He knew nothing about the television show or the skyline, the Cowboys or JFK. Dallas could not have meant less to Petar Musa a year ago, when he was lining up at striker for Portugal’s S.L. Benfica.
Why would it? He was 25 years old and playing for one of soccer’s most storied clubs. He was making inroads into the Croatian national team. Musa was on his way, and such progress inevitably pointed somewhere else in Europe—England, perhaps, or Germany or Spain. This is what young men like him do when they are 6-foot-3 and sturdy, playing the most glamorous position in the world’s most beloved sport. They go to where the action is. To where the best play.
What they don’t do, at least not in their mid-20s, is head off to Major League Soccer. On the off chance one does make his way stateside, rarely is it to FC Dallas.
Yet here Musa is, the brightest spot in a lost season, eight months after signing for a club-record $9.7 million transfer fee, which could rise to $13 million with incentives. No FC Dallas player had notched 15 goals in his debut season before Musa ripped an unassisted, outside-the-box strike on September 21 against LAFC. Only five others have done it at all in their Dallas tenures. This is exactly what the club bargained for and exactly what former FCD right back Reggie Cannon, who overlapped with Musa at another Portuguese club, Boavista, told his old teammate to expect if he accepted the club’s offer to sign him.
“You will destroy the league,” Musa recalls Cannon saying, adding a sheepish laugh. Bold is not Musa’s style. He has a self-professed fondness for “basic things”: good coffee, a walk in nature, he and his wife bathing their infant son. Ask him his favorite thing about Texas, and he’ll tell you barbecue (Hutchins, in particular). His idea of a good time with teammates away from the pitch is playing cards.
All of which makes his move to a city he’d barely heard of, in a country he’d never stepped foot in, seem like a very un-Musa-like endeavor. The same level of surprise could apply to FC Dallas coaxing him into it. Indeed, as Chief Soccer Officer Andre Zanotta acknowledges, when the club decided to attempt to sign Musa, “Your immediate thought is, ‘That’s going to be tough.'”
While the club has enjoyed a noticeable uptick in transfer spending over the past two years, FCD remains an outfit far better known for selling American starlets than buying foreign stars. Even seeking out a player like Musa was a detour from the club’s standard operating procedure. Beating out clubs from across Europe’s major leagues for his signature hints at an entirely new roadmap.
“It shows the ambitions of the club and how much we believe we can do things differently,” Zanotta says. “We’re on the right track, so you can attract players like him.”
Dallas can attribute Musa’s desire to change clubs to the oldest reason in sports: he wanted to play more. He spent the 2023-2024 campaign in a backup role at Benfica, productive—he scored 11 goals in all competitions—but peripheral in some of the matches that mattered most. He needed a change, and Benfica wasn’t eager to give him one; Zanotta describes a negotiation process full of stops and starts as the club dithered on whether to let Musa leave.
When Benfica finally relented, Zanotta appealed to the sensibility that may have been least fulfilled for Musa in Portugal. FCD could not match Europe’s tradition or appeal. It could not offer him a chance to participate in the UEFA Champions League, the most prestigious club competition in the world. He would no longer be a short flight away from his native Zagreb as his wife navigated her pregnancy. What it could do was make him a the focal point on a club that was already flush with complementary attacking pieces, from stalwart Jesus Ferreira to upstart Bernard Kamungo to Alan Velasco, who preceded Musa as the club’s most expensive transfer when he joined from Argentina’s Independiente two years ago.
“Instead of going to the Bundesliga [in Germany], to a club that you’ll be one more there, he felt like, ‘I can do something different,’” Zanotta says. He could matter.
It took time for Musa’s on-field impact to match the symbolic one. He scuffled through the first three months of the season. On the field, he was playing too far away from goal and hampered by injuries to many of his primary creators, including Ferreira, Velasco, and midfield orchestrator Asier Illarramendi. Perhaps there was a cultural adjustment, too. Musa makes no bones about the jolt of relocating from Libson to Plano, where the coffee is to-go, nobody walks, and “everything is so big.”
Things began to coalesce in June, when Dallas replaced head coach Nico Estevez with assistant Peter Luccin. The Frenchman deployed a more direct approach than his predecessor, one that anchored Musa in the box and funneled chances his way. He also could empathize with Musa unlike any FC Dallas head coach before him. Eleven years earlier, Luccin moved to the United States to end his playing career with the club after more than 300 matches for teams in France and Spain’s top leagues, including global powerhouses Paris Saint-Germain and Atletico Madrid. It didn’t matter that Luccin, then 34 years old, arrived in Dallas as a bit player instead of a star like Musa. “Peter knows well how to [be] a player of high levels in Europe,” Zanotta says. “I noticed that connection between [Musa] and Peter clicked right away.”
On June 19, 10 days after Luccin’s appointment as interim coach, Musa banged in a hat trick against Minnesota. The following week, he scored again at Seattle. Then came goals in all five of Dallas’ matches in July and August. That earned him a trip to the MLS All-Star Game alongside keeper Maarten Paes, giving Dallas multiple representatives for the first time since 2022.
Both he and the club tapered off from there. Musa’s milestone goal against LAFC was his only one in six matches in September and October. That match also happens to be FCD’s sole win in that span, as it dropped out of the playoffs for the first time since 2021. The club now goes as its best goal scorer does, the way it once did with names such as Jason Kreis, Carlos Ruiz, Kenny Cooper, and Ricardo Pepi before him.
Now it must empower him to do his best work. Per the club’s Garrett Melcer, Musa outperformed his expected goals by 5.2, a top-10 mark in the league. It says plenty about his ability and even more about his surroundings; Musa did everything that could be asked of him, and that ask was unreasonable for a team with title aspirations. Better health from his supporting cast would go a long way toward ameliorating that. A full season of Velasco and Ferreira playing behind Musa profiles as one of the more prolific attacks in the league, while even at age 34, Illarramendi can play balls few others in MLS can.
But so, too, will simply continuing to fall behind the big man up front as he continues to acclimatize to his newer, bigger, spread-out surroundings. Musa plans to explore some of the United States this offseason before returning home to Croatia and then taking a belated honeymoon. (The Maldives is a potential destination.) After that it’s back to Dallas, to continue making his unconventional new home a little more lived in.
“When you find someone like him, it really gives you the leadership,” Zanotta says. Now it’s time to see how many surprising destinations the club might follow him to.
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