NYCFC releases Yankee Stadium seating chart

Playing in Yankee Stadium was always going to be somewhere well short of ideal for New York City FC. While the location was pretty close to perfect, fitting a soccer pitch onto a baseball field was going to be a challenge. On Tuesday, we learned just how imperfect it was going to be when NYCFC released their official seating chart, complete with interactive map that allows you to see how your view will look from around the stadium.

As expected, there are a lot of places in the stadium that would be downright awful places from which to watch a soccer match. The good news is that the worst of those seats apparently won’t be available as the areas behind home plate and the opposite corner will be covered by tarps.

The other good news is that, at least according to the virtual views, there are some pretty good values. The cheapest seats in the house, in fact, will actually offer a reasonably good value, at least in the sense that fans will get a solid perspective of the match and not have to pay an absurd amount of money to do it.

As not awful as those seats may be, it’s hard to wrap your head justifying the expense of some of the stadium’s more expensive seats. The worst value -- and admittedly people buying these seats for value -- are what’s called the Legends Club. The tickets are apparently going for $175 per game, which makes them among the most expensive in MLS. And while there are some cool perks with those tickets, you’re not particularly close to the field and you’re sitting at a very odd angle.

They’ve also made the somewhat curious decision of putting the “Champions Club” seats right behind the goal of what would otherwise be the first-base side. While those are surely plush seats, $1,975 to sit where supporters are usually stashed seems a bit steep, especially when they’ll be surrounded by people who paid less than a quarter of that for their seats.

The bigger problem will be more of the general feel. Aside from the first-base side, none of the seats are particularly close to the field. Although the field will be the smallest in MLS, this is unlikely to feel like an intimate setting.