Just as so much of life is about “moments,” so are the sports that we love. In a lot of ways, everything else just fills space between those defining and meaningful points in time.
It’s the day you meet the love of your life, or your first child opening eyes to the world, or the day you leave for college or maybe the night you crushed that winning goal.
Same with sports and the emotional ties that bind us to our beloved teams and favorite players.
It’s you moving heaven and Earth to be in the arena when your team finally “gets there.” Or watching alongside pals as that special record is set, toasting your besties to the splendor of it all. Maybe it’s even the heart-wrenching moment when you hear your hero is hanging them up.
Those are the moments of a lifetime – and here we arrive surely at such a moment for FC Dallas.
This must be the biggest event in FC Dallas’ 28-year history in terms of buzz and engagement, a night against Miami and Lionel Messi that will draw in volumes of curious onlookers like nothing FCD has seen before. The pulsing tingle of anticipation may be unmatched for soccer in all of Texas, period.
At this point, FC Dallas does have stacks of history, of course, those moments of memory and meaning – just nothing like this. For instance, someone could make a cogent argument that June 6, 1995, carries more historical importance. That’s the day of Dallas’ selection as one of 10 original sites for fledgling Major League Soccer. But as a “moment,” that one seems a bit procedural. And while the soccer nerds among us could dream about expansion and stadiums and epochal days ahead (like Sunday), nobody knew for sure if this new fangled airship could really fly.
April 14, 1996, was a day full of build-up, pomp and circumstance. The news crews were out for the Dallas Burn’s debut contest as a crowd just short of 28,000 watched inside the storied Cotton Bowl. Yes, that day swelled with sweeping historical heft. But in terms of stirring up local buzz, in terms of the gen pop talking about it while waiting in the coffee shop line, it’s well short of this magical Messi buzz of the moment.
A growing number of MLS-interested eyes were trained on Toyota Stadium (known then as Pizza Hut Park) for MLS Cups in 2005 and 2006, when plenty of us were pleasantly surprised to actually see scalpers patrolling the stadium perimeter. (That was back in the day when boots-on-the-ground scalpers ruled the second market, which has now gone online, of course.) And yet, MLS simply had not attained the local, regional or national awareness it enjoys now.
If we examine soccer history in Texas: Global soccer’s chattering class certainly talked up the Brazil-Netherlands quarterfinal clash at the Cotton Bowl at the 1994 FIFA World Cup. While that high quality 3-2 thriller still stands as perhaps the best game of World Cup USA, plenty of locals had not wrapped their arms around the cultural heft of soccer around the world.
Indeed, any soccer event you could pick out from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s or 2000s to argue for its place as the whopper of all whoppers in North Texas soccer, just know this: The game is simply more popular now, which adds significantly to the weight and intrigue of it all.
A day in 2007 bears some resemblance to Sunday. David Beckham was a global icon, having recently joined the L.A. Galaxy. The man who would so forcefully move the needle for MLS was set to play in Frisco in late July. Alas, an ankle injury kept Beckham grounded back in California; he didn’t make the trip, a huge bummer for a sold out match in Frisco that had, like those MLS Cups, ginned up interest along the second market.
Even then, it was absolutely nothing like what’s happened since Wednesday night, when we all learned that Messi, quite possibly the most well-known person on Earth, was inbound to North Texas.
Beckham was a brand as much as a soccer player. He would likely make most people’s Top 100 all-time list; Messi generally sits atop those lists. Messi elevated his arguable standing as the greatest of all time with his crowning lifetime achievement last winter, claiming the FIFA World Cup with Argentina.
With apologies to Lebron, Tiger, Brady and a few others worthy of one-name acclaim (and probably even to Pele from decades before), a more recognized global superstar has never played in North Texas.
That makes Sunday an unrivaled opportunity for FC Dallas to reach a different audience, the soccer-curious who may not quite understand how much MLS has grown, how the quality has marched inexorably forward. It’s an opportunity for a larger cross section of regional media to discover the club.
All that media will share details of luminaries on hand for the moment – the local types but also presumably a few national figures. And they’ll tell arresting tales of ticket prices and record numbers of credentials. For all that, audiences will lean in, driven by FOMO, because nobody wants to be the only one at the office or at school who didn’t know about the world's best known athlete touching down in North Texas. Apple TV’s worldwide reach will keep selling the “Messi’s Cup Run” to sets and screens around the world, all arrows pointing to Toyota Stadium.
Even in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup triumph of 2016, for as much as it meant to the club’s most loyal, enduring supporters, FCD wasn’t the talk of Dallas-Fort Worth sports the way it will be over a full weekend.
None of that is to mention what it surely means for the FCD players and coaches who will tell this story to the kids and grandkids, etc. “Yes, you bet I played in Leo Messi’s first road game as an Inter Miami player.”
Win or lose – assuming nothing unforeseen happens and Messi takes the field as planned – people will talk about this one for years and years. As events go for FC Dallas, hard to say when another one would dislodge this one in hullabaloo and the massive, dreamlike fanfare of it all.
