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“People used to get on the bar and chant J-E-T-S! We don’t have that anymore.“
— Rich Comunale, MoMo’s sports bar
Once upon a time — if you could believe this — a season finale matchup between the New York Giants and division rival Philadelphia Eagles would have seen Long Island bars packed.
Any sports bars worth its salt would have been awash in blue and white that afternoon.
And the cheering! The groans!
The fun.
Those days have been elusive. It’s been more than a decade since the Jets or the Giants made the playoffs consistently. Or in the Jets case, at all.
And it’s not just hurting the bottom lines of the city’s two woefully underperforming football franchises.
It’s hurting the bar owners.
“This last game of the season, Giants versus Philly. It was dead,” said Rich Comunale, who opened MoMo’s Sports Bar & Grill in Holbrook in 2009 before later expanding with MoMo’s Too in Bayport.
“It’s killing business, it really is.”
Indeed, the Jets and Giants have just wrapped up the most disastrous football season the New York area has seen since 1960.
The teams combined for a 5-21 record (.192 winning percentage).
Their seasons were realistically over by Week 5.
“When it’s October and the Jets and Giants are 4-1, maybe you meet up with your buddies for the game instead of going pumpkin picking with the family,” said Comunale. “But when your team is 1-4 in October? Then guess what? You’re going pumpkin picking.”
John Sarno, who owns five Village Idiot Pub locations across Long Island, put it more pointedly:
“I’m saying there’s zero interest” in the games, Sarno emphasized mid-conversation. “People are finding other things to do instead of wasting their time.
“There’s nothing to root for and most of us have had enough.”
Bar owners estimate their game day revenues would be up another 15 to 35 percent if the Jets or Giants were competitive.
For some hard numbers, a study released by the Toast point-of-sale system this September showed chicken wing sales alone soared by about 25 percent at restaurants for the first Sunday Night Football installment of the NFL season, compared to non-football Sundays — with sales of hard seltzers, for an another example, increasing by 14 percent. That’s the power of football.
James Bonanno opened his first Tap Room location in 2011 in Patchogue, and it was tiny. That was the NFL season the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2012, “and we had room for like 20 people in there,” he said.
That also was before Tap Room later expanded to nine locations across Nassau and Suffolk by 2025. Bonanno said he couldn’t pull apples-to-apples data even if he wanted. But at this point, he could barely imagine a packed house on a Sunday for the Jets or Giants across all his locations, and what that would mean for business.
“Honestly, this is all we know,” he said. “Both teams have sucked for so long that I don’t even know what I’m missing. It’s hard to quantify what Sunday football is anymore.
“With that, we’ve been able to build a pretty good football crowd over the years, but we’re fighting an uphill battle because the Giants and Jets have been so irrelevant so early in the season. By week 4, 5, both teams are already done.”
Even he and his friends don’t go out anymore for the games, he said.
“Because it’s not fun; it’s depressing.”
More than money
Your typical Long Island sports bar owner isn’t some institutional investor. Most open their businesses because, first and foremost, they love sports and love being around fandom.
If they can make a good living running a sport bar, maybe expand to multiple locations, that’s a bonus.
In our interviews for this report, even more than money, it’s the scene the bar owners miss, the energy and excitement.
Forget Super Bowl teams, they just want the Jets or Giants to be playing meaningful games, in any month.
That would change everything.
“What better atmosphere than having a sea of blue or green flood your bar?” Sarno said. “Jumping all over each other when they score or get a sack. Are you kidding me?”
“The last time the Jets played in London, my places were packed with green,” he added. “This year, no one cared.”
“People used to get on the bar and chant J-E-T-S!” said Comunale. “We don’t have that anymore. When you’re watching these random games because of your fantasy teams, you’re not passionate about it like you would be if it’s the Jets or Giants.”
“When you have a restaurant, a sports bar, you’re trying to create an atmosphere and when people do come out and they’re excited to watch football and their team just keeps losing, the energy in the place is just deflating,” Bonanno said.
“It’s everything we don’t want.”
March toward oblivion
It’s been a race to the bottom for both New York teams since the Giants’ Super Bowl win in 2012.
The Giants have had two winning seasons (over .500 winning percentage) since, with just one playoff win. The Jets have had just one winning season since 2010, and are in the midst of the longest playoff drought in all major sports leagues at 14 years.
The trickle toward the proverbial gates for football fans at the bars happened slowly, Comunale said, but it has really hit rockbottom now.
“This is by far the worst season,” he said. “But the past few years have been pretty bad. It’s been steadily getting worse throughout the years.”
Football aside, New York as a region has had an awful stretch of underperforming teams with a prolonged championship drought. The Giants won the Super Bowl in 2008 and 2012. Between that, the Yankees won the World Series in 2009. Nothing since.
The Rangers won the Presidents Trophy last season for the most points in the NHL, and the Knicks advanced to the NBA East semifinal. And last year, the Mets and Yankees both made the playoffs, which Bonanno said helped fuel a buzz at the Tap Room locations.
But there’s nothing like football, the bar owners all agreed.
“NFL dominates the sports landscape; that’s obvious with broadcast ratings,” Bonanno said. “The NFL is by and far the most popular sport in America. And those TV ratings are reflected in attendance at the bar-restaurants.”
Bonanno said even with NBA playoffs games on in late April, “there are guests at the bar just interested in the NFL draft.”
“That tells the story right there,” he said.
Asked if he had anything to say to the Jets or Giants owners in New Jersey, Comunale just laughed.
“You want me to fly a banner from a plane?” Comunale said. “Sure … ‘Help MoMo’s.'”
— lead art generated by AI
