New York's Met Oval Wins Inaugural League For Clubs Championship | OneFootball

The Maspeth, Queens-based soccer club, Met Oval Academy, won the first-ever edition of The League For Clubs national championship on Saturday night, defeating Napa Valley 1839 FC 3-2 on penalties at the Toyota Soccer Center in Frisco, Texas.

The game remained tied at 2-2 after extra time, before goalkeeper Costi Christodoulou made three saves for Met Oval in the shootout, including the match-winning save of Napa Valley's fifth penalty.

Met Oval made it all the way from the new league's regional regular season, through regional playoffs, to a dramatic set of national playoff matches to eventually win the league’s first-ever national championship.

A win against the much-fancied league founders, Tulsa Athletic, in the national semifinals was another highlight, featuring a dramatic second half of extra time that included three goals. Met Oval’s Glenford Gentle III scored the winner to see his side through to the final.

The final itself went even further than that, as the teams could not be separated after extra time, so penalty kicks were needed to decide the winner.

Christodoulou’s heroics saw the league’s first national title go to one of New York’s and the United States’ historic institutions – one that claims to have the oldest continuously used soccer field in the country.

Soccer at the Metropolitan Oval dates back to the early 1900s. It was established in 1925 by German-Hungarian immigrants in New York City who attempted to replicate the soccer fields of Europe at this field in Maspeth.

New York’s primary local league, the Cosmopolitan Soccer League, founded in 1923 and still going strong, has similar roots. It was originally known as the German American Soccer League, and several of the league's historic clubs, including record 11-time champion German-Hungarian SC, five-time champion SC Eintracht, and two-time champion Blau Weiss Gotschee, have links to the Met Oval.

Werner Roth, who went on to star for the famous New York Cosmos in the NASL, played at the Met Oval for the German-Hungarians youth teams and said that the venue, with its view of the Manhattan skyline in the distance, inspired him to think of a world beyond Ridgewood, Queens.

The Oval has also hosted several finals in the United States' national cup competition, the US Open Cup.

Today, the Metropolitan Oval soccer setup is focused on its elite development program. It is a founding member club of MLS’s youth development program, MLS Next Pro.

Three Met Oval players, Balthi Saunders, Matt Iriarte, and Nelson Reynoso, were named in the League For Clubs' Northeast Conference team of the season for 2025, while the Met Oval and Napa Valley 1839 players were also honoured at halftime during the FC Dallas game against New York City FC on Friday night ahead of the final.

The YouTube stream of the final on the National Soccer Network has almost 6,000 views, and the League For Clubs will be encouraged by its debut season.

In the context of new American soccer leagues at this level, merely organising a national league and completing a season with relatively few hitches can be seen as an achievement in itself.

“That's a wrap on Season 1,” the league said in a social media post. “There were plenty of highs and lows.

“There were things we did well that we need to keep getting better at, and things that we didn't do well that we will work to improve for '26. But we did it. And we couldn't have done it without all of you.”

In winning the inaugural League For Clubs national championship at a time when the eyes of the soccer world have been focused on the New York and New Jersey area, the Met Oval Academy reminded everyone of a 100-year-old soccer institution.

It was also another reminder that New York City and the surrounding area is one of the most historic and diverse soccer hotbeds in the world, and as the region prepares to host the 2026 World Cup final, this history deserves more recognition.