The US Men's National Team takes on Jamaica in a friendly perhaps destined to be most remembered for its location rather than either of the sides involved. The match will be staged at Finley Stadium, a 20,000-seater arena that is home to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's football team and NPSL's FC Chattanooga.
It is the crowd FC Chattanooga is able to draw to fourth-tier American soccer matches that has persuaded US Soccer to send the national team to the home field of a club in (semi-pro) NPSL. The local press expects a sell-out. One of the more reductive threads in the national soccer conversation is "which city loves this sport the most", but it has become more significant in light of the latest MLS expansion drive - an exercise that will certainly include some evaluation of the relative popularity of soccer in the 12 cities bidding for four available places in the next round of MLS growth.
Chattanooga doesn't have its hat in the MLS expansion ring, but Nashville does. Some will doubtless use the crowd at Finley Stadium as a sort measure of the strength of Nashville's bid to have a presence in MLS.
For what it's worth - which is very little - USMNT's last game drew about 20,000. That was the 0-0 draw against Serbia in San Diego. Rather, it was a draw against a team of Serbian Superliga players virtually unknown outside their own country (and some arguably not so well known in Serbia either).
If Jurgen Klinsmann was still in charge of USMNT, the failure to trounce a team that barely qualified for consideration as Serbia's third-string would have been presented as further evidence of the German's incompetence. But it was Bruce Arena's first game of his second time in charge of the national team, and it is traditional for expectations to reset to "reasonable" in the early days of a new coach's tenure.
The match against Jamaica revisits one of the great humiliations of USMNT's Klinsmann era. The last time these teams met was in the 2015 Gold Cup semifinals - and Jamaica won, 2-1. But this game should not be mistaken for a rematch: both sides have other priorities at the moment.
For USMNT's January campers, the task is to persuade Arena of their suitability for the World Cup qualifying task ahead. For Jamaica, there is no more World Cup qualifying to think about until after the 2018 tournament, so the current priority is to identify emerging talent. Interim head coach Theodore "Tappa" Whitmore would also like to persuade the Jamaica Football Federation to make his re-appointment to the national team job a more permanent arrangement.
This game will be a scouting bonanza for North American clubs hoping to catch sight of the up-and-coming tier of Jamaican pro soccer players. About half the Reggae Boyz roster is players from the Red Stripe Premier League, which doesn't have a large audience in the USA. It is not a particularly young squad (Montego Bay United's Dwayne Ambusley is 36) or professionally inexperienced (Omar Gordon played for Indy Eleven last year), but the two players likely to be of most interest to any scouts present are the 19-year-old forwards Shamar Nicholson and Jourdaine Fletcher.
On the USMNT side, New York Red Bulls' fans will look forward to minutes for 'keeper Luis Robles, and maybe the last sighting of Dax McCarty before he dons the jersey of the Chicago Fire and becomes "one of them". (Kidding, Dax - you'll always be one of us.)
RBNY's Sacha Kljestan was released from USMNT duty after the Serbia game, to attend to the more pressing matter of a newborn addition to his family. And the Jamaica camp has reported Kemar Lawrence has stayed with the Red Bulls after a scan revealed a "groin problem".
USMNT will be expected to win, the Reggae Boyz will likely be happy enough if people are talking favorably about Jamaican players who don't normally get discussed outside RSPL circles. And most of the post-game talk will be about the 20,000 people who decided to watch some soccer in Chattanooga (even though the same number turned up to see USMNT in San Diego less than a week ago).
Per livesoccertv.com here's where to find the game: