A new professional soccer team is coming to Brooklyn. The USL today announced that a new Brooklyn franchise will launch in its third-tier USL League One starting in the 2025 season.
The new Brooklyn USL team will be brought to life by the North Sixth Group, a “strategic services” company that also holds investments in two lower-division soccer teams in Italy, Ascoli Calcio 1898 FC in Serie B and Campobasso Football Club in Serie D. Campobasso is somewhat notable in that it counts married daytime TV personalities Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos as partial owners.
Much remains unknown about this new Brooklyn USL squad at the time of its announcement. The club doesn’t have a name or badge, and it’s unclear where they plan to train or play their home matches. We reached out to USL seeking further clarification on the home venue situation, but a league source says there’s no Brooklyn venue announcement to be shared at this time.
Even while details remain scarce, the new Brooklyn USL team appears to have ambitious plans. Forbes reports that the Brooklyn club also wants to set up a youth academy and eventually have its own professional women’s team, with an eye toward having that Brooklyn-based women’s club compete in the USL Super League, the recently-announced league seeking Division One status that aims to compete directly with the NWSL. There’s also mention in that Forbes report of the potential for this Brooklyn club to eventually step up from League One to the USL Championship, “as long as certain benchmarks, such as relocating to a more spacious stadium, are met.”
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The new Brooklyn team represents a pivot for the USL, which long looked to have a New York City-based club in the works for the borough of Queens. Queensboro FC grabbed headlines with its 2019 launch thanks to a soccer-star-studded ownership group (David Villa, Aly Wagner, etc.) and its ambitious plan to build a 7,500-seat soccer stadium on the campus of York College in Jamaica.
QBFC, though, never got a professional men’s team up and running. The Queens team’s plans to debut in the USL Championship were delayed multiple times, and no ground has been broken on the stadium planned for York College. It now in fact appears as though Queensboro FC is no longer in operation at all, with no public updates from the club or signs of activity to speak of for many months.
This new as-yet-unnamed Brooklyn club would be the first professional soccer team to call the borough home since the New York Cosmos, who used the Minor League Baseball stadium at Coney Island as their home field for their final season in the North American Soccer League. Could that same venue, now dubbed Maimonides Park, be in the running as a home venue for this newly-announced team?
We’ll have to wait for more concrete information about his new addition to the New York City soccer scene, but it will be undeniably interesting to see how another club’s NYC soccer stadium saga will unfold.
