Win or Lose, Inter Miami vs. Barca Is a Win for the Home Team

Things are about to get a lot more interesting for Inter Miami and its fans: One of soccer's most storied clubs is in town this week for a friendly.

FC Barcelona — yes, that Barcelona, AKA Barca — faces off against Inter Miami at DRV PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday, July 19, at 8 p.m. Tickets to the match are sold out — which is to be expected when a club that routinely sells out football-size stadiums takes the pitch in a stadium that seats a scant 18,000. As of this past weekend, tickets remained available on the secondary market, ranging from a get-in-the-door price of $140 to a one-step-away-from-being-on-the-team $11,000.

The match against Barca is quite the get for David Beckham's Inter Miami and comes on the heels of the team's signing of Spanish midfielder Alejandro Pozuelo, the best player to pull a pink kit over his head for the team to date. Despite being huge underdogs to the La Liga juggernaut, the mere fact that Barca chose to visit Miami provides cred and pushes soccer further as the team readies to move from Broward to Miami — and sign bigger stars.

Barca has never played Inter Miami, but this will mark the club's fourth appearance in Miami — the team faced off against Chivas Guadalajara (2011), Real Madrid (2017), and Napoli (2019), with all matches taking place at the stadium currently known as Hard Rock. Past Barcelona appearances featured recognizable names like Messi, Neymar, and Ronaldo. Though the names this time around — Piqué, ter Stegen, Dembélé, Busquets, Pedri, and American Sergiño Dest — may not be familiar to casual fans, the mystique that surrounds the team endures, and it's well-earned.

Inter Miami enters the match looking for a spark to a disappointing 2022 campaign — or at the very least, something to seize on as a positive. Through 19 games, Inter languishes in the bottom half of Major League Soccer's Eastern Conference standings with 7W-9L-4D mark.

In the end, Inter Miami and its fans can be proud that one of the game's top clubs gave them the time of day.