Major League Soccer just revealed the schedule for the 2027 sprint season, the 14-game mini-season that will take place between February and May before the league shifts to its new fall-to-spring competitive calendar beginning next July when the 2027/28 season kicks off.
The sprint season will be the last MLS campaign New York City FC will play before the club moves into Etihad Park on July 17, 2027, when they play the home opener to end all home openers and usher in the new 3.0 version of MLS, whatever that may end up looking like once all the details (New divisions? New roster rules?) get finalized.
Before we get there, it's a unique 14-game competition that will see each MLS team only play the 14 other teams in their respective conferences, seven at home and seven on the road. For New York City, the sprint season will be hosted exclusively at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, pending one match — Saturday, March 27 vs DC United — that's Venue TBD due to Major League Baseball scheduling conflicts. The full schedule can be viewed here, or in the image right below this paragraph.
Opening night comes on Saturday, February 20, 2027, against the defending Supporters' Shield holders, Nashville SC. It's two straight away matches to start, as NYCFC then faces FC Cincinnati on the road a week later, a 3:00 pm ET kickoff on the afternoon of Saturday, February 27.
This weird asterisk of a season will be a true going-away campaign in the Bronx for NYCFC, as their home slate begins and ends at Yankee Stadium with the two biggest home matches of the regular season, from a hype perspective. It's also jam-packed with home games in the month of March, before the MLB season begins — that is, if the MLB season does even begin on schedule in 2027, given the widespread expectation of a potential work stoppage due to a dispute over a new collective bargaining agreement between the players union and the MLB owners.
Regardless, the 12th and final MLS home opener played at Yankee Stadium will see Inter Miami CF come north to play on a cold March evening, with the first home match scheduled for Wednesday, March 3 at 7:00 pm ET, the first time the team has played a midweek home opener in club history.
Lionel Messi, Rodrigo De Paul, and whoever else is on that star-studded Miami squad by next February will get one last taste of Yankee Stadium, and the building gets one more chance to draw a big Messi-driven crowd before the action shifts to the 25,000-seat capacity Etihad Park.
That's how the home NYCFC schedule starts, and yesterday, word broke about how the NYCFC home schedule ends. The club's Yankee Stadium farewell match will be on 2027 Decision Day, a Hudson River Derby with Red Bull New York at 5:00 pm ET on Saturday, May 8 in the Bronx.
Michael Battista
The other non-Red Bull, non-Miami, non-DC home opponents for NYCFC will include Philadelphia Union (Saturday, March 6), Toronto FC (Saturday, March 13), Columbus Crew (Saturday, April 3), and Charlotte FC (Saturday, April 24).
There is only one afternoon match scheduled as part of the 2027 home schedule, with a 3:00 pm ET kickoff on March 6 when the Union come to Yankee Stadium for one last time.
The club is leaning into the months-long going-away party for Yankee Stadium angle with the release of this sprint season schedule, dubbing it "The Walkoff Season" and embracing this one last period of baseball stadium tie-ins. The Red Bull match on Decision Day should be a spectacle, though it's unclear if there's any chance it might end up not being the final NYCFC match hosted at Yankee Stadium.
If fans are looking to say goodbye to Citi Field, they might have to act fast, because as it stands right now, the club's final regular-season home match of the 2026 season on October 31 against CF Montréal is also the final NYCFC game scheduled to be played at Citi Field, across the street from the team's future full-time home.
That might not end up being the case, because any plans for possible NYCFC venues for the MLS Cup Playoffs that follow the sprint season and wrap up before the end of May are unclear at this time, though that would require the team actually performing well enough over a condensed few months of games to qualify.
