Brooklyn FC played the final game of their first USL Super League season, settling for a 0-0 with Carolina Ascent FC at Maimonides Park in Coney Island.
The clean sheet was Brooklyn's eighth this season and the first for goalkeeper Alexa Goldberg, who made her debut with BKFC in the final game of the campaign. In a vacuum, it could have been a decent result, as Carolina Ascent FC just won the USL Super League Players' Shield and the squad holds a +22 goal differential on the season, also with a 5-0 home win over Brooklyn in their belt from these teams's last meeting in North Carolina on April 12.
The result doesn't exist in a vacuum, though, and the goalless draw confirmed that Brooklyn will miss the first-ever USL Super League Playoffs, ending their season with 39 points through 28 matches played (10W-9D-9L, -4 GD) across the Fall and Spring halves of the league calendar. Brooklyn also went winless in their namesake borough in games played at their primary home stadium, Maimonides Park, holding a record of 0W-4D-3L while playing in Coney Island.
Brooklyn can finish no higher than 5th Place in the table but will likely end up in 6th Place (pending Fort Lauderdale United FC's results in their final two games), while only the top four teams in the USL Super League qualify for the postseason.
The home side needed to get a first win at Maimonides Park to have any longshot hope of sneaking into the playoff field, but wins of any kind were almost impossible to come by for Brooklyn across the second half of their inaugural season.
The failure to qualify for the playoffs means Brooklyn FC won't take the field again until they kick off the 2025-2026 USL Super League season on August 23 with a home match at Maimonides Park vs Tampa Bay Sun FC – you can see the full 2025-2026 schedule of BKFC matches here if you're on to next season already.
Two very different half-seasons
The Spring portion of the calendar ended with Brooklyn only collecting one win and 10 points from 14 matches played after the winter break and their trip to train and play a friendly in Italy. What followed was a precipitous drop for a Brooklyn team that looked like one of the league's best through the first half of this season.
When the USL Super League went on its winter break in mid-December, Brooklyn was in 1st Place and six points clear at the top of the table, riding into the recess on a six-match winning streak. They'd done it by being one of the league's stingiest defenses, keeping six clean sheets while conceding just eight goals through those first 14 games.
That proved to be the high point of the season. The defense lost whatever worked in the Fall half of the year, struggling through the Spring by conceding 26 goals in 14 games, including lopsided losses on the road by scorelines of 6-0 and 5-0.
That 5-0 loss came, as mentioned above, at the hands of Carolina Ascent FC and was the result that spurred the team's front office to move on from former Brooklyn FC head coach Jessica Silva.
Andrew Leigh
Woes on the Brooklyn coast
There's a full-circle element to Brooklyn closing out the season by hosting Carolina.
The Ascent was scheduled to travel to Coney Island on August 31, 2024 for the first USL Super League match in Brooklyn's history and the first competitive match played by a Brooklyn FC team at home venue Maimonides Park.
Instead, issues with the artificial turf installed for soccer at Maimonides Park created player safety concerns and caused Brooklyn to relocate all Fall home matches to Columbia University's Rocco B. Commisso Soccer Stadium in Upper Manhattan. Brooklyn had to wait until March 15 against Fort Lauderdale United FC to play in Brooklyn, and by then it was their eighth home match of the season.
They lost 0-2 to Fort Lauderdale in that Brooklyn debut, then four days later returned to Maimonides and lost again, 0-3 to Dallas Trinity, at that time making it a four-match scoreless streak as the post-winter break tailspin took hold.
Subsequent home matches in Brooklyn featured some crushing late goals, like on March 29 when Brooklyn led 2-1 from the 51st minute until Tampa Bay Sun's Natasha Flint equalized at 90'+4' to grab a 2-2 draw.
A similar script unfolded on May 10 in the penultimate home match against Spokane Zephyr FC, as Brooklyn held a 2-0 lead inside 20 minutes, but then watched it all fall apart as soon as defender Tori Hansen was shown a straight red card in the 71st minute – one of two reds given out across the Super League in its first year. With the player advantage, Spokane scored goals in minutes 74' and 90'+2' to give Brooklyn another frustrating, deflating 2-2 draw at home.
Seven matches without a win is no way to start life fully in Brooklyn, especially when it's after a lengthy delay to making your in-borough debut.
What's in store next season?
Brooklyn ended this season with Sporting Director Kevin Tenjo acting as the team's interim head coach. After Jessica Silva's dismissal, the club officially announced that experienced college assistant and TST regular Fabio Barros would be interim head coach – but he never turned up on the touchline and Brooklyn has scrubbed all mention of him from their official team website and social media channels.
Instead, it was Tenjo in charge of the team down the stretch, and he'll now need to figure out how to fix what broke for Brooklyn after the winter break. They seem to need a new head coach first and foremost, and inevitable player movement will follow, too. It should be a busy summer for Tenjo, since the Brooklyn Sporting Director is also supposed to be prepping for the team's first season in USL Championship on the men's side in 2026.
Andrew Leigh
From the outside, it seems Brooklyn also needs to get some positive results and generate some on-field excitement while playing in their borough, if they're going to create more opportunities to draw fan interest and up their attendance average at the 7,000-seat minor league baseball stadium.
The announced attendance for the season finale at Maimonides Park was 1,500, and across the seven Coney Island home matches the team drew an average of 1,743 fans, peaking with an announced crowd of 2,830 when Brooklyn hosted Tampa Bay on Saturday, March 29.
Those are all announced attendance figures and might capture the number of tickets sold – the crowds in the building consistently looked sparse to even the most untrained eye.
The test will now be if a new season and a heavier, regular dose of Brooklyn FC home matches in Coney Island can make a difference. Interestingly Brooklyn will play nine of 14 home games scheduled for the entirety of the 2025-2026 season during the Fall half of the league's calendar, so they'll have lots of chances to get a first Brooklyn win locked down once the USL Super League returns for season two.
