legacy

Jeff KassoufMay 21, 2025, 05:17 PM ET
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Boston Legacy FC, a 2026 NWSL expansion franchise, will play its entire first season of home games at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, due to delays with the redevelopment of its proposed home stadium.

“With the 2026 NWSL season beginning in 10 months, Boston Legacy FC will play its inaugural season at Gillette Stadium before the club moves into its permanent home at White Stadium in 2027,” a Boston Legacy spokesperson told ESPN in a statement on Wednesday.

“White Stadium construction is well underway, but construction will not be finished by March of 2026,” the statement continued.

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Gillette Stadium is the longtime home of MLS’ New England Revolution and the NFL’s New England Patriots. Gillette Stadium will also host seven FIFA Men’s World Cup games next summer. The NWSL plans to play games during next year’s World Cup, commissioner Jessica Berman previously told ESPN.

Boston Legacy FC’s ownership group is renovating the dilapidated White Stadium in Boston’s Franklin Park as part of a unique — and controversial — public-private partnership with Boston Public Schools.

White Stadium was originally supposed to re-open by March 2026, when the NWSL typically begins its regular season, but it has faced several setbacks, including an ongoing lawsuit from a local conservancy group to stop the project. Demolition of the old structures began earlier this year.

The Boston Globe reported on Wednesday that “the soonest” the field at White Stadium will be complete is “the middle of next summer,” and that Boston Legacy FC decided against making a midseason venue switch in its inaugural campaign.

The shift to playing at Gillette Stadium, a 65,000-seat venue with artificial turf that is primarily utilized for American football, is another setback for the Boston franchise originally approved as an NWSL expansion team in early 2023.

Boston Legacy FC will play its opening season at Gillette Stadium. Kirby Lee/Getty Images

Earlier this year, the group announced it was changing its name to Boston Legacy FC. The team originally announced itself as “BOS Nation FC” last October. The name, and the accompanying marketing campaign titled “Too Many Balls,” was widely criticized.

Boston was granted an NWSL expansion team contingent upon the stadium renovation coming to fruition, sources previously told ESPN.

“Expansion is our opportunity to shape the future of the league and to set up not only the contractual requirements for those clubs, but also the league’s oversight of ensuring that particular deadlines are met,” Berman said about Boston in March when asked if White Stadium would be ready. “We have been and are continuing to work very closely and in partnership with the ownership group in Boston.”

Berman and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu have lauded the partnership between the city and the NWSL team as a model for other cities to follow.

The price of the project has nearly doubled from its original estimate, to over $200 million. Boston Legacy, led by principal owner Jennifer Epstein — whose family are longtime co-owners of the NBA’s Boston Celtics, which is in the process of being sold — is responsible for half the renovations and costs.

Boston Public Schools athletics will get priority in scheduling events at the stadium. Boston Legacy FC will be allowed to use the stadium for up to 20 games per year, with certain restrictions around the frequency of games.

Gillette Stadium is owned by the Kraft Group, which owns the Revolution and the Patriots.

Josh Kraft, the son of Kraft Group CEO and chairman Robert Kraft, is running for mayor of Boston against Wu. The White Stadium project has been a source of public contention between Josh Kraft and Wu.

The Krafts are attempting to build their own soccer stadium in Everett, just across the river from Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood.

A spokesperson for Kraft Sports and Entertainment issued the following statement to ESPN:

“Gillette Stadium is pleased to welcome Boston Legacy FC for its inaugural season in 2026. After being approached by the club, Gillette Stadium was proud to support the team and provide a world-class venue for Boston Legacy FC and its fans in order to promote the advancement of women’s professional soccer in New England.

“Gillette Stadium and the New England Revolution look forward to sharing the field with Boston Legacy FC as we add to our long history of hosting premier soccer events.”

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Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel will let us take a detour from the returning Night City to visit a new location which feels a bit “like Chicago gone wrong”. Naturally, this news has me questioning how Cyberpunk’s timeline might have affected the most prominent basketball dynasty of the 1990s.

The tiny nugget of info we got about this second city comes from Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk TTRPG series that CD Projekt’s futuristic RPGs are based on. It’s the first bit of concrete info about the game – beyond just where it’s at in the production process – we’ve gotten for a while.

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Speaking to Tvgry during this year’s Digital Dragons Conference, Pondsmith touched on his current relationship with CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk devs. He’s “not as involved directly with the sequel as he was with the first Cyberpunk, but he does still pop by the studio to look at scripts and offer his views on stuff like new cyberware made for Project Orion.

For instance, he revealed that when he was there recently, he “spent a lot of time talking to one of the environment guys, and he was explaining how the new place in Orion – because there’s another city we visit, I’m not telling you any more than that, but there’s another city we visit.”

“Night City’s still there,” Pondsmith continued, telling us more, “I remember looking at it and going ‘yeah, I understand the feel that you’re going for in this, and this really does work – it doesn’t feel like Blade Runner, it feels more like Chicago gone wrong’. I said ‘yeah, you know, I can see this working.'”

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This chatter starts at around the three hour and 45 minute mark of the video embedded above, if you want to check it out for yourself. I don’t know if you’ll do the same, but the mention of a Cyberpunk city that might be a bit like Chicago got me wondering what the existing Cyberpunk lore says about the actual Windy City.

According to the series’ Fandom Wiki (which does note that it needs more citations), Chi-town was “left in a state of absolute devastation” by the collapse of the United States that occurs between 1996 and 2008 in the Cyberpunk timeline, and was subsequently ravaged by a “catastrophic bio-plague” created by the federal government itself. By 2077, the city’s “implied to have undergone some level of reconstruction” by rumours of it being connected to Night City via the transcontinental maglev rail network that Cyberpunk 2077’s database describes as “currently inoperational”, but subject to revitalisation efforts by Night Corp.

Cool. But here’s the thing. If Chicago started to fall apart in 1996 – the year that martial law was declared across the USA in Cyberpunk lore – do Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls win the 1996, 1997, and 1998 NBA championships to cement themselves as arguably the greatest basketball dynasty of all-time? That’s assuming Jordan and the Bulls even exist in the Cyberpunk universe, but I think it’s worth exploring anyway.

The situation is this as far as I can tell – the aforementioned martial law runs from 1996 to 1999, so Jordan and co have that to contend with, in addition to a 1998 midwest drought and the collapse doing so much damage that “an estimated 90%” of Chicago is abandoned by the end of it in 2008. It’s MJ though. I’m still banking on him to beat the Jazz in the finals, even if he’s got to dribble past bio-plagues and hostile cybernetically-augmented soldiers to do it.

Do you think his airness still ends up with six rings on his weird cyber-fingers? Also, how do you feel about visiting this second city in Cyberpunk 2? Let us know below!

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Boston Legacy to play 1st NWSL season at Gillette Stadium

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Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel includes a new city that “feels more like Chicago gone wrong”, and I’m now wondering how the USA’s collapse might have affected Michael Jordan’s legacy