DC United sought to use the occasion to woo Charm City, but another flat loss put Miami\u2019s quality in sharp relief<\/p>\n
The pregame scene outside Baltimore\u2019s M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday likely felt familiar to anybody who has followed Lionel Messi\u2019s time in Major League Soccer. Fans milled about, forming a colorful patchwork of Inter Miami pink, the light blue and white of Argentina\u2019s national team, and in this case, the purple of the NFL\u2019s Baltimore Ravens. Others simply came in whatever soccer jersey they happened to own, all the way down to indoor soccer\u2019s Baltimore Blast, the closest thing the city normally gets to top-flight soccer.<\/p>\n
What there wasn\u2019t a lot of was DC United black and red. Despite its proximity to the nation\u2019s capital, Baltimore isn\u2019t exactly DC United country, and as far as decision-makers at United are concerned, that was an opportunity. The club moved the Miami match away from their usual home, the 20,000-capacity Audi Field, to maximize ticket sales, but also to put themselves on display to potential fans in Charm City, a market they\u2019ve badly wanted to engage for years. DC are in the process of starting an MLS Next Pro team in the city, and they\u2019ve partnered with Baltimore\u2019s local government to construct a stadium here for that club.<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DC United sought to use the occasion to woo Charm City, but another flat loss put Miami\u2019s quality in sharp relief The pregame scene outside Baltimore\u2019s M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday likely felt familiar to anybody who has followed Lionel Messi\u2019s time in Major League Soccer. Fans milled about, forming a colorful patchwork of Inter … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}