Professional soccer returns to Randall's Island this weekend with Icahn Stadium serving as home venue for Gotham FC when they face Seattle Reign FC, what will be the first NWSL match ever played on the island.
It's not the first time Gotham has hosted at Icahn Stadium, as the club made its debut there last summer, beating CF Monterrey 2-1 in Concacaf W Champions Cup action on a rain-soaked August evening.
Gotham returning adds NWSL to the list of soccer competitions to come through Randall's Island, and adds another chapter to the soccer history of this parcel of land nestled neatly between the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens.
This was the place where Pelé debuted for the New York Cosmos in June 1975 at the now-demolished Downing Stadium. That original stadium on the island, erected in the 1930s as Triborough Stadium through the efforts of New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, hosted more than just the Cosmos and Pelé.
It was the site of multiple US Open Cup finals (1954, 1970), it hosted international soccer friendlies, like the United States losing 4-0 to Scotland in 1949, and had European club teams like Eintracht Frankfurt and Real Madrid come through to play summer friendlies in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the present, Randall's Island now has a much smaller stadium focused mainly on track and field events, since that was what the 5,000-seat Icahn Stadium was purpose-built to host. Yet since 2024, when a $3 million donation from New York City FC facilitated the installation of a brand-new Kentucky bluegrass playing surface inside the Icahn Stadium running track, Randall's Island has found a new niche as a destination for some of the world's best soccer players.
Since the 2024 renovation, Icahn Stadium hosted numerous matches played by New York City FC II of MLS Next Pro, the one aforementioned Gotham FC match, but also training sessions for top European clubs like Eintracht Frankfurt and Everton FC, plus the national teams of Australia and South Korea while they were in the New York area to play friendlies.
This June, Icahn Stadium hosted its most prestigious soccer event to date and got New York City its one and only taste of World Cup-level soccer this summer, as the Netherlands played Uzbekistan behind closed doors in what was the final preparatory friendly for each team before they began their World Cup journeys.
For the stewards of Randall's Island, the Randall's Island Park Alliance, the recent proliferation of high-profile soccer visitors to Icahn Stadium has been a success. The field has held up while juggling the needs of track and field with the needs of soccer, and hosting soccer at Icahn has also supported the wider mission of supporting, improving, and maintaining the island's many acres of green space and parkland.
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Soccer at Icahn: Mutually beneficial
Outside the walls of Icahn Stadium, the island still has hundreds of acres of parkland to be tended to, among them many soccer fields. Bringing national teams and top clubs to Icahn has helped support the wider work needed to make improvements on the island, deepening the island's ties to the sport.
"A high-level premier soccer event brings people to the island, raises revenues, and allows us to do other things on the island, whether it's free services and programming for people in the community, or improvements in our facilities," Sunil Gulati, the former president of the US Soccer Federation and a current member of the board of trustees of the Randall's Island Park Alliance, told New York Soccer Journal in an interview.
Gulati said he got his first Randall's Island soccer experience while serving as a coach for Regis High School, an all-male Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. That type of first exposure to Randall's Island is all too common, since the island's various soccer fields host tens of thousands of players of all ages and skill levels throughout any given year.
"If you play soccer in New York City or the surrounding areas, you're likely going to play on Randall's Island at one point. We don't know if the next great star is literally playing out there today," said Deborah Maher, the president of the Randall's Island Park Alliance.
The island's fields have served that role for far longer than soccer has been played at Icahn Stadium, but the recent work done in order to bring professionals back helps solidify the role Randall's Island has long played in growing soccer in New York City.
"It's already had an extraordinarily important role in the growth of the sport in the New York area, as an outlet for young people to play. You've got elite and rec leagues, you've got kids that played out there — it's an important part of that growth for many, many years," said Gulati of the island's influence on the local soccer scene.
But how's the pitch?
In order to reap the rewards of Icahn Stadium as a soccer venue, the staff at Randall's Island had to learn on the fly how to balance the demands placed on the freshly-laid playing surface by hosting both soccer and track and field events.
"It's a game of chess," said Peter Hunter, who is chief of operations for the Randall's Island Park Alliance, and who oversees maintaining the turf laid inside Icahn Stadium's running track. "Having something that needs to be constantly ready to go for some of the best players in the world. You know, it got us on our toes, got the juices going again," Hunter said.
Track and field is still the primary thing at Icahn Stadium, and the "field" part of that means the Kentucky bluegrass can take a beating.
"There's the reality that when you have throwing events for track and field, whether it's a hammer or a shot put, the pitch is going to get damaged. So you need to allow for time to restore that sod. We know how to do it now. We're getting better every single year and quicker every single year," said Maher.
Even while learning on the fly, reviews from the teams to play on Icahn's pitch have been generally positive. Gotham FC head coach Juan Carlos Amorós said following his team's win on Randall's Island last summer, "I think it's a great place...the pitch was fantastic."
That aligns with feedback Hunter and his turf team received when visited by the likes of Eintracht Frankfurt and Everton. The German club was initially concerned about the height of the grass. As Hunter tells it, "They were all concerned about it being at an inch. They got out here and they were like, 'It's just like our home field.' They felt like they were at home, and that's the words out of their mouth."
A similar dynamic played out with Everton before their open training session at Icahn held in the summer of 2025 before playing a friendly against AFC Bournemouth at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. "I told them about the shot put area and how chopped up it gets," said Hunter of his interactions with Everton's coaching staff. "They went out there, and the coach goes, 'Where was the shot put area?' We were ten feet away from it. They didn't realize."
The Icahn pitch still deals with plenty of wear-and-tear, a reality perhaps felt most directly by NYCFC II, the sometime-tenants who were originally set to play at Icahn Stadium seven times this 2026 season. That number has already been trimmed to four due to three matches shifting from Randall's Island to Belson Stadium in Jamaica, Queens, the team's other, more oft-used home venue.
New York Soccer Journal understands that one of those relocations was due to logistical complications, but another one, the planned August 1 match against Orlando City B, was moved because of how close it fell to a major track and field event coming to Icahn Stadium, the 2026 USATF National Championships taking place there from July 23 through July 26.
"When you start putting holes in the ground, things change, get complicated," said Hunter of the demands the track events place on the playing surface. The complications and the ongoing chess match haven't derailed soccer or track at the venue, though.
"In the end, we're able to pull it through. We still have our Class 1 certification for track and field, and we also now have a FIFA-certified pitch in the middle of all that," said Hunter.
Serving a niche, not scaling up
While Icahn Stadium has seen increasing levels of soccer activity since its 2024 renovation, the Randall's Island Park Alliance seems content with the stadium's current role and structure.
"In the future, maybe this will be a bigger stadium, but right now, I think Icahn Stadium's place is for those smaller, intimate matches, for trainings, for support, and really inspiring the kids who play soccer and other sports in New York," said Deborah Maher, who in a previous interview from 2024 about soccer at Randall's Island indicated a possibility existed for future expansion of the venue to take it beyond its 5,000-seat capacity.
The end goal, for now, isn't making Icahn Stadium into the city's next big soccer venue. One of those will instead open next summer in Willets Point, Queens, but Icahn still can serve a valuable role even without chasing bigger crowds and bigger events.
"I don't think Icahn Stadium is replacing any large stadium right now. It's really a niche space, a place where I think you can have a great friendly, a smaller match, or trainings — we can really facilitate trainings quite well," said Maher. The stadium and its overseers know its role, but just because it's not getting bigger doesn't mean it's not getting better.
"Our focus is to use the resources that we have to improve certain infrastructures within the stadium for teams," Maher said, while pointing out the fact that Icahn Stadium just installed a new scoreboard that’s around three times larger in size than the previous one.
Icahn's soccer future
The early years of hosting soccer at Icahn Stadium have gone smoothly enough, and the Park Alliance now counts as partners the two local professional teams, NYCFC and Gotham, who will soon make a permanent home only a stone's throw away from Randall's Island at Etihad Park.
Andrew Leigh
New York City FC's first team has still not played at Icahn Stadium, and its front office only ever indicated that the Randall's Island venue might make sense for a US Open Cup match. As for NYCFC II, the reserve team's future in New York City is slightly murkier now that MLS Next Pro is partnered with a private-equity firm to launch an initiative to rebrand and relocate Next Pro clubs to give them independent, non-"II team" identities.
Still, opportunities for Randall's Island to work with NYCFC and Gotham will exist no matter the final destination of NYCFC II.
Gotham is coming to Icahn this second time because they literally can't play in their current home venue, Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, which is off-limits for matches while the World Cup is being played. The New Jersey soccer stadium got turned into the NJ/NY World Cup host committee's official Fan Hub and its playing surface is currently being entirely re-sodded after having fans and a stage trodding upon its turf since mid-June.
Gotham will continue to be a tenant even when they move to Queens in 2028, so a failsafe option like Icahn Stadium that's only mere minutes' drive away from their usual home might come in handy, should a situation like the one they face this summer present itself again, or should other, newer scheduling nightmares arise.
The rise of Etihad Park is seen as an overall positive by the Park Alliance's president, with Deborah Maher saying, "We're excited for the future of soccer in New York City with NYCFC's new stadium being built and the recent announcement that Gotham will be going there. We think we can partner with them on a few things, and we think there's only opportunity there, given we're 15 minutes tops from that part of the city."
For almost a century, Randall's Island has played a central soccer role in New York City, and that looks set to continue thanks to the progress made with Icahn Stadium as a soccer venue, and the boost that success has provided to the rest of the island.
