There’s always something on the line when the FC Dallas soccer team practices. Practice is of course a chance for individual and team improvement and a chance to vie for more playing time, but there’s also the barbecue fund. As teammates run passing drills, the lowest-scoring duos put in $20 each. The poorest performance in goal comes with the same penalty. And players pay for other reasons, too. Assistant coach Josema Bazan told me, “One guy showed up for practice twenty minutes late” last week. “That’s a full barbecue,” he said, laughing.

After Bazan joined FC Dallas in 2011 as an academy coach, he quickly took over the cooking duties for what was then the coach’s barbecue lunch. He suggested inviting the players to the next one, and a team tradition was born. Now the MLS team’s players and coaches come together about once every three weeks after practice to truly share a meal. Sure, there’s a team meal after every practice, but the players come and go from the lunch room. The player-funded barbecues are different. They’re important as much for the social aspect as the food, but the food isn’t bad either. It’s one of the few times where the players and coaches all occupy the same space outside of practice or a game setting.

A native of Córdoba, Argentina, Bazan grew up cooking barbecue. He learned how to make coals from hardwood, properly grill sausages and beef lomo (tenderloin), and whip up a chimichurri from his mother and his uncle. Bazan has never cooked professionally. His first paycheck came from the Argentinian national team at age 18. He has played soccer professionally in five countries, each one providing a new cooking culture to learn from and further fuel his passion for barbecue.

The smell of beef fat dripping on coals wafted up from the edge of Toyota Stadium in Frisco when I arrived for a team barbecue, at the invitation of Gina Miller in the team’s media department, a few weeks back. Jorge Mercapidez, a Uruguayan friend of Bazan’s, was grilling sausages for sandwiches called choripan. Bazan was wrestling with a mound of beef lomo and picanha. The latter is a cut unfamiliar to Argentinian cooks, but he discovered the prized cut of Brazilian barbecue while playing soccer there. Flanken-cut beef ribs also took up some serious real estate on the charcoal-fired grill. These are thin slices of beef rib cut across the bones that take little time on the grill. Bazan sees it as a functional cut that can feed a crowd quickly if more strangers, like myself, show up for the barbecues. He’s usually in charge of feeding about fifty, but he keenly remembers a day when 97 hungry folks showed up, and his hands were nearly numb from all the meat flipping.