Dan McNally still remembers going to the airport, meeting Crystal Palace Football Club and making small talk with their then manager, Alan Pardew. When Pardew asked McNally, FCC’s director of soccer operations, how many fans the club expected for the upcoming friendly, McNally said over 35,000.
“Thirty-five thousand? That’s more than we get at Selhurst Park!” McNally remembers the Palace coach saying to him.
Consider that the first moment of a four-day stretch in 2016 that saw FC Cincinnati and Crystal Palace FC embrace each other before a sold-out match at Nippert Stadium. For FCC, the club started playing months earlier and wanted to make an early impression. For Palace, an English Premier League club, their visit was the fire starter for Cincinnati eventually sealing an MLS expansion bid.
This past Saturday, FC Cincinnati re-aired the friendly for the first time, while also streaming a Second Screen Experience for the match, which included Voice of FCC Tommy Gelehrter, play-by-play analyst Kevin McCloskey, McNally and former player Paul Nicholson.
The stories were classic and can be watched here! These are some of the highlights:
McNally said the friendly against Palace, which Cincinnati lost, 2-0, was the first moment he realized FCC were creating something special in the Queen City.
“We are really on to something,” McNally recalled thinking. “The next three or four years have just been a blur. I would call it a soccer miracle.”
McNally also had other great stories, like when a security guard had to hold a watch valued at more than six figures for a Palace player.
“Welcome to the Premier League,” he said.
Nicholson also gave great insight on what it was like as an Englishman playing a club from his birth country in his new home. He brought up a story when McNally and former head coach John Harkes walked into the locker room one day and told the Orange and Blue that they’d be hosting an EPL side.
“It was just crazy, to be honest,” Nicholson said. “It wasn’t something on the cards or discussed when we signed as players. It was just a great feeling.”
Nicholson laughed thinking about trying to defend Palace winger Wilfried Zaha and how much quicker the Premier League players were passing than the third-division USL side.
For McCloskey, he mentioned how much Crystal Palace players embraced the atmosphere of a sold-out Nippert Stadium and how significant the friendly was to newly-created FC Cincinnati.
“Whenever you have big teams or players, you’re used to seeing prima donnas,” he said. “But it wasn’t that. It was the exact opposite.”
Another classic moment was McNally’s fear after the final whistle blew about players swapping jerseys.
Because FCC were a lower league team, McNally said the club didn’t have many of the white jerseys remaining. If players started swapping them with Palace ones, that could’ve created an actual jersey shortage for the remainder of 2016.
“If they swapped jerseys, would we have enough for the rest of the season?” McNally recalled.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem.
