The scene at Fenway Park Sunday was both familiar and foreign. The fans, decked in red and white, filled nearly every seat in the historic venue to cheer on one of the most valuable and well-known teams in sports.
But they weren't there to watch the Red Sox.
These faithful came to watch soccer — getting the rare chance to watch Liverpool FC play a match on this side of the Atlantic, as the club took on Sevilla FC as part of its preseason U.S. tour.
It's been a big year for the club, which is saying a lot for a team that's been around since 1892. In June, the Reds beat Tottenham Hotspur to win the UEFA Champions League title, the highest prize in club soccer, making them the owners of the prestigious trophy for the sixth time in club history.
For a team that boasts of 580 million fans worldwide, finding supporters isn't a problem. But the win may have given them a few more.
"That obviously brought a lot of new fans, it resurrected a lot of older fans that may have been just kind of lingering about whether they wanted to commit their lives to Liverpool, so that really brought a lot of people out," said Marc Davis, digital media manager of LFC Boston, a local Liverpool fan group.
Davis started watching Liverpool nearly 30 years ago when he was a pro track athlete living in Europe. The chairperson of LFC Boston, Ian Gunniss, has been a fan since he was three years old.
The club has been coming to Boston since 2010, when Fenway Sports Group, which also owns the Red Sox, bought the team. Gunniss went to the two previous matches held here — in 2012 and 2014 — and he said he has seen the excitement for the club grow.
"It's always been great, but we can see the gradual incline of people that not only just know Liverpool, but also are actual fans," he said. "Now, obviously, with FSG owning Liverpool, you see a big increase in that, and this is the biggest that I've seen it so far."
When the match kicked-off, you'd have no idea that these fans had been waiting for hours on one of the hottest days of the year to watch a preseason match. Liverpool chants echoed through the air as the teams took to the pitch, which had been spread over the outlines of the diamond like a big, grassy blanket.
It felt just like what you'd expect a Liverpool home game at Anfield to be like, just with maybe more hot dogs.
The match was deemed a friendly due to its low preseason stakes, but the play was anything but affable as it got surprisingly physical throughout. Towards the end, Sevilla's Joris Gnagnon even picked up a red card after he kicked Liverpool's Yasser Larouci near the end of the second half.
Players had to be momentarily separated as Larouci throbbed on the ground in pain. He was taken off on a stretcher, and Gnagnon walked off to a chorus of boos from the de facto Liverpool home crowd.
Despite playing the last few minutes with only 10 men on the field, Sevilla got out of Boston with a 2-1 win.
After the game, Liverpool Manager Jürgen Klopp wasn't thrilled with the final score, but he was pleased with the scene of 35,654 spectators in what he cracked was "the owner's city."
"[The] atmosphere [was] really, really cool and [in] a historical place," he said. "We enjoyed it, apart from the result."
Klopp also encouraged the growth of soccer fans here in States and welcomed them to pick up the Reds as their club of choice.
"I think the game is ready to conquer U.S.," he said. "It will take a while until American clubs are as big as Liverpool is, and in between now and then, you're very welcome to be LFC supporters."
