For the first time since inception, New York City FC is celebrating the primary tenants of Yankee Stadium and part-owners of NYCFC, the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball.
Matchday 25 against Nashville SC is officially Yankees Night. They're going to be selling a special piece of limited-run crossover New York Yankees x New York City FC merchandise, a New Era hat, at Yankee Stadium on matchday. You'll likely see plenty of footage from when Matt Freese threw out the first pitch before the Yankees played the Minnesota Twins on August 12 on the field where he's usually standing in front of goal and showing off his throwing arm in other ways.
This first Yankees Night is part of the club's "City Celebration Series," a bunch of theme nights celebrating the diversity of the people who make up New York City and the NYCFC fanbase. That now includes the Yankees and their fans, though the question that feels hard to shake about the whole thing: Why now?
It almost goes without saying that the Yankees don't need extra publicity. They're the most successful sports franchise in North America historically, and in the present, they're second in Major League Baseball in attendance having already drawn a little over 2.6 million fans to games in the Bronx this season.
It's always Yankees Night when you're at Yankee Stadium, even if it's to watch New York City FC play. The Nashville match will be the 142nd time NYCFC plays at the Bronx baseball venue, though that number will only climb so much higher over the remainder of this season and in 2026, given the impending completion of NYCFC's permanent soccer-specific home, Etihad Park in Willets Point, Queens, by 2027.
The new stadium remains a ways off, though, with dozens more matches likely held at Yankee Stadium in the interim, so you can't really view Yankees Night as a going-away party. The Yankees don't appear to be going anywhere as co-owners of NYCFC, either, as the baseball team remains a stakeholder even after the club's owners rearranged their structure last summer when Bolivian-American billionaire Marcelo Claure bought a piece of the club and its forthcoming Queens stadium.
The NYCFC-Yankees connection has always been there and looks set to endure even when NYCFC packs up and moves out on its own to a shiny new place across town.
Speaking of stadiums in Queens, there's some great irony to the fact that Yankees Night in the Bronx is the first home match after a failed attempt by NYCFC to play at the city's other MLB stadium, with their match against the Columbus Crew scheduled for Citi Field postponed and moved to September 17 at Yankee Stadium.
Andrew Leigh
Life in the Bronx as tenants at Yankee Stadium hasn't always been easy, but it's been a reliable venue for NYCFC since 2015. Citi Field and the Mets are newer to working as occasional hosts and landlords for NYCFC, but a grass-forced cancellation situation like what occurred in Queens hadn't ever occurred across a decade of playing as secondary tenants in the Bronx.
Ultimately, NYCFC celebrating the Yankees feels too much like throwing a party for your landlord and hosting it in the apartment you rent from them. The existence of Yankees Night also feels like it all but guarantees that we'll get a Mets Night some day in 2026 for the purposes of achieving balance among local professional baseball teams.
Another confusing part of Yankees Night remains that it would be NYCFC that would truly benefit most from one of the local baseball teams throwing them a celebration night. The Mets have released their own soccer jerseys as giveaways on promotional nights in the past, and the Yankees hosted AC Milan Night at Yankee Stadium for the other professional soccer team they own a stake in. Something like that might have helped NYCFC out in its earlier days, or even in the immediate post-MLS Cup win period to maximize their visibility as the first-ever local MLS champions.
Maybe it's not worth it to think too deeply about Yankees Night, though, and instead just view it as another piece of the intense brand marketing campaign undertaken by New York City FC this summer. This Yankees Night promotion wasn't even added to their City Celebration Series calendar until June 30, only a few weeks before the club floated that massive inflatable pigeon up and down NEw York City's local waterways.
Hudson River Blue Staff
Whatever agency or agencies the club hired to ramp up awareness efforts this summer is putting the work in. Not just the pigeon, but with the citywide poster and billboard campaign that includes tons of advertising on subways, and some massive billboards erected around the city.
Add to that marketing blitz some leveraging of the longstanding Yankees relationship to get NYCFC players on the field and pictured hanging out with Aaron Judge makes too much sense to have taken as long as it did to happen.
It continues with Yankees Night, a slightly awkward thing to consider but one that will, at the very least, likely produce a sharp looking hat that some number of NYCFC and Yankees will gladly buy and wear. Beyond that, it feels a little too much like a professional sports version of a belated Father's Day celebration.
