When Inter Miami visits the Columbus Crew on Saturday (4:30 p.m. ET | MLS Season Pass), it will mark the meeting of the last two remaining unbeaten MLS sides.
But although Columbus is the home team, they'll be playing roughly a two-hour drive away at the 67,000-plus capacity Huntington Bank Field, home of the NFL's Cleveland Browns.
This won't be the first time a home club has moved a game on account of Messi; Sporting Kansas City moved its clash with Inter Miami last year to the 76,000-plus seat Arrowhead Stadium of the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs.
But this is the first time an MLS club has relocated a match such a distance -- a drive of 145 miles from Columbus' normal venue of Lower.com Field -- just to roll out the red carpet for Messi and company.
Here's three reasons why it's happening.
Haslem family's Cleveland connections
While the Haslam family's intervention in buying the Columbus Crew in 2018 is a major reason the club avoided relocation to Austin, they are also the Browns' owners and have had a far longer civic connection with Cleveland.
That makes relocating the match to Cleveland more lucrative for two reasons: It comes at a venue where the owners are already tenants, and it comes with an opportunity to promote the relocation as bringing a watershed event to a community in which they've been invested far longer.
The Horseshoe's unsuitability
There was a time during the very early days of MLS when Columbus played its home matches at the 102,000-seat Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University.
Thankfully MLS standards have evolved to a degree where staging a game at "The Horseshoe" today would be unthinkable; the pitch size at the American football venue was only 106 x 62 yards, far smaller than the 110 x 70 minimum stipulated for FIFA-sanctioned matches.
But the inability to adapt the venue for soccer leaves few other suitable alternatives for a club searching to greatly increase seating capacity for a star of Messi's stature.
There are only two other venues in Ohio with a capacity above 50,000; One is in Cleveland, and the other is Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati, where Columbus would be restricted from hosting a match because of FC Cincinnati's territorial rights.
Not Messi's first visit
While some Crew fans understandably feel jilted by the relocation of Saturday's match, what may lessen the indignity is that Columbus fans had the chance to see Messi in person at Lower.com Field last season.
The eight-time Ballon d'Or winner scored twice and had an assist in Miami's 3-2 victory at Lower.com Field back on Oct. 2. That made the equation for the Haslam family a bit different than if Saturday marked the first time Messi had faced Columbus on the road.