The New England Revolution host Inter Miami on Saturday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m., with Lionel Messi in line to make his return to Gillette Stadium.
Messi last came to Foxborough in 2016, when nearly 60,000 people saw the Argentina national football team defeat Venezuela, 4-1, in the Copa América Centenario quarterfinals.
Less than six days away from his 29th birthday, Messi put on a clinic in his first game of the tournament, creating the first goal and scoring the team’s third before adding another assist to his tally on Argentina’s fourth.
Nearly eight years later, Messi is likely to make his return, but not a guarantee, as doubts have risen over the 36-year-old’s willingness to play on the artificial turf field at Gillette Stadium.
Messi has previously dismissed concerns over his availability in games played on artificial turf fields in the MLS, and last season he played an entire match on artificial turf when Inter Miami faced Charlotte FC at Bank of America Stadium. The Herons had the full week off to recover from their last game, having also been knocked out of the Concacaf Champions Cup quarterfinals.
But with Luis Suarez already in doubt — as he previously was granted permission to skip matches played on artificial turf while playing for Brazilian football club, Grêmio — the question of Messi’s availability will persist until the official lineups are announced an hour ahead of Saturday’s kick-off.
Nevertheless, the Revolution expects to see a record-breaking crowd in attendance, with over 64,000 tickets distributed for the match already.
The attendance record for a Revolution game is 61,316 back in 2002 when the Revs hosted the LA Galaxy in the MLS Cup Final, which also stood as the highest-attended MLS Cup Final until 2018.
But in 2002, the average attendance of Revolution home games was 16,927, with just four regular-season games pushing beyond 20,000.
Fast forward to 2024, the Revs are following up on last year’s success where they averaged a franchise-best 23,940, with four regular-season games at Gillette Stadium crossing 30,000 fans.
The Revs were not the only team to experience tremendous growth in the past year, as attendance numbers across the MLS went up last season.
Revolution Vice President of Marketing Cathal Conlon spoke on the importance of Messi’s arrival to MLS with soccer’s popularity in America and how the Revolution saw this match as an opportunity to nurture that growth.
“When (David) Beckham came in 2007, that was something for us to build on, that was a new building block for the MLS to build on,” Conlon said. “Messi arriving now is almost (like throwing) gas onto a fire.
“The league is already well-positioned for future growth, it’s on a really strong pattern and you throw this Messi-effect in on top of that and it’s just exponential growth across the board. It’s really exciting to see that promise of the league start to pay off.”
The Revolution benefits greatly as co-tenants of Gillette Stadium, with the infrastructure already in place to scale up home game operations.
“We’re fortunate our building has a 20-plus year history of hosting major events from everything you can imagine,” Conlon said. “Our stadium operators are vastly experienced at hosting major events, so from that point, our focus was on we’re going to introducing our match day experience to tens of thousands of people that may have never experienced it before – the emphasis for us has to make sure that what we do, we do to the best of our ability.”
With this in mind, there was a concerted effort from the outset to reward Revs fans first.
“One thing that we had early on is we put a lot of tickets on sale through our packages, our full season memberships … and then our multi-game packages which were like four and six-game ticket packages that included (Saturday’s) match,” said Revs President Brian Billelo.
“It was important to us to make sure that our biggest of fans that want to support the Revs, not just once a year but many times a year, had access to the stadium. So our approach early on was to make sure that all the best seats were available through our packages and we had a tremendous response on that.”
Last week, the Revolution announced that a round-trip, special event train service from Boston and Providence will be provided by the MBTA Commuter Rail and Keolis for $10 per round-trip ticket. While the roundtrip ticket from Boston is currently sold out, tickets still remain from Providence.
Revs enter Saturday’s game desperate for a positive result, having suffered three consecutive defeats on the road. New England will hope that the friendly confines at Gillette will provide the same fortune it had in the Revs’ last home game, a 1-0 victory over Charlotte FC nearly three weeks ago.
Earlier this week, the Revs traded for veteran defender Xavier Arreaga from Seattle Sounders FC in the hopes of solidifying the team’s defense. Arreaga joined Seattle in 2019, winning the MLS Cup in his first season and reaching the finals again in 2021. The 29-year-old defender has over 100 caps in the MLS, including 82 starts, and also won the 2022 Concacaf Champions Cup with the Sounders, earning himself a place in the tournament’s Best XI.
