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SANDY -- More than 20-thousand fans are expected to be at Rio Tinto Stadium Wednesday night to watch Real Salt Lake take on Monterrey, Mexico.
About 200 fans from Monterrey and Houston rode a bus for 30 hours to be in attendance for the big game.
"It's our passion," said Monterrey fan Oscar Trevino. "We have a real loyalty to our team. And we go anywhere."
Fans like Trevino may be cheering against Real, but it's a testament to just how far this team has come.
It was just about 7 years ago that Real became Major League Soccer's 12th team. Wednesday night's record breaking crowd shows just how accomplished this team has become.
Real Salt Lake has gone in three short years from a new squad, an expansion franchise dealing with many growing pains to perhaps the most elite club in the entire league.
Now the team is a league champion, heralded as a great example for growing soccer in the US, but a few years ago there were struggles. Several seasons of losing records, many games lost at the very end, questions about where to locate a new stadium, should tax money be used, whether the team could survive in the long run.
Since moving to Rio Tinto, the squad has lost just twice in 45 games, outscoring opponents 76-19. Its attendance is among the top in the league, averaging 18,000 a game and it's number two in the league in terms of merchandising.
"In terms of a game in Utah, a championship game, this is as big as it gets," said RSL owner Dave Checketts about Wednesday night's game. "And this is a very, very important game to us."
Checketts continued, "I'm not sure that I expected it to happen this soon, but sometime in the history of the first 10 years of RSL, I expected us to have international opponents and games that meant something, this is not a friendly, this is not just two teams getting together as an exhibition games."
Checketts says the team sold over a million dollars in merchandise last year, another sign of success.
Story written by John Daley with contributions from Nkoyo Iyamba.
