Sporting Kansas City makes its return to Sporting Park early with CONCACAF play

Sporting  Kansas City doesn’t play its first Major League Soccer regular-season home game until  March 15, but fans get an early taste of soccer action when the team plays a top-flight club team from Mexico just days earlier.

Sporting Kansas City plays Cruz Azul March 12, the team announced Monday. The tilt will be the first action at Sporting Park since the MLS Cup final in December.

The Cruz Azul game will be what amounts to a playoff game in the CONCACAF Champions League. It’s the competition that Sporting Kansas City CEO Robb Heineman wants to win now that his club has an MLS Cup and U.S. Open Cup title to its name in just the last two years.

The CONCACAF Champions League is an annual competition in which the best-performing club teams from North America and Central America play in a tournament to crown something of a regional champion. The tournament has been held since 1962 and been mostly dominated by club teams from Mexico. Cruz Azul has won it five times. A team from the United States hasn’t won it since 2000, when the L.A. Galaxy took the title.

Sporting Kansas City punched their ticket to the current CONCACAF Champions League in 2012 when it won the U.S. Open Cup title.

Similar to the early rounds in the MLS Cup playoffs, Sporting Kansas City will play Cruz Azul twice (once in Kansas City and again in Mexico), with the winner determined by whichever team scores the most goals when the final tally of both games is added up together.