Hudson River Blue is shutting down after 13 years of covering NYCFC

Independent soccer coverage in this country keeps getting harder to sustain, and another outlet is about to go dark because of it.

Hudson River Blue — which has covered New York City FC since 2013 — is shutting down next week.

Executive editor Oliver Strand published a farewell letter on Saturday announcing his departure from the site, which has operated since 2013 and has gone through five executive editors over that span. Strand took over late in the 2021 season, when the site was still part of SB Nation and NYCFC had yet to win a title. In the time since, HRB left the SB Nation network, relaunched as an independent outlet, partnered with Sofascore for statistical analysis, and covered NYCFC through its first MLS Cup championship and into the early stages of construction on a new stadium in Queens. Strand was clear he couldn’t speak to HRB’s future, stopping short of a formal announcement that the site itself would cease to exist, but contributor Mark Radigan filled in the gap.

“These past few years covering NYCFC with HRB have been some of the best of my entire life,” Radigan wrote. “I’ve made friends and memories to last a lifetime, all while covering a team I’ve followed passionately since its creation in 2014.”

This is difficult news to share: I’ve been informed that Hudson River Blue (@HudsonRiverBlue) will be shutting down next week.

These past few years covering @newyorkcityfc with HRB have been some of the best of my entire life. I’ve made friends and memories to last a lifetime,… pic.twitter.com/n4enaDQjts

— Mark Radigan (@mark_radigan) March 21, 2026

Strand’s letter is worth reading in full for what it captures about what HRB actually was — not a corporate vertical staffed by contractors — but a publication built over years by people who genuinely cared about the team and the city. He singled out contributors Andrew Leigh, John Baney, Matthew Mangam, and Radigan, calling them writers who “know the team inside out and cut their teeth writing in these pages,” alongside Michael Battista, whose coverage of lower-league soccer and the US Open Cup he called “unmatched,” and Megha Gupta and Tyrese Allyne Davis, who expanded HRB’s coverage to Gotham FC and Brooklyn FC respectively. That’s a community of people who found each other through a shared obsession with a club, and built something real around it.

As the league’s move to Apple TV pushed it further from casual audiences and the SB Nation cuts eliminated a generation of team-specific blogs in one fell swoop, the independent outlets that survived have done so largely on the passion of the people running them rather than on any structural support.

Hudson River Blue was one of the survivors, until it wasn’t. Thirteen years is a long run by any measure in independent sports media, and especially in a corner of it as financially difficult as club-specific soccer coverage. The people who built it did so without a safety net, and they kept doing it anyway, through ownership changes, platform shifts, and the slow erosion of the ecosystem around them, because the alternative was leaving NYCFC without the kind of coverage it deserved.

Radigan said he doesn’t know what the next chapter looks like and left his DMs open. The people Strand named in his letter are still out there covering the sport they love. The outlet they built it in isn’t.