but it must also comfort, nourish, entertain, and evanesce as the occasion, the weather, and the mood of its occupants demand.

Yet sport, rather than the food or the shopping or the halftime show on the jumbotron, remains the stadium’s defining rationale. And professional sport—despite its overcommercialization, despite the relentless milking of the stadium cow that’s become common both here and abroad—still belongs, culturally and emotionally, to its fans. Sport’s soul comes from its community, and for most teams that community still comprises middle- and working-class people whose lives, bank balances, and stadium seats are far removed from the suits bubbling it up in the glass-protected suites. The modern stadium must now satisfy two worlds: the mainstream rabble that fills the stands and the luxury seekers that plump the piggy bank. In straining to bridge this divide, team owners and stadium designers have attempted the architectural version of Total Football, a manipulation of space and sensation that helps the arena fluctuate and adapt according to need; corporate architecture juggernaut Gensler, which recently opened an office in Kansas City, has argued that “we must move beyond the general admission seat/private suite dichotomy.” The dream looks something like Riyadh’s future MBS Stadium, an “ultra-flexible” arena capable of staging multiple events in a single day, which the Saudi government is planning to build for the 2034 World Cup. But efforts in this vein to date have underwhelmed. Instead of the smooth modularity of Guardiolismo, stadium architects have succeeded only in staging a collective descent into incoherence.

History, atmosphere, a lived-in sense of place: Yes, these are all valuable. But might clubs be better off without them? Real Madrid, the biggest chorizo in Spanish football, recently renovated the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, its home since 1947. The touch-up included all the usual improvements (a retractable roof, climate-controlled seating, better eating options, more shopping), but bizarrely the club chose to wrap the magnificent concrete concertina of the Bernabéu’s exterior in stainless-steel louvers. The intent was to project modernity, a slick dynamism, to show that Madrid can wow like Shenzhen or Dubai or Minneapolis; instead, the whole structure now looks like a roller door that swallowed a doughnut. The club is unperturbed, one imagines, by the gripes of the aesthetes: Real Madrid’s stadium revenue increased 23 percent to $463 million in 2025–2026, with much of that growth driven by nonfootballing sources like the stadium tour, the club museum (a feature that’s become de rigueur at the home grounds of many of Europe’s biggest teams), and the hosting of the NFL’s first game in Spain. Other clubs have moved in the opposite design direction from Madrid, imagining a kitsch facsimile of history that nods patronizingly to a long-vaporized economic model: Thomas Heatherwick has designed a new 62,000-seat home for Birmingham City, a 150-year-old club that’s a perennial underachiever in English football, whose enormous brick chimneys rising over the colosseum’s perimeter are its distinguishing feature. The velvet-roped amenities of the reimagined sporting arena betray the tragic spirit of the true football fan, whose passion is felt as much in the anguish of serial disappointment and defeat as it is in brief moments of joy and achievement. Heatherwick’s innovation in Birmingham is to show that the stadium can now offend on both this general basis and more curated, location-specific grounds. The faux smokestacks, Heatherwick claims, honor the brickworks that used to sit on the site, along with Birmingham’s past as a global manufacturing center. Never mind that the city’s industrial economy withered in the face of a postwar financial rationalism whose present-day practitioners include Tom Wagner, the veteran turnaround merchant who now owns Birmingham City. None of this will trouble fans; their calm in the stadium chimneys will be assured by an “elevator experience” transporting them to the “tallest bar in the city,” according to Heatherwick. Elevation up the nonchimneying chimneys will compensate for a lost economic mobility, while adding (most crucially) to the club’s bottom line. Fans are now gas in the stacks, the essence on which the profit-optimized stadium economy runs.

In recent years this incoherence has spread to the design of NFL arenas in the US itself. In today’s sporting economy it is not simply money, culture, ideas, and architects that cross borders; stupidity does too. The Buffalo Bills rushed their new ground through construction with barely a single structural review, it seems, from the engineers. In August it welcomed its first fans, and the pans were both instant and universal: The reborn Highmark Stadium is a parody of a 1990s bowl, only with worse sightlines in the upper tiers, smaller replay screens, better corporate hospitality facilities, and a wormy little homage to local industrial history (bricks again, albeit dark ones, this time at the base of the façade) that aligns with the modern fashion for cheap nostalgia. Maybe the key here is simply to stick with a winning formula. The Kansas City Chiefs recently unveiled plans for a new stadium that replicates almost exactly the prowlike ends of its current one. This aesthetic stasis, the owners argue, “honors the rich legacy” of the franchise—perhaps the only concession to history in a concrete canoe whose real action is in its jacked middle tiers, where the insurance executives and regional law firm heads of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area will soon twinkle and clink their way to the LOIs and MOUs that keep the economic waters of the American Midwest churning. Stagnation? It’s good, actually. In its attempt to achieve a kind of placating positionlessness, to become all things to all spectators, stadium architecture has gone global but lost its way. The modern stadium is in crisis.

BUT NOW THE END OF THAT CRISIS is near: Etihad Park will have a burger. In the thirty or so years since the birth of MLS, the most recent and successful reboot of American club football, professional soccer in America has largely dodged the perils, contradictions, and excesses of stadium construction in the NFL and in Europe. This is the product of a foundational modesty among MLS’s administrators, conscious as they have always been of soccer’s status as a beta among the alphas of the American sporting scene. The first “soccer-specific stadium,” to use the rather charmless lingo of the local soccer technocrats, was a twenty-five-thousand-seater in Columbus, Ohio, built for $28.5 million in 1999. The arenas that have come in its wake, while costing significantly more to erect, have largely stuck to these dimensions: Twenty-two of MLS’s thirty teams are now housed in soccer-specific stadiums, and not one of those grounds holds more than 31,000 people. (NFL stadiums, by contrast, range in capacity from sixty thousand to 82,500.) As a rule they’re unshowy affairs, straightforward rectangles with one or two tiers; many of them, like Los Angeles Football Club’s BMO Stadium and Houston Dynamo’s Shell Energy Stadium, also hold the advantage of sitting close to their respective downtowns. (The sale of sponsorship rights to these arenas, as everywhere in American sport, ensures their names are uniformly ugly.) While the NFL and the big soccer leagues of Europe build their basilicas, MLS tends to its chapels: These are venues designed to be intimate, approachable, and family friendly.

Etihad Park trades on this reputation, sticking to the league’s canonical capacity of twenty-five thousand. But with the wealth of the Emirati royal family at its back, it also promises to drag American soccer into the global stadium’s brash new era of overproduction. It’s not fighting this cultural battle alone: Messi’s own Inter Miami recently moved into Nu Stadium, an airy nu home whose outer ring of supporting columns evoke, however faintly, the exposed steel braces of De Kuip, the historic ground that’s home to Dutch side Feyenoord. The league’s scrambled search for a unified identity is already there in the club names, in MLS’s jambalaya of Europeanisms (Inter Miami, Dallas FC, Sporting Kansas City, Real Salt Lake), Americanizations (the Colorado Rapids, the Portland Timbers, the San Jose Earthquakes), and pragmatic concessions to the sponsor dollar (the New York Red Bulls²).

New York City FC, a “football club” in a league that calls the sport “soccer,” can’t escape these incongruities³, and for a long time the team’s rootlessness was literalized by its lack of a permanent abode. Since its founding in 2013, NYCFC, while retaining Yankee Stadium in the Bronx as its primary venue, has also played “home” games in New Jersey, Queens, LA (what), and Hartford, Connecticut. Etihad Park represents an end to years of nomadic wandering across the tristate area and beyond. Etihad Park! The name is foreign but also green, sylvan, somehow refreshing: the type of name you might expect to see advertised on a billboard, appended to some nonsensical corporate slogan, as you tour the departure gates on a layover in Hong Kong or Heathrow or Dubai. “Etihad Park: Because happy doesn’t need to be normal.” “Etihad Park: Make every Monday a Sunday.” “Etihad Park: Ready for your now. Ready for your next.” “Etihad Park: Assume the position.”

HOK is the firm behind the project, which contains all the required baubles—starting with precipitous seats. At their steepest the stands at Etihad Park will reach an incline of 34 degrees, the highest gradient recommended under MLS guidelines. (Most national soccer leagues now advise a maximum seating rake between 34 and 35 degrees; older grounds in Europe and Latin America, like the San Siro, La Mestalla, and La Bombonera, the home of Buenos Aires club Boca Juniors, are even steeper in their upper tiers.) From that encouraging height things start to unravel. In the advance publicity, the architects have consistently trumpeted Etihad Park as a “vibrant example of urban placemaking.” To look at the rectangular prism rising over Seaver Way today, even a charitable critic would find it hard to agree. The stadium’s façade is clad in black brick, exposed black steel, and precast concrete. HOK claims this choice of materials constitutes the obligatory nod to “the site’s industrial heritage,” though quite what brick and concrete have to do with a part of the world that was once an industrial dump, then became a dirt-tracked shanty town of lean-tos and auto wrecks, is anyone’s guess. The interior of the stadium will probably be fine, as these things go, but the exterior? It’s all very TJ Maxx.

If the material heritage of Willets Point is about anything, it’s about garbage, the refuse left behind by fossil fuels and ruined cars. And garbage is certainly what visitors will get on their arrival through Etihad Park’s grand gateway, an angular, seven-story entrance lined with more than eleven thousand square feet of LED panels that the architects have dubbed, Abu Dhabishly, The Cube. The effect, an NYCFC publicist wrote to me in a recent email, “will be a dazzling, immersive arrival experience. The LED experience will be constantly transformed, populated with video, photography and graphics that set the stage for the entertainment experience within.” The task of the stadium today is to pack in as many experiences as possible, to insert experiences into experiences, such that you, the fan, proceed from the arrival experience to the LED experience to the ticket-scanning experience to the seating experience to the pregame entertainment experience to the game experience to the experience of wondering why your team sucks. Then, once all those experiences are safely secured in the vault of experience, you move on: to a second-half experience, to a getting a beverage experience, perhaps a beer experience, or a cocktail experience, then why not a burger to go with experience, and trudge back to your seat experience to enjoy a full-time experience before capping the night off with a beer-and-burger-informed toilet experience on the way to your stadium exit experience.

Will any of these experiences be within reach of the average fan? With full, transparent pricing of general admission tickets not yet made public, that’s a matter of hot debate between me and the NYCFC communications team. But the short answer is: probably not. City Football Group appears determined to appropriate the language of community while keeping less-moneyed supporters and local residents—the traditional social core of any sports franchise—at a militant distance. The cheapest seat at Yankee Stadium for a NYCFC game this season is around $20; fans can buy full-season attendance packages one season at a time. That straightforward ticketing scheme now looks set to go the way of the Iron Triangle. The horrors of dynamic pricing, a pay-what-you-can’t scheme that Gianni Infantino’s FIFA perfected ahead of the 2026 World Cup, will ensure that fans of the Pigeons are squeezed for all they’re worth, and then some. Across social media the club’s ultras are already flooding the boards with reports of the early quotes they’ve received from NYCFC sales reps to renew their season tickets, and they’re often being asked to pay double current prices, on multiyear commitments, for seats that are farther from the on-field action. The club’s stated strategy is to “maximize the value of the premium spaces”—the corporate suites, the entertainment packages, etc.—and chase subscription dollars through Etihad Park+, a recently announced annual membership program for the venue, “in order to create more affordable options throughout the rest of the stadium,” as the publicist put it to me. The most visible button on the new ground’s website is a link asking fans to “PLACE YOUR DEPOSIT” for early access to general admission tickets. On the premium seating page, as you scroll past thumbnails of the Centerline Lounge (“a private club featuring a raw bar, chef stations, and passed hors d’oeuvres”), the Gatsby Seats (“you’ll be directly next to the player benches”), the Skyline Lofts (“sophistication with a boutique atmosphere”), and the Tunnel Seats (“the most exclusive private club at Etihad Park”), a list of upper-case commands appears:

⬤ PLACE YOUR DEPOSIT
⬤ BOOK A SEAT SELECTION APPOINTMENT, powered by Calendly
⬤ RESERVE YOUR SEATS.

Etihad Park boasts so many exclusive clubs, retreats, lounges, and oases that it’s honestly worth wondering whether there will be any room left for regular seating at all—which is certainly one way to “move beyond the general admission seat/private suite dichotomy,” as Gensler insists we must. The strategy of catering to the very rich is already bearing fruit: Several premium areas have already sold out. West Egg has come home to the Valley of Ashes.

But, the stadium’s boosters will counter, Etihad Park is necessarily a structure committed to equity and fairness: Just look at all that pristine housing—affordable and already equipped, in some sections, to welcome its fortunate poors—that bricks the stadium in. “Housing is the goal,” giddily proclaim signs around the future apartment cluster. Etihad Park is no boondoggle for the billionaire class; it is the fulcrum of a new community, built by union labor for that most politically useful and definitionally slippery constituency: “ordinary New Yorkers.” But will the ordinaries have any real contact with their twenty-five-thousand temporary neighbors? On the one hand, it’s good the city is building more homes, especially affordable ones (however their affordability is defined). On the other hand, since most of their inhabitants will likely be priced out of match-day attendance, the apartment complexes abutting Etihad Park seem more like décor to boost the stadium’s atmospherics, a panel-clad Potemkin village built to approximate the dense urban cotton nesting inner-city grounds in England or Spain. It’s not uncommon for major new sports venues to disrupt existing neighborhoods; what’s unusual about Etihad Park is that it conceives the stadium and an adjoining locality for the stadium to ignore at the same time.

Here the contradictions of the sports economy reach their zenith, and the crisis of the modern stadium scales a fresh peak of absurdity. Not only does Etihad Park appear destined to alienate its own support base through various financial contortions and extortions; it will also be the world’s first football stadium dropped into a new neighborhood it doesn’t serve. And not just any new neighborhood but one of the club’s own design. Modern sport could have no clearer expression of the contempt in which its owner class holds “ordinary” people. Nor will things improve across Seaver Way: Metropolitan Park’s assemblage of casinos and shrubbery will be no less insulting to the future locals. Uniquely in the recent history of New York development, Willets Point will house a mass of working people next to forms of entertainment that are either inaccessible to them or actively hostile to their well-being. For its residents, this affordable-housing Hudson Yards will be more like a dormitory suburb, a place to sleep while sunlit life happens elsewhere.

Things don’t need to be this way, of course. The subway line that makes this parcel of land attractive to NYCFC and its collaborators extends from Willets Point on elevated tracks that run east-to-west. A half mile away, in heavily Mexican and Ecuadorian Corona, the 7 train acts as a sort of canopy for commerce, and Roosevelt Avenue has evolved into a Benjaminian gallery where ceviche stands, cheap boutiques (Franky Fashion, Elegante), ninety-nine-cent stores, and laundromats sit cheek by jowl with savory ice cream parlors, cram schools, and neon-lit dives that pump smoke and cumbia deep into the night. Here the streets are genuinely vibrant, and the food and drink feel happily of their own place, tickling the senses in a way that Samuelsson’s burger concept never will: Offal steams in the windows of the taco trucks, chalupas whirl in their comales, the tlayudas are as big as tennis rackets, and there is fresh juice always available to treat everything from diabetes to a broken heart. Around 40 percent of the New York subway network runs on elevated lines. Built in steel and cast iron by the city over the first half of the twentieth century, the above-ground tracks attract none of the love (or hate) that’s reserved for the subterranean system, but the life that flourishes on the streets that run below them illustrates their enduring, if underappreciated, importance. Public infrastructure like the subway does not simply provide a service to its users; it shapes urban culture. I think of the elevated tracks, which extend far into Queens and the Bronx and Brooklyn, as shields protecting a more welcoming New York—scruffier but somehow gentler—from the clutches of the real estate speculators. Who would today’s New Yorkers rather take as their idol: John Travolta inhaling his double slice under the tracks of the D train in Saturday Night Fever, dough in the belly and rhythm forever in his hips, or a Chase Sapphire Reserve member Ubering to Etihad Park for a night of meat discs and experiences in the Gatsby Seats?

In the shade of New York’s greatest public asset, Corona offers a powerful contrast to what’s unfolding a subway stop away, a different idea of urban adaptation. Stadium architects might indulge in Panglossian babble about moving beyond the dichotomy between rich and poor, expensive and cheap, but around New York’s future home of soccer a sense of deepening social polarization becomes unavoidable. Between Etihad Park, Citi Field, and the National Tennis Center, where a grounds pass to attend the first day of the US Open now costs $363 on Ticketmaster, Willets Point feels more and more like a collection of monuments to money, gated compounds for the rich of the type you might find in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. An enclave once built on the huffing camaraderie of men working metal is turning into something else entirely: a place that looks like a tightly populated inner-urban quarter but feels—in its politics, aesthetic preferences, and estrangement from its own environment—more like a suburb. Two ideas of New York now live next to each other: the closed New York of the “district,” privately financed, segregative, and committed to a plastic ideal of exclusivity; and the open New York of the plein air subway galleries, ramshackle, democratic, and priced to clear.

But think of the triangles! The Iron Triangle is passing into history as a mutant Guardiolismo of the city takes its place. Etihad Park–Metropolitan Park–Flushing Meadows Corona Park; NYCFC–the Mets–the US Open; soccer-baseball-tennis; Hard Rock Entertainment–Major Food Group–City Football Group; dining-gaming–affordable housing; experience upon experience upon experience. In Willets Point’s evolving syncretism of Emirati money and American garbage, the patterns, the geometries, the possibilities are mesmerizing. The triangle is dead; long live the triangle.