The Colorado Rapids will face Inter Miami on Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at Empower Field at Mile High, and the club said Friday it had already sold more than 70,000 tickets, breaking its attendance record. The match is being moved to the Broncos’ home stadium to handle the demand and to mark the Rapids’ 30th anniversary.
For Colorado, the crowd is the headline, but the timing is just as important. The Rapids are sixth in the Western Conference and have scored 19 goals in seven games under first-year coach Matt Wells, matching Vancouver for the league lead. Wells, 37, has four wins, three losses and no draws since taking over, and he said the club needs to stay true to itself even in a bigger venue. “We’ve got an excellent home record, we’ve been superb here in Colorado and in the altitude, so the fact we’re in a different stadium doesn’t make a difference to me,” he said.
The club’s growth makes the scene at Empower Field a long way from 1996, when Marcelo Balboa joined the Rapids after leaving Club León in Mexico and the league had 10 teams. The Rapids opened their first home match at Mile High Stadium that year by beating the Dallas Burn 3-1 in front of about 21,000 fans. Balboa remembered the uncertainty of the league’s early years, saying how the first three seasons went would decide the next three, and he recalled walking onto the field to 20,000 people applauding and thinking, “Holy crap, OK. This can work.”
That contrast is part of what gives Saturday’s game its weight. MLS has grown to 30 teams, and Sportico reported in February that the average club is now valued at $767 million, but Colorado’s record crowd comes from a simpler reality: Messi and Inter Miami are a draw few clubs can ignore. Wells said the Rapids plan to press from the start and try to take the ball away, adding that if they stick to their principles they can win and play the kind of football that excites fans. Balboa, who was there at the start, put it more plainly years ago: the goal was to entertain, and on the day the Rapids opened at Mile High, it worked.
