Opened March 20, 2010 as Red Bull Arena, the 25,000-seat Harrison, NJ stadium is home to the New York Red Bulls and was renamed Sports Illustrated Stadium in December 2024.
Harrison's PATH station is a short walk from the stadium, giving fans a direct one-seat ride from lower Manhattan or Newark without needing a car.
The building has had three names and one purpose. It was planned as Red Bull Park, opened on March 20, 2010 as Red Bull Arena, and has been Sports Illustrated Stadium since a naming agreement announced in December 2024. Tickets, maps and directions still carry both of the later names, and the club that plays here did not change with the sign.
What it replaced matters more than what it is called. The team, the MetroStars until an Austrian drinks company bought them in 2006, had spent its life inside Giants Stadium, an American football bowl in the Meadowlands where twenty thousand people looked like a rumor. Rossetti designed a compact bowl instead, seating about 25,000 with the front row roughly 21 feet from the touchline, no running track and no baseball geometry to work around. The sightlines are the argument for the place: every seat faces the pitch square-on, and the bowl is shallow enough that the far corner is still legible from the back row.
The roof does the rest. A cantilevered canopy of PTFE-coated fabric, over 320,000 square feet and the largest in Major League Soccer, covers every seat and reaches well past the last row; part of it is translucent so that light still reaches the grass. It is hung low and closed all the way round, which traps crowd noise and returns it to the field — the reason a full house here sounds larger than the ticket count. The supporters stand behind the south goal.
Harrison is a former factory town of about a square mile across the Passaic from Newark, and the stadium went up on industrial land as the anchor of a redevelopment district that has since filled in with apartment blocks. The Red Bulls have played here since it opened and Gotham FC of the NWSL since 2020; the stadium has also taken the 2011 league all-star game, CONCACAF Gold Cup ties, college tournament matches and a long run of international friendlies.
600 Cape May St, Harrison, NJ 07029 · Official site ↗
Sports Illustrated Stadium is a soccer-specific stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, United States, that is home to the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer and Gotham FC of the National Women's Soccer League. It opened under its former name, Red Bull Arena, in 2010. Featuring a transparent partial roof, it is located on the waterfront in the Riverbend District of Harrison across the Passaic River from Newark and approximately 7 miles (12 km) west of Lower Manhattan, New York City. With a seating capacity of 25,000, it is the sixth-largest soccer-specific stadium in the United States and in Major League Soccer.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.