Dynamo Ends 16-Year Search for a Home The former Houston Oilers quarterback and NFL Europe executive Oliver Luck sat pondering his role as president of Major League Soccer's latest franchise. Its first game was three months away yet there were no front-office employees, no headquarters and no stadium lease. At least Luck (the father of the Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck, the No. 1 draft pick in last month's N.F.L. draft) had a good team. The San Jose Earthquakes had lifted the M.L.S. Cup in 2001 and 2003, and finished the 2005 regular season with the league's best record. Anschutz Entertainment Group, the club's owner, had been frustrated in its attempts to build a soccer stadium in the city. Now the Earthquakes players and coaches were uprooting their families and moving to Houston for the 2006 M.L.S. season. That club finally plays in its own stadium Saturday, ending a 16-year wait, when the Houston Dynamo hosts D.C. United at the 22,000-seat BBVA Compass Stadium. Luck will be among those in attendance to witness the closing chapter in a project that he spearheaded. "It was déjà vu for me," said Luck, now the athletic director at West Virginia University. He experienced similar circumstances when he had the task of setting up franchises for NFL Europe in the 1990s. What really mattered was creating the brand, getting people interested, getting people to notice. Saturday's opener should be smoother than the Dynamo's inaugural game against the Colorado Rapids in April 2006. The fledgling club's ticketing system failed and long lines clogged the entrances at the University of Houston's Robertson Stadium as more than 25,000 people turned up. Luck took to the turnstiles along with the Anschutz executives Phil Anschutz and Tim Leiweke to sell tickets for $10 to eager fans. That first game instantly went down in Houston soccer folklore as Brian Ching's four-goal performance inspired a 5-2 victory. Robertson Stadium hosted the 2006 and 2007 Western Conference finals as the Dynamo won back-to-back M.L.S. titles in their first two years in Houston. The old stadium also witnessed classic battles in regional club tournaments against Mexican opposition, but it held a major drawback for the team's players. "It wasn't ours," said the current assistant coach Wade Barrett, who captained Houston to those two championships. It wasn't a place that you walked in and saw our history. You didn't see our trophies. You didn't see our names up on the wall. Luck had been instrumental in obtaining an M.L.S. franchise for Houston. He had returned to the United States in 2000 after a decade spent appreciating soccer's cultural significance while working for the N.F.L. in Europe. He spent five years running the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, a political entity working on the financing and construction of new stadiums for Houston's baseball, football and basketball franchises. "As we finished up the last building, I said to my board there is one sport we don't have," Luck said. It's wrong for this sport, the world's sport, not to be in a culturally dynamic place like Houston. Now the city had a team, two championships, and heroes in Coach Dominic Kinnear and players like Barrett, Ching, Dwayne De Rosario and the local product Stuart Holden. Luck turned his attention toward figuring out a stadium deal that was "politically palatable" to all stakeholders. Site proposals came from Houston's suburbs, but Luck stubbornly held to his belief that soccer required a downtown home. "It was the sine qua non," Luck said. For the sport and the team to really take hold and capture the imagination of the entire community, it had to be downtown. It was a cultural statement that soccer has arrived. Saturday's game carries added significance for Ching, one of only two remaining Dynamo players who made the move from San Jose (along with Brad Davis). The Houston captain's dream of leading his team out in its own building looked to have ended when the Montreal Impact selected the Hawaiian forward during last November's expansion draft. Ching even lined up against the Dynamo in a preseason friendly in February before being traded back to Houston. "I was getting more accustomed to the fact I might not be around," Ching said. Now he feels "antsy" about finally playing at the new stadium after spending much of the past week there doing promotional events. De Rosario will be there, too, albeit looking to spoil the party as captain of D.C. United. "I'm definitely going to enjoy standing there when the anthems are going on, looking around, taking it in, and knowing that we helped to stamp soccer in Houston and help build that place," De Rosario said. Luck, meanwhile, is looking forward to seeing Houston's die-hard fans, particularly a group of "30 or 40" that turned up whenever he needed public support at City Hall to push the stadium proposal forward. "We'll have a nice private smile," Luck said. We know the challenges we had to overcome to get the deal done. Ian Thomson is a free-lance soccer writer and founder of The Soccer Observer Web site. Follow him on Twitter at @SoccerObserver.