Why European soccer clubs are expanding into Manhattan

Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, home to iconic institutions like Radio City Music Hall and NBC Studios, skyscrapers like the Bank of America Tower and the CBS Building, and the corporate headquarters of News Corp, has more recently become the American stage to an English football rivalry.

Melvyn Carter, a lifelong fan of the professional football club Arsenal visiting New York from London, felt compelled to drop his bags and chant his own club’s name when he came across a newly opened Manchester City retail pop-up at Rockefeller Center. He was “amazed” to find an English club with a store stateside.

Would he buy anything, though? “Absolutely not,” he told Marketing Brew before retrieving his bags and leaving.

NFL fans may not expect to find the Green Bay Packers setting up shop in Milan or Berlin anytime soon, but Manchester City is looking to make its New York presence permanent after the success of the pop-up, which originally opened in June to coincide with the club’s preseason tour of the US, including a match at Yankee Stadium in July, Serena Gosling, director of retail and licensing, City Football Group, told Marketing Brew.

The team is not the only professional European club to establish a beachhead in the Big Apple. Since 2021, the French Ligue 1 team Paris Saint-Germain has opened stores in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. The two clubs—backed by the deep pockets of the Abu Dhabi United Group and Qatar Sports Investments, respectively—are aiming to capitalize on the growth of soccer stateside.

“We sell a lot of merchandise online to the US, We’ve got a growing fan base there,” Gosling said. “It made sense to look for our next physical location in the States.”

The British are coming

Soccer has always lagged in popularity in the US, but a combination of US women’s soccer success, superstar Lionel Messi’s arrival to Inter Miami FC, and a decades-long grassroots effort to introduce the game to young athletes has begun to pay off.

At the midpoint of its season in July, Major League Soccer reported record attendance, and jersey sales on the league’s webstore were up 17% year over year. NBCUniversal, which airs Premier League games on its streamer Peacock as well as on channels like USA Network, said last season was the league’s most-watched by US audiences ever, up 4% from the previous season.

And soccer fans are younger and more diverse than US sport fans in general, according to Morning Consult.

Success on the pitch has no doubt helped interest in the clubs boost interest in soccer and in the teams.

Man City has won six of the last seven Premier League championships, while PSG has won 10 of the last 12 Ligue 1 titles, fielding, at one point, the soccer superstars Neymar Júnior, Messi, and Kylian Mbappé.

“There is a new generation of real soccer fans that, frankly, didn’t exist at the scale it does now in the US,” Zohar Ravid, SVP, global head of corporate development at Fanatics, which operates PSG’s retail locations.

Those fans are opening their wallets. Outside of France, where PSG is based, the US buys the most PSG merchandise online, Ravid told Marketing Brew, noting that so far, the PSG retail outlets are profitable. Man City also saw a 48% uplift in online sales from the US market last season, before it opened its pop-up location.

Big spenders abroad

Fanatics landed on Fifth Avenue to open PSG’s New York location to align the store with luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Ravid said, and estimated that around half the shoppers are international tourists. Man City, meanwhile, scouted nearly 40 other locations before landing on its Rockefeller Center location, which also comes with the benefit of lots of tourist foot traffic.

Gosling said the Man City pop-up has proven to be a commercial success. New York-exclusive merchandise sold out quickly at the location, she said, as did a collaboration with the WWE. The best-sellers at the store are “match kits,” the jerseys the athletes wear on the field, and kids kits are starting to sell better than they previously did.

The retail locations function like a US hub for both clubs, giving fans who might not be able to attend a game an opportunity to interact with their teams. Since the Man City pop-up opened, the store has hosted meet-and-greets with players and has held photo ops for fans with the league’s championship trophy.

“These clubs have a lot of money, so they’ll go where the fans are and where [the fans] have money to spend,” Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at eMarketer, told Marketing Brew.

Gosling said the retail locations present stateside fans with the ability to spend big, since they’re not used to having as many shopping opportunities for team merchandise.

“If you get a fan in that environment, and they live in the States, and they haven’t had the opportunity to come into a physical store that’s full of the merchandise of their favorite team whilst they’re there, they’re probably going to spend a bit more,” he said.

Lauren Welling, who visited the retailer in late August, said she counts herself as a Manchester City fan since her two kids joined a local club in Utah, where they live, that supports the team. She’s since become well-versed in the intricacies of the “kits,” she told us, and found herself dropping about $100 on gear at the pop-up.

“When I found out they had a store here, I thought I’d better stock up,” she said.