@andrewkleigh
I cover New York City FC and am executive editor of @hudsonriverblue.com. Once worked for some other websites (NYMag, MLB, etc). Staten Island born, now in Queens. ✉️ andrewleighnyc at gmail dot com ✍️ https://www.hudsonriverblue.com/author/andrew/
A familiar voice is back on NYCFC broadcasts for the first time since 2022 for the home opener, with Ian Joy on the Apple TV call
Spoke to Ian about returning to NYCFC commentary, the state of the current squad, and watching James Sands play at his former FC St. Pauli club
Have to stick to my MLS roots and say “exact terms of the transfer remain undisclosed and unconfirmed by either side”
My wife has been busy making a major change in her impressive media career, meanwhile, I’ve spent all that time patiently waiting for the moment I could turn it into fake Soccer Transfer Content
Tried to dive into how NYCFC operates when Nico Fernández Mercau, very much not a striker, lines up at striker
Heat maps, dribbling maps, some comps to the player he’s replacing: All in here as I attempt to make sense of the team’s striker-free approach to start this season
Free but with caveats like in-game upcharges & subscription tiers is not how free works for me. I wish you luck with it, but I firmly believe MLS is wrong for going this direction and will be playing @fantasyutd.bsky.social and Sofascore’s free games instead while mourning the death of MLS Fantasy
Had a great time hopping on @soccerwisehq.bsky.social with @empiregass.bsky.social to chat NYCFC ahead of the 2026 season
The work Soccerwise and @kickbacksoccer.bsky.social are doing for soccer media in this country is truly vital, so to play even a small part in their coverage is a huge honor ✌️
Matt Doyle MLS power rankings screenshot of NYCFC at No 8 and “If Seymour Reid is the Matchday 1 starter at center forward I might just move this team up to No. 1.”
This is why you should subscribe to Matt Doyle’s new site, nobody else out there is moving like this for Seymour Reid save for his agent and his family tacticsfreezone.ghost.io/my-first-pow...
Cutting the best writer and analyst from their website not long after they did the same to their long-running fantasy game: why does MLS so badly want to kill its own website, and what will they think of next in their endless quest to piss off and alienate the most engaged of their fans?
Screenshot from the Yankees’ Instagram of Luis Gil in a ATL UTD tshirt
Luis Gil repping Atlanta United while arriving for Spring Training? Someone needs to get him one of those Yankees+NYCFC hats from last season
“An insider has taken a huge Polymarket position on ‘Lionel Messi won’t play midweek vs DC United’, and thank god I pay Kickbase for their Ultimate Plus Tier, so now I know to take him out of my fantasy team”
They ignored + marginalized their fantasy game for years, now the solution appears to be: make it someone else’s problem while completely screwing dedicated players by moving it to a platform that has in-app purchases and “tiers” you have to pay for if you want a “full” experience
MLS believes in its own version of the “flood the zone with shit” approach because they had a whole bunch of new kit releases scheduled for 11 AM today, which is when they also chose to formally reveal that the league outsourced its long-running fantasy game to some German app maker
Quote from Harvey Schiller, former CEO of YankeeNets, from The Athletic article about Yankees partnering with Manchester United: “I tried to talk Mr Steinbrenner into buying Manchester United,” he says. “We had an opportunity to purchase it — not for the Yankees, but for the Steinbrenner family. George’s son Hank, who was a big soccer person, was very keen. He’s one of the ones who pushed his father to get the Yankees involved with Manchester United in the first place. “There was an opportunity to buy it, and I don’t remember how much it would have cost, but it certainly wasn’t anything near what it would be today. If I remember correctly, it was some way below $1billion.”
Would love a peek into the alternate timeline in which Hank Steinbrenner, apparently a “big soccer person” on top of owning the Yankees and a bunch of racehorses, convinces his family to buy Manchester United for under $1 billion in the early 2000s www.nytimes.com/athletic/700...
Photo NYCFC shared on their website from Coachella Valley Invitational training of Jonny Shore and Malachi Jones https://www.newyorkcityfc.com/albums/training-gallery-new-york-city-arrives-in-coachella
Not seen with the squad for last weekend's Austin friendly, not pictured in any of the group training activities recently shared across the club's social channels, now shown running with a still-rehabbing Malachi Jones: Our guy Jonny Shore sure seems Injured
Excited for Taty while also terrified in the knowledge that West Ham are specialists at throwing away 2-0 leads…
Quote from Brad Sims about NYCFC and the pigeon from a 2024 interview: “But as it pertains to the pigeon, I don’t know that we’re ever going to get a consensus. I think pro-pigeon, anti-pigeon feelings with our fanbase is like 51%-49%, or 53%-47%, or 55%-45% one way or another, and I’m not sure which way it is, and I don’t know that amongst our hardcore fans, that that’s ever going to wildly change to like three-quarters in favor or one-quarter against or vice-versa. So that’s a long, roundabout way of saying, I have no idea, and I’m actually scared to go on record by saying if I’m pro-pigeon or anti-pigeon, because I’ll alienate half of our fans.” https://www.hudsonriverblue.com/exclusive-interview-brad-sims-nycfc-new-york-city/
A lot has changed since Brad Sims said this to me about NYCFC and the pigeon as mascot in March 2024 www.hudsonriverblue.com/new-york-cit...
The Moussa Sylla transfer might collapse but at least we’ve taught Schalke fans about the weird timing of the MLS transfer windows; we laugh at their “Deadline Day” urgency while the window here hangs open until 3/26
Plenty of reasons why West Ham will go down but spending a combined 73 million pounds on Max Kilman and Jean-Clair Todibo should be high on that list of reasons, as it bought them the worst defense in England
Screenshot of Pochettino visiting the US U17s
Important to teach those kids the principles of “shut up and dribble” and “you aren’t allowed to have opinions” as early as possible, all a part of The US Way
Solidarity can come in many forms, we’re not disrupting major capital by having a soccer blog go quiet for a day, but it’s at least a way for us to use (or not use, more accurately) the platform we have to make a meaningful statement
A “prediction market” is still just betting and personally I think MLS does nothing to improve its product or appeal to new fans by better “integrating prediction markets into the fan experience” so they can fuck off with that
first chance to do “online learning” for my 1st grader, what could go wrong?!
Good website for finding a way to help while not in Minneapolis, lots of different ways laid out on there to contribute, too www.standwithminnesota.com
Xhaka rattled by chirping from the flat cap brigade behind the bench? West Ham might really be back
My new role as USMNT player-related fact checker of vertical videos I watched on Instagram is going great: James Sands will be playing his second Hamburg Derby since he went 90 minutes in the first one of the season on August 25
Screenshots of final seconds of Mamdani’s “Winner Stays On” video for CBS Sports in which he falsely claims Timothy Weah grew up on Staten Island https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTvecT2jypG/?igsh=aTV5bjQ3eXJqaTl1
Tim Weah has no connection to Staten Island, he was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Rosedale in Queens and his family still owns a house in nearby Springfield Gardens. No one really needed this to be fact checked but I couldn’t help it due to Staten Island lineage reasons
Ahead of the interview, I'd asked an AI chatbot to write an opening paragraph in the style of Julian Barnes. It began: "He had always believed that memory behaved like a courteous guest - arriving when invited, leaving when ignored - but lately it had begun to loiter, hands in pockets, humming tunelessly in the corners of his mind." The real author describes it as a combination of plagiarism and banality.
"If I'd written that sentence, 'He'd always believed that memory behaved like a courteous guest', I'd stop there because all the stuff about 'loitering hands in pockets, humming tunelessly in the corners of his mind' is just crass". Overall, he says the AI paragraph "doesn't make you laugh and it doesn't make you cry. It doesn't move you. It's just a pastiche. "They need to have some sort of law which says you can't just scrape things and then publish it as an original work."
Doing “I asked AI to write like Julian Barnes” and then reading it to him for the interview is some dirty work bbc.com/news/article...
Taty Castellanos will be the 3rd player to sign for both NYCFC and West Ham, after Frank Lampard and George John, with the latter 2 infamous for not signing actual contracts with NYCFC before the 2015 season even if they pretended they did. George John never played a match for either NYCFC or WHUFC
15% was reported by TyC Sports last week, though 10% is now the NYC sell-on fee getting reported by Italian media, so, somewhere between $3.4M and $5.1M heading NYCFC’s way/thank you Hammers/please finish at minimum 17th if possible www.tycsports.com/futbol-de-br...
NYCFC reportedly get 15% of the cut of a Taty Castellanos sale so at least if he follows in the long storied tradition of “strikers who forget how to play after signing for West Ham”, I’ll have a positive local angle to cling to