Think Red Sox fans would cheer Aaron Judge the way Revs fans cheer Messi? Didn't think so

New York Times

3 days ago

BOSTON — A friend texted the other day to say he took his son to Gillette Stadium Wednesday night to watch the New England Revolution host Inter Miami and its galactic superstar footballer from Argentina, Lionel Messi. 'And the stadium was 75% for Messi,' my friend wrote. 'Many thousands (including my kid) wearing his shirt.'
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Considering the attendance was 43,293 for the Revolution's 2-1 loss, that's a lot of Inter Miami shirts. I reached out to some other friends who also happen to be sturdy, longtime Revolution fans. 'Yeah, I was there,' one of them shot right back. 'I'd say less than 75 percent but definitely a lot.' Another old pal, also in the house that night, wrote this: '75% is accurate. There were loads of Messi/Inter Miami jerseys.'
For most of you, perhaps all of you, this is not news. When Messi-led Inter Miami played the Revolution at Gillette in 2024, a franchise record 65,612 fans turned out. And anyway, it's a long-standing tradition in the United States for fans to bestow Beatles-like devotion on visiting soccer superstars. Whether the match is a league competition or a friendly, fans love the legends — and Messi, who scored both Inter Miami goals, didn't disappoint.
🚨 Watch: Lionel Messi gets a standing ovation from the crowd after yet another magical performance. 🐐🤩👏@M10GOAT pic.twitter.com/ODbCqzTEgi
— Inter Miami News Hub (@Intermiamicfhub) July 10, 2025
This isn't some newfangled, cool-kids, TikTokian thing. As far back as July 8, 1968, a crowd of 18,431 turned out at Fenway Park to watch — and cheer — as Brazilian soccer legend Pelé led Santos FC to a 7-1 victory over the 'home team,' the one-season-and-done Boston Beacons of the North American Soccer League. It was instantly proclaimed the largest crowd ever to watch a soccer game in New England.
Why do soccer fans go ga-ga over out-of-town players in a way you'd never see in baseball, football, hockey or basketball? The answers are easy. Too easy, in fact. Yes, a big part of it is national pride. Pelé is from Brazil, Messi from Argentina. As New England has the second-largest Brazilian community of any state in the country, that's a built-in fan base to watch not just Pelé but other South American stars as well. Including Messi, of course.
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Part of it, I guess, is a bucket list thing. Surely, there are people who filed into Fenway Park on that July evening in 1968 so they could say they saw Pelé play. But it goes way beyond that. Fans turn out at ballparks throughout MLB to watch Shohei Ohtani, but they don't wear Dodger shirts unless they're Dodgers fans. It was doubtless the same during the Tom Brady era, with fans clamoring to watch the greatest quarterback of all time without deigning to climb into a New England Patriots or Tampa Bay Buccaneers shirt.
It's different in soccer — that is, in the USA. Yes, there are plenty of expats who turn out at Gillette Stadium to watch Messi. Maybe even some ex-Pats. (Memo to self: Ring up old buddy Steve DeOssie, a former New England Patriot, and ask if he owns a Messi jersey.) Bottom line: Soccer fans in this country have a respect for the game that extends beyond team colors.
However, we need not bother with a statistical or sociological study to explain why this is so. Let's accept it for what it is. Besides, I have a larger point I want to make, and it begins with a question: Have there been times in the history of the Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics and Patriots when fans devoted an entire game to cheering a player on another team? (This is not a rhetorical question. You're invited to make your own submissions in the comments section.)
Leo makes it two! 🐐
For the fourth straight MLS game, Messi has a brace. pic.twitter.com/D3Lyt82sd4
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) July 10, 2025
We can all cite examples of former Boston sports heroes who returned to town and were wildly cheered — to a degree. Brady's return with the Bucs comes quickly to mind. Carlton Fisk with the Chicago White Sox as well. And, oh, Paul Pierce with the Brooklyn Nets. Among so many others. They were cheered, and then fans resumed rooting for the Pats, Red Sox and Celtics. I'm certain Bruins legend Bobby Orr would have been cheered beginning to end had he ever played at the old Boston Garden as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks, just as Celtics legend Bob Cousy would have received similar treatment had he played at the Garden during his cameo with the Cincinnati Royals. Those guys were in a different class and from a different time. Alas, Orr's lone game against the Bruins was at Chicago Stadium, and Cousy's seven games with the 1969-70 Royals included no showdowns against the Celtics, so we'll never know.
We've seen many instances in which Boston fans cheered a soon-to-retire opposing star who's in town for the last time. Yankees stars Catfish Hunter in 1979 and Derek Jeter in 2014 quickly come to mind. Richard Johnson, longtime curator of The Sports Museum, notes that Red Sox fans were in a particularly nostalgic mood on the night Hunter bade Fenway adieu, as they were waiting anxiously for Carl Yastrzemski to log his 3,000th career hit. Hunter came out of the game in the fifth inning. Yaz collected hit No. 3,000 in the eighth inning, a ground-ball single to right off Jim Beattie.
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Johnson also cited that time when Boston fans cheered an entire opposing team. We speak, of course, of the closing minutes of Game 7 of the 1982 Eastern Conference finals, with the Philadelphia 76ers wrapping up what would be a 120-106 victory over the Celtics. That's when the Garden masses began chanting, 'Beat LA! Beat LA! Beat LA!' — the idea being that, as much as they hated the 76ers, they hated the Los Angeles Lakers more. (The Lakers took out Philly in six games in the NBA Finals.)
My contribution here would be Opening Day at Fenway Park on April 8, 1975. The Fenway opener is always magical, but this one was in a class all its own. For the Red Sox, hometown hero Tony Conigliaro, who grew up on Boston's North Shore, was making his second comeback following the 1967 beaning that cruelly derailed his brilliant career. For the visiting Milwaukee Brewers, baseball's newly-crowned home run king, Henry Aaron, was about to play his first game in the American League. Aaron had originally signed with the Boston Braves, made it to the big leagues with the Milwaukee Braves, and broke Babe Ruth's all-time home run record with the Atlanta Braves. Now he was closing out his brilliant career with Milwaukee's American League club, and the baseball gods sent the Brewers to Boston to open the season.
I was there that day. We cheered wildly when Aaron was introduced during the pregame ceremony. We cheered wildly each time he came to bat. I believe I speak for the 34,055 fans in attendance when I state that everyone was rooting for Aaron to hit a home run. He did not. Instead, he went 0-for-3 and Luis Tiant pitched the Sox to a complete-game 5-2 victory. We'd all have been happier had it been a 5-3 victory, with a home run by Hammerin' Hank supplying the extra run.
But even so, rooting for Aaron that day wasn't the same as Boston fans rooting for, say, Pelé. Look at it this way: Whether or not Aaron was playing for the Brewers, Fenway Park was going to be sold out on Opening Day in 1975.
Not so whenever Pelé was in town. In an article for New England Soccer Journal in 2022, following Pelé's death at age 82, writer Frank Dell'Apa notes that the Brazilian soccer legend made four playing appearances over the years in the Boston area. The first was the 1968 match at Fenway Park. The Boston Globe apparently didn't think it was a big deal, given that it sent an intern to cover the game. Then again, the intern was rising University of North Carolina senior Peter Gammons, who would later gain fame as one of the greatest baseball writers of all time.
As Gammons noted in his game story, 'Pelé received cheer after cheer from the curious crowd that had heard and read about his mystique, and although he only scored once and assisted on one goal he proved to be one of the most exciting athletes anyone has ever seen in this area.'
It probably won't surprise you that Gammons, now 80, remembers the game as though it was played last night.
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'People wanted to appreciate him,' Gammons told me. 'Soccer, football, whatever you want to call it, really wasn't very big at the time in Boston. I don't think it was entirely a Brazilian crowd, with everyone from New Bedford coming up. It was a large, appreciative crowd.'
Nobody appreciated it more than Gammons.
'I was still in college, and my fraternity was St. Anthony Hall, which had a lot of soccer and lacrosse players,' Gammons said. 'I remember (sports editor) Fran Rosa from the Globe saying to me, 'I think you'll have some fun with this assignment. It's something different.' And it was. I was covering one of the most celebrated soccer players in soccer history playing in one of the most celebrated baseball parks in history.'
Pelé's next visit to Boston was on June 30, 1972, with Santos FC taking on the Boston Astros of the American Soccer League. The result was pretty much the same — Santos 6, Astros 1 — but not the interest. Depending on which account you read, only 1,000 to 2,500 fans showed up. All kinds of reasons were given, from heavy fog and high ticket prices to 'a false radio report that the game was cancelled,' according to the Globe.
Things were quite different on June 20, 1975, when Pelé, now playing for the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, arrived at Nickerson Field to play Boston's latest pro soccer outfit, the Minutemen, and their big star player, Eusébio.
Pelé was 34 and past his prime, but no matter. A huge crowd turned out for the occasion, with estimates ranging from 18,000 to 20,000 to 22,000 to even 30,000. But no need to squabble. The old ballpark was packed and then some. And it only had seating for some 12,500.
The Minutemen won 2-1 in overtime. Eusébio scored a goal on a direct kick. Pelé put the ball in the net soon thereafter, but his effort was stricken from the books because of a pushing-off violation.
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But ball control was not the story of this game. It was crowd control. As a result of too many people being crammed into too small an area and not enough security to keep everyone in line, fans rushed the field to a degree that Pelé wound up being carried off the field on a stretcher. It's not clear if that was a precautionary measure, perhaps even an attempt to quell the crowd, but Pelé did come out of it with a bruised right knee and ankle.
As Charles Scoggins of the Lowell (Mass.) Sun put it in his account of the game, 'When you read from time to time in the sports pages about those wild soccer riots in South America, you were always able to content yourself by thinking, thank goodness it can't happen here! Well, it can. And it almost did last night at Boston University's Nickerson Field.'
Ouch.
All across the country, newspapers carried wire-service accounts that focused more on the crowd control than the actual game. Readers of the Biddeford-Saco Journal in Maine woke up to 'Pelé Mobbed by Frenzied Fans.' The Honolulu Star-Bulletin went with 'Mob Shakes Up Pelé.' In The Berkeley (Calif.) Gazette it was, 'Pandemonium reigns at Boston for Pelé.'
There was no such mayhem Wednesday night at Gillette Stadium. The Revolution tend to draw a family crowd, and Gillette is a big, modern place with security people who know what they're doing.
But just as at Fenway in '68 and Nickerson Field in '75, people came to see a legend. And that's not a bad thing.
It's Messi! ⚡
Miami takes the 1-0 lead in New England. pic.twitter.com/xwuiAK3vLN
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) July 10, 2025
'If you're born in Boston and you're a baseball fan, you're very likely growing up supporting the Red Sox,' said Adam Klionsky, director of communications for the Revolution. 'If it's basketball, it's the Celtics. In soccer, there's an appreciation for that level of greatness and the spectacle of one of the most iconic players in the world coming to town.'
Perhaps the day will come when enlightened Red Sox fans stand up and cheer the Yankees' Aaron Judge, he being one of the most iconic baseball players in the world.
Then again, perhaps not.