In his own mind, Maximilian Mansfield can see it all now — the subway cars, packed with fans wearing black, brown and gold, the chants, the beer, the unforgiving passion.
Appropriately, that all stems from his own admiration for the game.
The CEO of the Brooklyn Football Club walks this walk and imagines what so many others will experience in the not-so-distant future. The fans will get off the train in Brooklyn and begin the 10-minute saunter to the boardwalk. It’s a direct route on a clearly marked path that cuts through the ever-famous Coney Island. Nathan’s hot dogs on the left, a rollercoaster approaching.
It smells - in a New York way - like the ocean.
They will head down the concrete steps, through the industrial gates, scan a ticket, go up a ramp and before them will be a baseball stadium - At least that’s what it is right now.
In three months, the diamond, home of minor league side Brooklyn Cyclones and seemingly a monument to all things America, will be the site of the Brooklyn FC home opener. America becomes Europe. Baseball becomes soccer.
For now, though, this all remains in Mansfield’s mind. Soon, he hopes, it will grip the city he calls home, showing that a distinctly European brand of grassroots soccer can exist in the United States - even when played out in the unlikeliest of venues.
“Why in this city of 8 million (people), where there's a couple hundred thousand soccer fans, why is there no overlapping soccer club?” Mansfield says in an interview with GOAL. “How can we fit into that segment, and kind of give those people a more authentic European experience?”
Mansfield knows how this all works. He is a veteran of the game on both sides of the Atlantic. Dortmund born, New York City raised, molded by stints at clubs in Germany and England at a professional level, he has seen how soccer teams interact with its communities and fans around the world.
In New York, though, Mansfield says he has found a gaping hole. While MLS teams New York Red Bulls and New York City FC are strong global brands, their roots are shallow in the local community.
NYCFC were 16th in average attendance last year, Red Bulls finished 21st. These are professional franchises built for on-field excellence with the backing of foreign investors. Their connections to the city and its multitudes of soccer fans, he believes, aren’t strong.
Mansfield, who - even when he left for Europe - never really departed the New York soccer scene, has seen that soccer fandom in the world’s biggest media market runs deeper.
“I've been in the New York City underground soccer community, like, for so much of my life. And there's such a big soccer community in New York, but there's no overlap into supporting the pro teams here,” he added.
The roots of Mansfield’s connection with Brooklyn FC, in many ways, go back more than five years. It was 2019, and Mansfield lost his direction. His soccer career had collapsed for good, a stint in non-league English football showing that he was never likely to reach the upper echelons of the game - or make enough money to sustain himself long term.
A finance career - buoyed by an Ivy League degree - left him unfulfilled. But the calling towards the beautiful game never really left him.
“I found myself in my mid 20s, kind of without direction, and feeling a little bit soulless in a soulless industry,” he said. “So I put everything on hold, dropped my career, and went back into football.”
Mansfield quit the finance job. He had enough money, by his estimation, to last him about 24 months. If he couldn’t make a living in soccer within those two years, then it was perhaps time to give up on the dream.
That experience, though, was an important inroad - Mansfield starting a consulting group that helped with player and club acquisitions in Europe. He was in the room when a Premier League club was sold a few years back.
But back home, the more impactful work was starting.
Two Bridges FC began as a charity venture to help local New Yorkers and Brooklynites play soccer for free. Resistant to the “pay to play” model that has helped create an inequitable soccer landscape in the U.S., Mansfield wanted to give talent the chance to be cultivated - without the thousands of dollars required to just get eyes on a youth soccer player.
here was one issue: his players had nowhere to go. Though there are two MLS teams in New York, that still left minimal roster spots, especially in proportion to the potentially huge fans base in New York City. So Mansfield leveraged his connections elsewhere.
“If I'm an 18-year-old player, there's 20 spots at Red Bull, and there's 20 at NYCFC – if I'm not at those two, I need money to be able to play,” he says. “So if I'm not at that highest level, I'm completely fallen off. And those were the players that funnelled into my lap.”
Those that couldn’t get in front of professional sides were syphoned off to Europe, travelling to Italy and finding success in lower tier Calcio. That process birthed something far more significant in the American soccer landscape: Mansfield found that his local talent could compete in Europe, but just needed somewhere to operate in the States.
And it was in that gap that Brooklyn FC was born.
As Mansfield pieced together, there was still more to being a club CEO than having a good player pool and a pre-existing setup. His goal was more fan-based, searching for ways to bridge the divide between the wealthy New York soccer culture and a team that it could get behind. For that, Mansfield drew upon his European background.
He spent the latter days of his professional career playing non-league football in the UK, bouncing from village to village and playing on muddy pitches every weekend. Those small clubs, he found, still had well-heeled fan bases, despite constrained budgets and small stadiums.
“Those clubs still function, and they're an extension of their community, right?” he says. “Or a voice of their community. So it's like, how do you listen to your community and understand what they want in a football club?”
Those pieces have started to come together. It starts with the club’s branding. Designers put together official club merchandise that references various points of the Brooklyn community. Crewnecks call back to Brownstone buildings that still line the streets. Hoodies mimic the streetwear to come out of the borough. Community clean-ups and events are in the works, too.
“Before we asked, you know, what our community can do for us, we've asked the community, what can we do for you guys?” Manfield said. “How can we support boys and girls to use football as a vehicle to go to university before we ask you to spend your hard-earned money on our kids or our tickets.”
There’s still much to be figured out. An ownership group announcement is imminent, and although the club have generated considerable online interest with their merchandise, an official kit hasn’t been released.
Their USL Super League team - one of eight original franchises in the newly-founded women’s soccer setup - kicks off in late August. An academy on the girls side is forming, and the club is in the process of piecing together the roster. Signings haven’t yet been announced, although the club says that those crucial pieces will all be rolled out in the coming weeks.
But sit behind home plate at Maimonides Park, stare into the outfield, and there’s a Brooklyn FC banner perched on top of an advertising board, the boardwalk in the distance behind it.
This is the home of double plays and grand slams, but it was also the field where the now-defunct Cosmos used to host home soccer games. Pele once wore the shirt of the professional side that last played here. Beckenbauer, too. Raul, the modern face of the club, was often seen in the VIP box before the team collapsed in 2017.
And it’s not too hard to imagine soccer here again, even as Cyclones outfielder Jefrey De Los Santos knocks a home run deep to left field on a warm night in May. And in many ways, that’s precisely Mansfield's idea. This may be a monument to an American pastime, but it can also become a place where the world’s game put down its roots.
Brooklyn FC, playing in this stadium with 11 players on the pitch, doesn’t yet exist. Yet Mansfield, he knows exactly how it’s going to look.