As the Frank Lampard saga begins to recede New York City FC’s life as a Major League Soccer franchise started in earnest on Tuesday evening with the 2-0 defeat of St Mirren at the City Football Academy.
For Jason Kreis’s team this was their inaugural game, which was won by a first-half David Villa strike and a second from Tony Taylor after the break.
Lampard was not present, though on Monday evening he enjoyed dinner with the team-mates he will join in the close season. Instead the midfielder, whose status at Manchester City caused a furore when it emerged last month he was never on loan from NYCFC, was with Manuel Pellegrini’s squad at a hotel before the Wednesday night encounter against Stoke City.
Lampard missed a contest of average fare though considering Kreis’s new squad have not yet had 15 training sessions they could be content at the result.
Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA had blared from the PA at the close of a match put on before a crowd of around 2,000 that was made up of a number of St Mirren enthusiasts, some intrigued locals and a handful of attendees sporting NYCFC merchandise.
In Villa there was a headline first-ever scorer for the franchise, the Spaniard planting a left boot through the ball on 32 minutes before he was replaced at the break.
Villa said: “It was a beautiful day for the club. We have been waiting for this for a while. It was good to win against a difficult, strong team, a team that is halfway through its season. It was nice to score the first goal in the club’s history. The most important thing is to get the win, though.”
Of what NYCFC might achieve in their debut campaign, the 33-year-old said: “It’s difficult to say because it’s only the beginning. We want to be there fighting for the top places. We want to keep working hard. We belong to a really big company and this is our goal – to be up there fighting to win everything.”
Kreis, a former midfielder for Raleigh Flyers (in two spells), New Orleans Storm, Dallas Burn and Real Salt Lake before coaching the latter for six years until 2013, echoed the sentiment. “Our ambitions as a club are to do three things. To get the team to gel as quickly as possible, to be competitive every single week and to play the game we want to play,” said the 42-year-old. “We believe that if we stay focused then the results will come. I was hired because they looked at me and the coaching that I’d done in the previous seven years and said: ‘That’s a coach that coaches the game the same way we want to see it played at Man City.’ So I can over-simplify it and tell you that for me it’s all about the ball.”
Kreis, who played 14 times for USA, is a 4-4-2 man. “For six and a half years or so we played a diamond in midfield with two strikers so my first inclination is to look at that. But I’m also mindful of the fact that we’re not going to be putting the majority of players in their best possible position, so I’m a guy who believes you have to do that so we’re going to tinker around quite a bit.”
The head coach believes Villa will light up the MLS when the season starts next month. “I don’t think there’s any reason why not. You talk about players like David Villa and Frank Lampard: you know what they’re capable of. So it now becomes a question of motivation and from speaking with him [Villa] the very first time we met, and seeing him do all of the work that he’s been doing by himself for six months in New York, you know you have an extremely motivated person.”
Of Lampard Kreis added: “He’s come around for a couple of the training sessions, met all the guys. Frank is another guy who I feel exactly the same as I do about Villa – these are two fantastic men.”
While City hope to acquire their third “designated player” soon – like Villa and Lampard he will break the team salary cap – Kreis had his eyes opened since landing in Manchester with NYCFC last week.
“For me to see what a huge business it is over here, it’s amazing,” he said. “We think about American sports and professional sports there: basketball, football and baseball. And you think about all the money that’s involved and what an incredible business it is in every single facet and to come over here, for me, I think it’s more of a business than professional basketball, football or baseball in my country. That’s absolutely earth-shattering for me.”
NYCFC can boast 13,500 season-ticket holders already, respectable for a team who are yet to kick a ball competitively. “The reception that we’ve had in the city has been fantastic, you could see that New York City has been hungry for a team within the city for a very long time so I’m really pleased,” said Kreis, who is realistic about a Big Apple sporting landscape dominated by American institutions such as baseball’s New York Yankees and the NBA’s New York Knicks.
“We’ve got a long way to go until we can start talking about competing with the likes of Yankees and Knicks,” he said. “I just think that the city is so huge and has so many ethnicities there that have been dying for top-level professional soccer for a long time.”
