Does it matter? Do you somehow earn the right to get angry over a transfer depending on how much your club spent on the player? If Messi ran down his contract and signed for us on a free, then in mid-July announced that he was going back to Barca, would you shrug your shoulders and go "oh well, we spent no money on him therefore I can't really argue that we've lost something we should've had"?
To understand this, you really need to understand the politics of their fanbase. It's an open secret that their main supporters group - the Third Rail - is coordinated and run by the NYCFC office. I don't mean as in they link up a lot with the club, I mean as in the club essentially tells them where to go and what to do, and when NYCFC says "jump" they say "how high?". This is a serious faux pas in American sporting culture, where having a supporters group run by the club is not too far removed from being seen as like the North Korea fans at the 2010 World Cup - i.e. paid to be there in order to make it look like you have actual fans. The non-TR-affiliated fans detest this and are furious that the club has opened itself up to this criticism. It also doesn't help that TR are awfully organised, have some of the worst songs going, and actively engage in attempting to drown out the other groups who raise their own chants, or have been known to use racism as a way to denigrate the Hispanic groups that are forming. Again, it's something of an open secret that they do this partly because NYCFC, and therefore CFG, have actively encouraged them to act demeaningly towards the other, non-official groups. Small wonder they build up so much resentment for CFG and MCFC when there is so much evidence that they are damaging the club from within.
Grandsolo was banned because, as many, he used the "you owe your club to CFG so stop being negative about them" comment. Seriously, we would've accepted that if it weren't for the fact that it was probably said a couple of hundred times by a couple of dozen different posters, and it's a very provocative thing to say when the fans are taking negatively to the same group over the way that they are running the club.
In fairness, I see some of their points. I remember back in the very early days of the team, Claudio Reyna held a live Q&A over facebook where he invited questions about the future of the team. One of the questions was "what will the identity of the team be?" His response was "we want the fans to create the team's identity" - particularly prescient since already, before the crest or the shirt or virtually anything had ever been unveiled, the team was already being mocked as Manchester City USA. That comment won a lot of fans.
Six months later, CFG had unveiled a sky blue kit, sponsored by Etihad, sent their manager off to Manchester to be taught "the City way", with a badge many are suggesting was consciously designed on our old circular crest and told them that they would be receiving a handful of our academy players, thus ensuring they couldn't get away from constant references to City.
A further 12 months on and we had taken their second ever player for a full season and only provided one of the promised four loanees, thus upsetting those who were willing to look on the CFG connections as actually potentially a good thing on the field. They created a City Voice for NYCFC, and have systematically ignored everything the fans have asked for on it.
I could name so many more things that CFG has got wrong over there. The simple fact is that CFG have not just upset the fans, they've provided countless examples of how not to run a club, so it's small wonder that mentioning CFG and even saying that they should be grateful to them is like putting a red rag before a bull.
You're missing the point. The majority of the NYCFC fans - or rather, the vocal ones on the forum - are from Category 4, which you didn't add: those who tried to follow the Red Bulls and the Cosmos as their "local team", and just couldn't stand the teams and refused to continue following them. Sure, there are definitely people new to football, and there are definitely bandwagoners, but a much higher percentage than you would believe were people who had refused to commit to a MLS team because none of their local clubs were right for them. Yet more were of a floating category of fans who did follow the Red Bulls but had been drifting away from them for some time and simply found NYCFC to be the catalyst which made them finally see reason. To be honest, this does not sound much different from the comments of MCFC fans, both new and old, on this very forum who give a testimony about how they went to a scum match, or a dipper game, or whatever, and thought they were a fan only to go to Maine Road/see City on TV and suddenly be converted.
What's more, people who say that on this forum get the internet version of a standing ovation for it, whereas we mock them for never feeling right at one club and moving on to NYCFC as soon as they had the chance. Heck, it's worth mentioning here that many Red Bulls fans actively refuse to call their team that and instead refer to the team as the MetroStars (the old name before Red Bull bought them). When even their own "die hards" have an identity crisis, it's not hard to see why their fans are leaving in droves for a new team.
As for the Cosmos, they are a new company who have nicked the name of a long-dead club and think that they - club and fans alike - can act with the arrogance of actually being the club with history. When you add in that the Cosmos' ownership are currently on a one-club mission to persuade FIFA and the US FA to abandon MLS and declare their league the top division of American football it's not hard to see why they are also hated. Oh, and they also have a reputation for fans beating up isolated fans of other clubs who have no chance of fighting back.
Honestly, given all that I've said on previous points, it's a miracle that we are keeping these disenfranchised fans, because you can be sure that the Red Bulls and Cosmos fans constantly mock them for all the reasons that should really apply to their own clubs first. The funniest comments are when Red Bulls fans accuse NYCFC of being a corporate toy for MCFC, as if they don't exist solely to sell energy drinks.
The thing is - and this is more a reply to Matty, but as XenForo doesn't really like quote-in-quote and I can't be bothered after an hour of typing to use code to force it, then whatever - the reason they are so angsty about buying season tickets on the premise of Lampard, you again have to understand how MLS works to understand that this is an issue. MLS is a league which has a stupid amount of rules designed to penalise teams in order to keep everyone level. Chief amongst these are the DPs, or the "Beckham rule" - worth mentioning because you've got to remember that DPs weren't even allowed until they changed the rules to let him join LA Galaxy - and because the DPs are so much better than the other players, clubs live and die by the ability of their ones. If a team recruits them well, they are odds-on to walk the league and finish well. If a team recruits badly, they are going to struggle. If a club has none they might as well not compete. Therefore, signing Lampard was like a statement to the league that NYCFC wanted to be a title-challenging team. Then he gets taken away from them and they still haven't signed a third DP, so Villa is left all alone where he can easily be closed out of games and it's no wonder they are suddenly at the complete opposite end of the table from where they promised to be. If you watched some of the games when NYCFC were on their losing run, you could actually see the disappointment turn to upset turn to resentment as he realised he had been signed to play for a team where no-one could support him. Having Lampard could've changed all that, and the fans had no reason to believe it wouldn't happen back when they first bought their season tickets.