Dallas Hosted Nine World Cup Games and Still Needs Fields

FC Dallas put four academy products on the U.S. World Cup roster, then watched Dallas Stadium host nine tournament games without the national team. Spain used two of those nights on the road to the title.

Club president Dan Hunt spent July talking up a youth bump from the World Cup. The U.S. side never took the field in Arlington.

Dallas Staged Nine World Cup Nights Without the US

Dallas Stadium drew 631,843 fans across a World Cup-high nine matches, the most of any of the 16 host cities. Monica Paul, president of the North Texas FWC Organizing Committee, called hosting nine matches in 31 days a marathon and noted that France became the 15th different team to play there.

THE NINE DALLAS STADIUM CROWDS

Lionel Messi passed Miroslav Klose as the World Cup’s all-time leading scorer in a 2-0 win over Austria, then scored again in a 3-1 win over Jordan. Cristiano Ronaldo’s last World Cup appearance came in the round of 16, a 1-0 Spain win in front of 70,649, the night Unai Simón logged a sixth straight clean sheet and all-time World Cup attendance moved past 50 million.

Spain beat France 2-0 in the July 14 semifinal on a Mikel Oyarzabal penalty in the 22nd minute and a Pedro Porro goal in the 58th. Ferran Torres finished the job in New Jersey on July 19, scoring in the 106th minute of a 1-0 extra-time win over Argentina.

The United States never joined that list. The U.S. team fixtures skipped Dallas entirely, running through Los Angeles, Seattle, and Santa Clara instead.

A current FC Dallas player did get a night in that building. Petar Musa started up front for Croatia against England on June 17 and scored in first-half stoppage time in a 4-2 loss, the same England-Croatia match Hunt later named among the venue’s best.

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Four Academy Products, One Round of 16 Exit

FC Dallas listed four academy products named in May to Mauricio Pochettino’s 26-man U.S. squad: Weston McKennie, Ricardo Pepi, Chris Richards, and Alex Zendejas. No other MLS club placed more of its own graduates on that roster.

Major League Soccer said 21 of 26 U.S. players were either current MLS names, homegrowns, or academy alumni, 81% of the squad. Dallas Cup organizers separately noted that 10 of the 26 had played in their youth tournament.

HOW THE FOUR FARED

McKennie grew up in Little Elm and trained in the FC Dallas Academy from 2009 to 2016, then left for Schalke without a first-team appearance. Richards, an Alabama native who arrived from Texans SC Houston in 2017, also never played a senior minute for Dallas; he went to Bayern Munich on loan, later joined Crystal Palace, won the 2025 FA Cup, and was named U.S. Soccer’s 2025 Male Player of the Year.

Pepi came from the El Paso affiliate, scored a hat trick on his North Texas SC debut, won the 2021 MLS Young Player of the Year award after a 12-goal season, and moved to Augsburg in a club-record sale. Zendejas, the club’s 13th Homegrown, made eight first-team appearances before leaving for Mexico and later switching to the United States.

The U.S. beat Paraguay 4-1 on June 12 and Australia 2-0 on June 19, lost 2-3 to Türkiye on June 25 after already winning Group D, beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0 on July 1, and went out 1-4 to Belgium on July 6 in Seattle. Malik Tillman scored the American goal. Pepi came on in the 72nd minute. Zendejas stayed unused. Canada and Mexico also left in the round of 16.

Two of the four graduates never wore the FC Dallas first-team shirt. The pipeline Hunt sells is a magnet for Texas and beyond, and a launch pad toward Europe, more than a conveyor into his own starting eleven.

FC Dallas Youth Teams Grew About 10% in 2025

Hunt told interviewers in July that youth teams grew by around 10% in 2025 and that he expected an uptick of at least 7% in 2026 as the World Cup drove interest. That 7% figure was a forecast then, and the club has not published a later census.

After the final, the club’s own posts leaned on Musa clips, Zendejas’s debut graphic, and wallpaper. Hunt, in early September, was talking about a new lounge, not a new enrollment chart. “I’ve seen a lot of sporting stadiums around the entire world, and I’m not sure there’s a finer club, maybe in any soccer stadium anywhere in the world,” he said of the renovated east side.

Really, the only thing that limits us is fields. We have, one way or another, between 40 and 55 fields under management. I could build another 100 and I could fill every single ground.

Dan Hunt, FC Dallas president

He also said the club wants domestic talent to help the national teams, because a weak national team hurts the league. “You hope that this inspires the American Messi,” he said, a kid who might not have picked soccer, with a special brain for the game, who ends up at FC Dallas or another MLS side.

The Field Shortage the World Cup Did Not Fix

More than 1,100 new soccer fields have gone in across Dallas-Fort Worth since 2014, eight times more pitches per elementary-age child than that baseline. They are not spread evenly.

THE NORTH TEXAS FIELD GAP

• Income split: High-income areas average 938 kids per field; the lowest-income areas average 2,641, about a third as much access.
• Plano load: More than 39,000 kids share nearly 80 soccer fields in that suburb.
• Walking distance: Lex Chalat, executive director of U.S. Soccer’s Soccer Forward Foundation, said roughly 28 million children in the country still lack a place to play within walking distance.
• Hunt’s stock: Between 40 and 55 fields sit under FC Dallas management, the range he gave in July, with demand he says would fill 100 more.

The World Cup packed a 70,649-capacity NFL stadium in Arlington. It did not redraw where a kid in a low-income district can train on a weeknight. Hunt’s 10% youth bump, if it holds, runs straight into that map.

Toyota Stadium Is Still a Construction Site

Sweden used the Frisco complex as a World Cup base and arrived to mangled metal on one side of the ground. FC Dallas called it a planned pull-down demolition in an active construction zone, with no explosives and no injuries. The work had been blocked off before the Swedes showed up, and it did not touch the pitch they trained on.

Hunt has put the rebuild above $215 million. Capacity is limited to about 11,000 seats through the 2026 season and a shortened 2027, with the full bowl due in 2028. The club’s lease in Frisco now runs through 2057. The new East Side Club covers 12,000 square feet. A west-side phase is next. The club is also chasing a FIFA Women’s World Cup 2031 date, which needs a stadium over 20,000.

So the month of 70,000-seat nights happened in Arlington, in a building the Cowboys own. The soccer-specific home that actually feeds the academy is a half-open job site with a luxury pub attached. Hunt has said the old bowl was a starter kit, and that the club has to move from older match-day income to premium seats. That is a revenue project with a youth campus next door, not a new field in Oak Cliff.

Lamar Hunt’s Tornado Still Feeds the Pipeline

Dan’s father, Lamar Hunt, founded the Dallas Tornado in 1967. The club joined the North American Soccer League a year later and lasted until the league folded in 1981. Hunt says a bunch of those players stayed, started youth clubs, coached high schools, and ran camps, which is why the local games are so competitive.

FC Dallas bought the rights to Inter Dallas in 2005, then the second-largest club in North Texas with some 45 teams, and opened the Toyota Stadium complex. The academy launched in 2008. Chris Hayden, who runs the youth program, now oversees about 4,000 players in the broader FC Dallas Youth setup, plus an academy of some 160 players across seven boys teams and four girls academy teams. Many academy players train at a second site on Hampton Road in West Dallas. The Frisco campus has 17 fields, more than most MLS peers and almost double a classic Ajax layout.

Hayden’s younger sides have already been to England, Spain, and Brazil this cycle. “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty a few of those kids in each of those teams will end up making our first team. We just don’t know which ones,” he said. Mikey Varas, the U.S. under-20 men’s coach and a former FC Dallas assistant, has called the club a trailblazer for starting an academy before other MLS sides were ready.

Families in Texas will spend the time, Hunt said, and the climate works even when it gets hot. Sports are a big deal here. That older layer, Tornado coaches and a 4,000-player club, is the machine the World Cup was supposed to supercharge. It was already running.

Oak Cliff Pitches Are What the Tournament Left Behind

FIFA’s local leftover is smaller than a semifinal and closer to the kids Hunt cannot house. The Common Grounds Soccer Plaza in Oak Cliff, built with the Puede Network for the tournament’s legacy program, added five turf fields plus room for leagues and food trucks. The North Texas Sports Foundation is trying to turn leftover land into courts.

WHAT THE LEGACY PITCHES PROMISE

• Mini-courts: The foundation’s plan is 15 to 26 mini-pitches by 2027 in under-resourced neighborhoods, with free access aimed at 10,000-plus youth and families.
• Size: The courts run 30 by 60 feet up to 50 by 84, with fencing, turf, and goals, not full 11-a-side grass.
• Pop-up fields: A parallel inflatable-field program is meant to rotate 4 to 12 portable pitches through schools and parks and reach 2,000 to 5,000 youth a year.

Those courts will not produce the next McKennie by themselves, and they will not replace the 100 full fields Hunt says he could fill. They are the only new public grass, or turf, the World Cup actually planted on the poor side of the income split.

Hunt still wants the kid who never picked soccer. Dallas already had the academy, the Tornado ghost clubs, four U.S. roster spots, and nine of the loudest nights on the map. What it did not get is a U.S. match in Arlington, a finished soccer stadium, or enough fields to take the 7% if it shows up.