NEW YORK—The best rivalries are like fine wine: they get better with age.
But the New York City FC-New York Red Bulls derby heated up in a New York minute.
NYCFC players recognized it immediately when they walked out of the tunnel into a cacophony of noise at Red Bull Arena for the first of three meetings a year ago.
It was repeated when the scene shifted to the Bronx, where more than 48,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium for the second encounter.
“It’s not another game,” said NYCFC fullback Andoni Iraola, at a Thursday media availability held in Twitter’s Manhattan headquarters. “It’s obviously three points, but you really want to win this game because everyone is sending you messages, everybody is asking you for tickets. I think it’s special, everything before and after the game."
The reason the rivalry is quickly growing among the best in Major League Soccer, according to NYCFC midfielder Mix Diskerud, is because of the people off the pitch rather than the players on it.
“The supporters are a big part of it, maybe the biggest part of it,” he said. “To create a club, you need supporters. You have to give them the honors when it comes to creating this derby. It’s a special game, for them and also for us.”
For Andrea Pirlo, it doesn’t capture entire cities like the derbies he played in when in Italy. But the players recognized the intensity immediately.
“Between the players, it was very much felt,” Pirlo said. “Our adversaries, we had a healthy opposition between the players from the two different teams and we played very good games.”
The objective is the same as it is when NYCFC played in Toronto or Portland earlier in the week. But David Villa knows when NYCFC face the Red Bulls on Saturday (3 pm ET; FOX, TSN2) during Heineken Rivalry Week, it isn’t just another game.
“It’s not only about soccer in 90 minutes,” Villa said. “It’s the whole day, like a party. The fans take in the morning their jerseys, they want a fight for winning the game and after the game if no draw, one team is happy and one team is sad. It’s a very good day. To create rivalries is very good for soccer, for MLS and for our team, too.”
The fact that the Red Bulls won the first three meetings a year ago isn’t lost on the NYCFC players.
“Last season we didn’t win against Red Bull,” Iraola said. “It’s a huge game.”
