There wasn’t a single seat available when I stepped out of the wind on Bowery and into Wilka’s Bar on Sunday afternoon, about 15 minutes before Gotham FC was scheduled to kick off against the defending champion Orlando Pride in the NWSL semifinals . The crowd gathered to watch their home team at the recently opened first official women’s-sports bar in New York City was indeed mostly women, save for a few men appropriately dressed in sky-blue-and-black gear. As a relatively new Gotham FC fan myself, I asked the women around me what newcomers should know. “If someone is a Gotham fan, that is a safe person,” one woman told me.

As the game kicked off and what was left of the standing room filled up, I headed to the back of the bar to mingle with a mix of longtime Gotham fans and newer conve

See Full Page