$80 million Texas complex to open with MLS match
By Ridge Mahoney, Special for USA TODAY
For more than three decades, professional soccer has tried to find a foothold in the hotbed of Texas football.
Come Saturday, fans and officials and dignitaries will gather in the Dallas suburb of Frisco – ground zero of another hotbed, that of youth soccer – to herald a multi-use complex unlike anything in the world.
Surrounding a 21,193-seat stadium that will host FC Dallas of Major League Soccer as well as high school football will be a vast complex of soccer fields set amidst the lawns and trees of Pizza Hut Park, which is the first facility to meld youth sports and a professional team to such an extent.
"I've certainly never seen or heard of anything like this," says Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, whose Hunt Sports Group spearheaded the project to house FC Dallas, one of its three Major League Soccer teams, along with 17 grass fields as well as another with artificial turf.
The cost of the complex – estimated to be $80 million when all the trimmings are finished – is being shared by those entities. Naming rights were sold to Pizza Hut for 20 years at more than $1 million per year.
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