New Amsterdam FC, the potential replacement to the Cosmos
New Amsterdam FC was founded in 2020 as a response to the Cosmos going on hiatus due to the pandemic. The club name pays homage to the history of New York City as it was founded as a dutch colony named New Amsterdam. The logo contains Henry Hudson’s famous boat, the Half-Moon.
Currently, as New York has relaxed the number of fans that could go to the stadiums, the team plays out of Hofstra University’s Soccer Stadium which is in Hempstead, Long Island. The stadium is a mile south of the last place that the Cosmos last played, Mitchell Field.
Conversely, they play in NISA, The National Independent Soccer Association, taking the Cosmos’s place in the League. During the time when New York State didn’t let any fans into the stadiums, the team played their games out of the Hudson Sports Complex in Warwick, New York, a mere 65 miles north of New York City.
New Amsterdam FC will be interesting to watch
New Amsterdam Football Club’s philosophy is a three-parter. The first part of this philosophy is to the community as a whole. To that end, the club pledges to invest in the community that hosts the club, be it, Chelsea Piers, in Midtown Manhattan or in Hempstead by providing opportunities to local businesses or tryouts to either join the first team or the academy.
The second part of the club’s philosophy which closely ties in with the first is to give the fans the option to buy a share of the club. Something that the club interestingly did was to give the players a piece of the club as thanks to joining and playing for the team. The last part of this trio is to be sustainable and not to be owned by one particular person or entity.
As seen with the club giving a piece of the team to the players, they want to be known as “the Club of the People”. That is the main reason that instead of joining the United Soccer Leagues, the team joined NISA as it gave them a choice in terms of the ownership style.
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One initiative that the team has done is give any player who tries out to be scouted. These scouts have been the first-team coach but also some European teams. Such teams include: Hamburg SV, Werner Bremen, St. Pauli FC, Hannover 96. New Amsterdam boasts a reserve team that plays in NISA Nation, a fourth-division league. The under-19 squad will go to London to sightsee as well as to play against its similar in February.