Gotham FC get NWSL Championship celebrations right second time around

NEW YORK — Less than two days after defeating the Washington Spirit 1-0 in the NWSL Championship in San Jose, Calif., Gotham FC were back in New York City, rolling down the streets of lower Manhattan.

On Sunday, they stood on the top of two blue buses that crawled down Broadway as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” blared from its speakers, following a female-led drumline that guided them through the Canyon of Heroes. Fans draped in Gotham’s 2025 championship scarves cheered on their club as blue and white confetti shot through the air. At City Hall, New York City Mayor Eric Adams presented each player with their own key to the city. It wasn’t a traditional ticker tape parade, but it certainly felt special.

On Saturday, midfielder Rose Lavelle scored a goal in the 80th minute to seal the team’s second championship and her first. Gotham also became the league’s first No. 8 seed to win the league’s title game. Still, the celebrations were almost two years in the making.

“Being able to celebrate like this was the single most important thing to me, personally,” Gotham FC governor and lead owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett said on Monday. “Obviously, we just came in as new owners (in 2023), but that was a complete failure of the organization to not be able to celebrate like the team deserved. We started planning this on Nov. 24, 2023. We said, ‘When we get back to the championship, which we will, this is where we are going to celebrate it.’”

Monday’s celebration was in sharp contrast to the lackluster acknowledgement that followed Gotham’s first NWSL title in 2023. That year, despite their recent and successful rebrand from their old identity, Sky Blue, and winning the championship after finishing last the previous year, the club did not organize any public-facing events.

Gotham held a belated event for season-ticket holders and filled its offseason with New York-centric media moments, like the ringing of the New York Stock Exchange bell and having players featured at the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square. But fans yearned for a celebration like what the club and New York put together on Monday.

“I’m so happy to be here with my team, my club,” Gotham and U.S. women’s national team midfielder Jaelin Howell said from the steps of City Hall, as workers nearby cleared the confetti. “They mean so much to me. It’s been a really long season, so for everything to come together the way that it did, and bring the trophy home to the city, is really special.”

The team’s dominance in recent years has sparked conversations of another NWSL dynasty. Monday’s celebration, a last-minute affair squeezed in before 10 of Gotham’s players reported to national team duty, was also a major step forward in solidifying the team’s place in a crowded New York City sports market.

“The New York and New Jersey sports community appreciates — actually, to be honest, demands — excellence, which is why it’s such an unbelievable honor to bring home this trophy to celebrate with you today,” Gotham FC general manager Yael Averbuch West told fans on Monday. “I want everyone here not just to celebrate today, but to pay really close attention to what we’re building at Gotham.”

The last 36 hours for Gotham have been a whirlwind. The team flew into Newark, N.J., late Sunday night from California, before traveling back to Manhattan for the 10 a.m. parade on Monday. The club estimated thousands of fans came out to celebrate Gotham at City Hall.

“To get 3,000 people in less than 24 hours to show up for Gotham on a Monday morning shows what we’re building here,” Tisch Blodgett said. “We are not done yet. This is just the start. Obviously, we have to do this today because we won a trophy. But this is about what we’ve done in the last few years, and what we’ll continue to do.”

The crowd featured a mix of longtime season ticket holders and young fans. One fan made a sign that read “It’s never too early for Fireball!”, referencing Lavelle’s parents’ tradition of taking Fireball shorts during games, and “Saucy Sonnett” on either side, a nod to defender Emily Sonnett. Their game-day heroics during the NWSL Championship helped secure Gotham’s win.

Allison Johnson traveled to Manhattan from Fords, N.J., with her sister and mother. The trio, season ticket holders for about four years, woke up early to catch the 7:30 a.m. train.

“This is really cool, to be able to celebrate in the city,” Johnson said, “because if you look in New York, it’s the women’s sports (teams) winning all these championships. They deserve the attention they’re getting, and this is good for the game. They fought really hard to get here.”

Carol Johnson, Allison’s mother, said she was a freshman in high school when Title IX kicked in. For her, this moment with her daughters was special.

“It’s fun to see how women’s soccer and girls’ soccer have progressed from that first scrimmage I played as a freshman in high school,” she said, describing how her team would travel far for each game. “There were no other teams in Middlesex County (in New Jersey) that we could play — and how it’s progressed, it’s just phenomenal.”

Eleven-year-old Lucy Carson, wearing a winter USWNT hat, rode the subway with her mother, Francesca, from nearby Brooklyn to attend the parade. As a center midfielder for Brooklyn United, which has a club partnership with Gotham, Carson said she was most excited to catch a glimpse of Lavelle. The Carsons said they attend at least one match a year, and have been following the sport for four years, or about as long as Lucy has been playing.

“That’s when we really got into the women’s soccer teams, like (the) professional teams here,” Francesca said. “The growth that we’ve seen in the past four years, even, has been insane, in terms of popularity and awareness about the sport. … We’re just so excited to see that level of support for women’s sports.”

Gotham’s growth in recent years has been every bit intentional. While the team’s 2023 celebrations may have been muted, the club entered the 2024 offseason with a bold vision. The team turned heads with the signing of a quartet of USWNT stars — Lavelle, Sonnett, Tierna Davidson and Crystal Dunn (who now plays for Paris Saint-Germain in France). This earned Gotham a superteam label and a target on its back.

Last year, Gotham FC made it to the NWSL semifinals, where they set their mark in NWSL lore with a historic matchup against the Spirit. The match remains one of the most entertaining league games in recent memory — and may have been the first sign of the teams’ budding rivalry.

This season was no different, with Gotham bringing in key players, including signing Howell in an offseason trade and signing rookie of the year Lilly Reale from UCLA. The team arguably secured the biggest transfer of the year when it acquired Jaedyn Shaw in September for a record $1.25 million intra-league fee. The 21-year-old seamlessly meshed with the team, scoring the winning goal in the 97th minute of their semifinal against the Orlando Pride. She also coined the phrase of the postseason: “underdog my ass.”

Importantly, however, these last two seasons included a relaying of the club’s foundation, Tisch Blodgett said. This helped the sporting side flourish.

“When we first came in, it was clear there was really no infrastructure. We had to build a professional sports organization. There was no office. Everyone was using their personal laptops,” Tish Blodgett said. “On the soccer side, we had a great coach, a great general manager, but we didn’t have a full medical staff.”

So, the team brought in a new head of medical, a new performance team and an analytics department.

“There’s so much we needed to build,” Tisch Blodgett said. “But I would say, from my perspective, the biggest thing that I felt like was missing last year was I, as an owner, never really defined our culture. We went really deep and built out what our mission was, what our vision was, what our values were, and we quite literally spray-painted them all over the office.”

Gotham pushed through injuries and another congested schedule that took them around the world for the Concacaf Champions Cup this year. The team’s chemistry and connectivity are as evident on the pitch as they are off it. On Monday, players were one another’s biggest hype-people, including when Gotham captain Mandy Freeman took the stage and the team joined the crowd in chanting her name.

“It just feels like everybody loves and cares for each other on and off the field,” Howell said. “We have the quality, but also, it really is like a family, and I truly mean that. It’s cliché, but I think that’s what got us through in the end.”

The team’s celebrations are an example of that family, including their now-viral “Feliz Navidad” victory song. As Howell explained it, the Spanish players on the team, including World Cup-winning forward Esther Gonzalez, love to play Spanish songs in the locker room, but they wanted a song that featured words in both Spanish and English. The only song they could come up with was the classic Christmas hit. This predates the holiday season, too, becoming a tradition around September.

The season may be over, but this team is “never finished,” as players and executives repeated from the City Hall steps on Monday. Once the next international window closes, Gotham will get right back to work, vying for another title on the world’s stage. In January, barely a month into the offseason, they head to London for the final phase of the inaugural FIFA Women’s Champions Cup.

“We just embrace the mentality of the city, the grit and determination and the hustle. We don’t want to stop,” Howell said. “That’s the mentality of the club, just like the city of New York, and that’s special in its own way, and that’s something we want to continue to do. You’ve seen it this year, even through the adversity, we always came out on top.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Gotham FC, NWSL, Women's Soccer

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