The lineup calculus was as difficult then as it is now for an FC Dallas manager, with plenty of conflicting elements to consider.
It was 1997, season No. 2 for the Dallas Burn (rebranded later, of course, as FC Dallas). The team was about to face serious Mexican talent and, although just a friendly, the long-game stakes seemed substantially high. Not in the way of competition, necessarily, but in perception.
Looking at a still-new club in a still-new Major League Soccer, everyone was straining to assess exactly what they had in this fledgling professional soccer league.
So that July 1997 friendly against storied Mexican club CD Guadalajara was a screening of sorts. Which is why then-manager Dave Dir got some side eye by deploying a mostly reserve team to face “Chivas,” as the club is generally known. Some in the front office seethed when Chivas tore through the Burn (a 5-0 loss) before a huge crowd at the historic Cotton Bowl. Dir wanted to keep his top players rested for league matches; others worried about a bigger picture, fearful the result had undercut their ability to sell MLS soccer to the area’s soccer savvy Latino audience.
Dir’s decision seemed vindicated later when Dallas won the 1997 Open Cup, but that’s another story. The point is, there’s a real history with FC Dallas and its three-decade series of matches against Mexican opposition.
All these years later – FCD and Major League Soccer are now in their 28th season – matches against Liga MX clubs and the calculus of player selection and strategic approach remain important, just in very different ways.
MLS and FC Dallas are about to engage in the next chapter of the spirited North American regional competition – this one more ambitious than ever, and certainly the most massive in scale.
As Leagues Cup begins this week the clubs are much closer in competitive alignment; match results over the next month will reveal even more about that. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of the steps along the way from the FC Dallas perspective, how the club gradually climbed into a more competitive balance.
FC Dallas has faced 10 Mexican clubs over 26 matches. These are the most meaningful ones:
Actual competitive matches
The Dallas Burn’s second match against a Liga MX club had actual competitive stakes. This time the opposition provided by Necaxa (the same club FC Dallas faces next week in Leagues Cup.) Things went similarly sideways for Dallas in this 1998 CONCACAF Cup Winners Cup match; The Burn had qualified for the tournament as the ‘97 Open Cup champion. Dante Washington scored Dallas’ first goal against a Mexican team – at least there was that.
The first “W”
The Cotton Bowl was still home when the Burn recorded its initial win over Liga MX. That was late in 2000, a post-season friendly at the storied Fair Park ground. A few months later, in a 2001 pre-season friendly against Chivas, a 2-2 draw was held up as further evidence: the gap was closing.
2nd decade - a turning point
The year 2006 proved a turning point. By then, the Dallas Burn had officially become FC Dallas and was playing inside Major League Soccer’s third purpose built stadium, known at the time as Pizza Hut Park. The team had met Mexican competition plenty of times by then, but almost always in friendlies. The newly established Rio Grande Plate saw FC Dallas meet Tigres, a popular club from business and industrial hub Monterrey, located not far beyond Texas’ southern border. A quality FCD side that featured future U.S. national team defenders Clarence Goodson and Drew Moor, striker Carlos Ruiz and right-sided assist specialist Ronnie O’Brian won the two-legged competition in penalty kicks.
SuperLiga, a “mini Leagues Cup”
By the next year, SuperLiga was the thing. Think of it as an early run at Leagues Cup; a selection of MLS and Liga MX clubs clashing in a tournament style format. FC Dallas drew its two matches against the Mexican teams, Chivas and Pachuca, further evidence of a thinning gap. (Significant as the results were, those matches were somewhat overshadowed by the one FCD contest against an MLS side. David Beckham created a local stir and substantially boosted ticket prices as the LA Galaxy visited Pizza Hut Park for SuperLiga. Alas, a nagging ankle injury prevented an actual Beckham appearance.)
Club America, finally
A year later in 2008, Mexico’s other futbol giant, Club America, made its first appearance against Dallas, a late season friendly, a 2-1 win for FCD. Those spankings from 10 and 11 years before were slowly being discarded as relics of history, as critics of MLS quality were slowly acknowledging the incremental progress.
FCD makes history
If forward progress for MLS clubs against Mexican opposition was difficult to see, FC Dallas made it official in 2011. In CONCACAF Champions League play, FCD became the first U.S. club to defeat a Mexican team on Mexican soil in competitive play. Marvin Chavez provided the important game-winner. It was meaningful across MLS because of something from five months prior. That’s when Real Salt Lake became the first MLS club to make the CONCACAF Champions League final (in the tournament’s current iteration). Monterrey outlasted RSL in the final that April as MLS supporters from almost every corner rallied to support the league’s representative. MLS clubs were steadily gaining ground on their southern neighbors; the accomplishments that year from RSL and FCD proved it.
Champions League semifinals
Thanks to growing success under manager Oscar Pareja, FCD earned a berth in the 2016-17 CONCACAF Champions League. Having claimed the 2016 MLS Supporters Shield and ‘16 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, seeking yet more impactful history, the club threw everything it could into conquering Champions League. Pareja restructured the team’s entire preseason, seeking a competition-hardened team for those matches in late February and early March, before the bulk of MLS play. It was enough to eliminate Panama's Arabe Unido in the quarterfinals but not quite sufficient to squeeze by a powerful Pachuca side. FCD claimed the home leg, 2-1, on goals by Maxi Urruti and Kellyn Acosta but fell on aggregate when Pachuca prevailed, 3-1, back in Mexico in the second leg.
Papi returns to North Texas
Sometimes it’s not the competition that’s important, it’s the connections. That was the case in 2019, when Pareja brought his new team, Club Tijuana (known colloquially as Xolos) to Toyota Stadium for an emotional exhibition. Pareja had overseen some of the club’s most successful years, but left after the 2018 season in search of new challenges. The teams played to a 0-0 draw. More than the result itself, reinforcing what had been (and almost surely always will be) a special relationship between the club, it’s supporters and “Papi” was always the higher purpose of that meaningful July night at Toyota Stadium.
