Gotham FC leave Champions Cup disappointed, but with an ambitious long-term plan | OneFootball

Gotham FC finished third in the inaugural Champions Cup, but they will be of little value to a team with the ambition of being a global brand.

However, the reality is that the competition was skewed against them. Played in the middle of the NWSL offseason, Gotham had to call players back into their orbit before the minimum 28-day off-season break required by the collective bargaining agreement between the NWSL and the players’ association. Their preseason has been disrupted as a result, with the time off needing to be reallocated before the new season begins. As if that wasn’t enough, to play in the tournament the NWSL side had to travel to London, the home city of Arsenal, who had a big advantage as a result.

“There needs to be more conversation and planning and consultation with clubs and players and staff about how it fits best,” says Gotham’s director of operations, Ellis Clark. “You need the quality to be there and you need people to be able to fully invest time, resources and the will to win in it. So, there’s big conversations to be had about [the Champions Cup’s] future.”

Gotham rose to the logistical challenges presented to them. They knew that players wouldn’t be ready to compete if they stuck to their regular schedule, so they negotiated an earlier preseason start date.

“We knew really early on that if we didn’t do that the players physically wouldn’t be in the place that they needed to be,” says Clark. “Just baseline medically, player health wise they would not be in the right place to go and play 90 minutes against Corinthians and then another 90 minutes in a final or third-place game. So we were really proactive in planning for it. We have a great medical and high-performance team, superstar people, but I felt worried about cutting into the time off and rest and the emotional and mental capacity to deal with coming back into things so soon.”

It was important for Gotham to put player welfare at the heart of their decision-making around the tournament to set the standard for teams that may represent the NWSL in the tournament in future years.

“Our priority is obviously always us and winning, [but] we had to think about the greater good of the game and other players and staff that would come after us in this competition,” Clark says . “Within that though, people have to feel joy. We want players to feel pure joy when they look back at this huge chunk of their lives and see it as having been a home, not just a workplace.”

Clark says they are lucky at Gotham, praising the club’s ownership for supporting and spending to back their ambitions. As an example, she cites Gotham’s run to the 2025 NWSL Championship. The eighth-seeded team had defied the odds to make it that far, and the owners paid for team staff to fly their families out to San Jose for the match, in addition to the club’s entire business staff .

That move was expensive, but it was important, says co-owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, the founder and CEO of private equity and venture company Next 3 Ventures, who led her family’s investment in the club in 2023.

“When I told our board I told everyone to hold on to their seats before I told them that we were about to really invest in doing that,” says Tisch Blodgett. “Some thought it was crazy but, to me, those are the moments that you remember forever. Our ticketing team, for example, would probably not have been able to go without us paying for it.”

As a member of the Tisch family who have co-owned the NFL’s New York Giants since 1991, Tisch Blodgett is familiar with big sporting moments and the impact they can have on an organisation’s staff.

“The people that still work there still have their rings from the two Super Bowl wins that I’ve been a part of and they still talk about being a part of those moments,” she says, having been six years old when her grandfather bought the Giants. “They’re why you work in sports and that’s why it was really important to me that the whole team at Gotham got to be a part of it.”

The run to the NWSL Championship was a rollercoaster after a disappointing regular season that saw them scrape into the playoffs.

“It was an emotional journey,” says Tisch Blodgett. “We had invested a lot in the team, our medical staff and our performance staff. We had the largest coaching staff in the league but we were underperforming. There was just this frustration amongst the players and staff, all of us wondering what’s wrong, because we should have been higher than where we were.

“The US media had turned on us a little and we’d been written off going into the playoffs, but when I was with the team in Kansas City there was just this feeling in the room that while nobody believed in us, we believed in each other.

“Having our backs to the wall brought the team together. It galvanised everyone.”

Tisch Blodgett says her family had not been planning to buy another team, and were just looking at potential investments before joining the team’s ownership group in 2023. They found that the NWSL had “product market fit”, says Tisch Blodgett, who was head of global marketing at Peloton.

“Then we had a feeling of, OK, if we’re going to do this and we’re going to invest in this league, it has to be Gotham,” she says. “It’s in our backyard. This is our community, our home team, and we really felt like it was a market ripe for a great women’s soccer team if it had the right resources and the right people focused on it to help build it.”

Tisch Blodgett sees the team as a legacy project inspired by her grandfather and the way the Giants kept her family present with each other week-on-week during the NFL season.

“My hope is that we are owners of Gotham for generations to come,” she says. “I think about growing up wanting to be in my grandfather’s seat and now I’m here. I see my kids involved with the team, engaged with the team and I hope one day they’re running this team. So, if we’re going to be here 30 or 40 years from now, hopefully longer, we’re not going to make a decision based on what is cheapest today or tomorrow, we’re going to do what’s right for the team and what puts us in the best place to win. Winning is what’s going to help us in our mission to become a global brand. It drives marketing, it drives attendances, it drives everything.”

Header image: [Photograph: Jasper Wax/Getty Images]