Major League Soccer has changed a lot during Cathal Conlon’s time with the New England Revolution.
Conlon, the team’s vice president of marketing and community relations for nearly a decade, has worked with the Revolution for 19 years total. In that time, the league has morphed dramatically.
“First of all, the landscape of MLS is obviously dramatically different, right? It was a ten-team league with three different owners when I first started working here,” he said during an interview with GBH News. “And now it’s a soon to be a 30-team league with 30 different ownership groups. So, the whole trajectory of the sport has changed.”
Nothing may be more indicative of that change than when Lionel Messi, quite possibly the best soccer player to ever grace the pitch, will visit Gillette Stadium with Inter Miami for the first time Saturday.
The match will be a once in a lifetime opportunity for many fans to see a literal living legend in person. And for the Revolution, it will be a chance to help grow local fandom.
One of a kind
For the uninitiated, it’s safe to say there may not be another soccer player who has ever impacted the game the way Messi has. The 36-year-old, who led Argentina to a men’s World Cup title two years ago, has racked up club trophies in Spain, France and now, in Florida for Inter Miami, which he joined last year. His list of individual awards looks like a citation page.
The man has a near-Biblical following among his faithful. So, it makes sense that more than 64,000 people are projected to be in attendance for Saturday’s match in Foxborough. If that number comes to fruition, it would be the largest Revs home game attendance in club history.
Naturally, the club has been preparing for this game for a minute.
Brian Bilello, president of the Revolution, told GBH News that their initial focus was how to optimize the match around Revolution fans specifically.
“Over half the attendance at the match are gonna be people that are in some kind of package,” he said. “A full-season member, a four-six game [ticket] package. So, these are Revolution fans that also want to come to this game. And that was important to us.”
But having a player like Messi in the building will undoubtedly draw in some new eyeballs. Bilello said that soccer fans usually have loyalties split among several teams.
“We know that most soccer fans have room in their heart for multiple clubs,” he said. “And this is just a great opportunity for fans in our region that may not have sort of jumped on MLS, although at this stage many of them have, just to give them another touch point with our club and our league.”
Messi is not the first big star to cross over to the States from abroad. Before the 2007 season, MLS instituted the Designated Player Rule, also known as the “Beckham Rule,” which allows clubs to go over their salary caps to sign international stars.
The rule gets its nickname from English star David Beckham, who joined the Los Angeles Galaxy under the rule’s institution. And Conlon said that over the last decade MLS has done well to capitalize off big events like the 2026 World Cup and the arrival of star players from abroad.
“When Beckham arrived, we were not ready for Beckham. Infrastructure wasn’t ready for him, the clubs weren’t ready for him, the marketing operation wasn’t ready for him,” Conlon recalled. “Now, it’s a really well-developed infrastructure and a really solid league with 29 really smart groups. And you drop something like a Messi into that and it just is, it’s gas on the fire.”
And Bilello, too, knows it's obviously a big deal to have a player of Messi's caliber in Foxborough. At the same time, he said this is about more than a big name coming to town.
“It can’t just be a one-off match and you move on,” Bilello said. “It’s really about showing soccer fans in the United States, and there are a lot of them, how compelling our league and the players in our league are.”
Will Messi play?
If there’s one cloud hanging over Saturday’s spectacle it’s the chance that Messi doesn’t end up playing. Some former international stars have avoided the turf fields like the one at Gillette, though Messi has said he has no problem playing on the surface and has played on it while in MLS. But no one can know for sure what Messi will do.
Still, the anticipation for the match is high. Manager Caleb Porter knows what’s at stake for his squad, describing the attendance projections as the ”biggest game in Boston soccer history.“
“So it’s a great opportunity for us to catapult our season. To get new fans. To show the … Greater Boston community what the Revs are about,” he told reporters earlier this week. “That they can get excited about this other team that happens to be in Boston other than football and hockey and baseball and basketball.”
For players like Nick Lima, the goal is the same as always: pick up a win. But having a packed crowd will be nice, too.
“It will be awesome to see Gillette filled out. To see the love for soccer in the Boston area,” Lima said. “And then we go out and play it as another game and use the home crowd energy to our advantage.”
And as Porter points out, if you’re a player looking to perform on a big stage, this is it.
