This is City Soccer Review, our weekly subscriber-exclusive newsletter that gets you completely caught up on the game’s biggest happenings, locally and beyond, from any given week. It's for paid subscribers only, so Subscribe now and ensure you get every single issue sent straight to your inbox.
For the 34th time, New York City FC and Red Bull New York will contest the Hudson River Derby this weekend.
If it feels like they just played one of these, it’s because they did, though in the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup Round of 16, a midweek match at the end of April.
Speaking of midweek matches, both NYCFC and the Red Bulls had one on Wednesday night, and NYCFC is on even less rest when you consider that before Wednesday, they’d played a late-Sunday-afternoon match at Yankee Stadium, while the Red Bulls played in the more customary match window, 7:30 pm on Saturday night
With all of MLS hitting pause from late-May through late-July to accommodate the FIFA World Cup, we are getting slammed with match after match as the league sprints to fit in as much of the regular season as it can.
As a result of this almost endless stream of MLS action, plus the close proximity to a more significant knockout version of this derby, some of the luster is missing as NYCFC and the Red Bulls meet again.
This isn’t a problem unique to the two New York-area teams and their rivalry, either. You can look toward the mountain west and find another example in the form of Colorado Rapids vs Real Salt Lake. Our Rapids blog compatriots from the post-SBNation diaspora, Burgundy Wave, raised a similar complaint about this weekend's Rocky Mountain Cup.
MLS used to make much out of its rivalries, giving them their own week and turning more collective marketing energy toward promoting the feuds that stir excitement and interest and have the potential to reel in new eyeballs and new fans.
