Rain again. Brian Colona’s sunglasses were an optimistic touch under a sky far less bright than his high-vis yellow vest.

His Houston-area home flooded when Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017. And now a stormy week, far less dramatic but still pesky, was menacing a site poised for a special place in American rugby history. Soil turned to mush, coating freshly laid concrete parking lots and walkways with gooey brown globules.

Days of rain had frustrated workers putting the finishing touches to the Houston SaberCats’ new home, a project which had kept Colona, the club president, awake the night before we met.

Colona had retired from the oil and gas industry when the SaberCats’ principal owner, Mike Loya, called with a job offer at the end of 2017. “I had never watched a minute of rugby,” Colona said earlier this month over the rumble of portable generators and a concrete mixer. “I quickly got the excitement.”

We’ve taken a huge risk. We’ve spent this money, our money, on a bit of a wing and a prayer Brian Colona, Houston SaberCats

After the soft launch of the then incomplete Aveva Stadium on 13 April, a game against the Glendale Raptors on 11 May was set as the grand opening. Alas, near the end of a Major League Rugby (MLR) season in which they have lost to almost everyone, the SaberCats admitted defeat to the weather and postponed the fixture.

Now, with shades-appropriate weather in the forecast, the team host the Austin Elite at 5pm CT on Saturday, ahead of the rearranged official curtain-raiser against Glendale on 29 May.

Ten miles south of downtown, Aveva is, like much of Houston, next to a major freeway, swampy-looking fields and spacious housing estates. Are there alligators in the bayou behind the scoreboard? You wouldn’t rule it out.

The stadium has a capacity of 4,000, with 3,200 seats, and the total project cost is $15.2m. In Texas, where high schools spend up to $70m on football venues that seat more than 10,000, Aveva is little more than a hillock in a mountainous landscape. But it has outsize importance in rugby union’s bid to crack the world’s most lucrative market.

MLR has expanded from seven teams in 2018 to nine this year and it will reach 12 in 2020. Shortly before the second season ends, the SaberCats are opening the second rugby-specific stadium in the US. The first, Infinity Park in Colorado, belongs to Glendale.

Several more will follow, the league hopes, as it tries to emulate Major League Soccer (MLS), which was a tenuous venture until the Columbus Crew opened the first soccer-specific stadium 20 years ago, sparking a construction frenzy that laid secure foundations in more ways than one.

The Aveva scoreboard. Photograph: Brian Colona

Stadiums are “super important”, said Nic Benson, MLR deputy commissioner. “They really become community focal points around the sport. Probably the most important thing we have to do is build communities around our teams.”

Fandom needs facilities. So the Americanisation of global sports like soccer, rugby and cricket is not only about boosting awareness and passion, but persuading city leaders to allocate land and funds. In Texas, that means making the case that Saturday afternoon scrums are a good investment in the state of Friday Night Lights.

After borrowing high school football and minor league baseball venues, the SaberCats are playing and training at Houston Sports Park, a city-led venture that opened in 2011 and includes public pitches and the training bases of the Houston Dynamo, of MLS, and the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League.

The city has contributed $3.2m to the SaberCats’ three-field site, for parking and utilities, given the team a 30-year lease and has the right to host 10 events for nothing each year. In negotiations, the SaberCats argued that rugby is growing fast, making inroads in schools and on-brand for a diverse metropolis with a large population from rugby-playing nations.

“We found during that conversation that we had a number of city employees and parents who had their kids in college who found that rugby was becoming an increasing part of the sports environment and the American college scene also,” said Andy Icken, chief development officer for the city of Houston. “We see it as a good opportunity for the community.”

‘It’s a game for everybody’

Houston is the US’s fourth-biggest city. America’s other rugby-specific stadium is in a rather smaller municipality, in the words of a local news headline, a city of “two strip clubs, only one house and a pro sports team”.

Glendale is an oddity: a 0.6 square mile independent suburb five miles from downtown Denver whose roughly 5,200 residents live in apartment blocks dotted around big-box retail stores. It opened the 5,000-capacity Infinity Park in 2007 and bestowed upon itself the title “RugbyTown USA”.

Infinity Park in Glendale, Colorado. Photograph: Andy Cross/Denver Post via Getty Images

“I’ve been preaching the gospel of rugby for a long time,” said the mayor, Mike Dunafon, a former Denver Broncos player and Wyclef Jean rap collaborator who made an independent run for governor of Colorado in 2014 on a pro-gun, pro-cannabis, pro-rugby platform.

Dunafon discovered rugby in the British Virgin Islands in the 1970s. “My initial response was, ‘Not on your life, I’m not playing football without pads.’ Of course, once I played on a real team I realised what rugby actually was and became an absolute zealot about the ability to change your town with that game. It’s a game for everybody.”

Parents who had their kids in college found that rugby was an increasing part of the sports environment Andy Icken, city of Houston

He credits the sports complex with a decrease in crime: gangs declared truces and played on floodlit pitches at night. The project was financed by a lodgers’ tax but the influx of rugby visitors has driven up hotel demand and prices, he said, adding: “I jokingly say, build it and they will succumb. And they really have.”

Elsewhere, the wisdom of Indianapolis spending $5m on a World Sports Park for cricket, rugby, Gaelic football, Australian rules football and hurling has been debated. Mindful of south Florida’s proximity to the Caribbean, meanwhile, in 2008 Broward county lavished $10m on an international-standard cricket ground in Fort Lauderdale that can hold up to 20,000 spectators. But with US cricket plagued by governance woes, the venue only started to flourish when it was redeveloped for soccer.

Despite all that, Prairie View, a city of about 6,000 people 45 miles north-west of central Houston, is partnering with a Houston businessman who is building an 84-acre cricket complex, meant to be the biggest in the country.

“This has really been a boon to help me in developing the city,” said Prairie View’s mayor, David Allen. “Eighteen months ago people were asking me: what the hell is cricket? Now they’re understanding more and more that it’s just a positive thing and people are discussing our city in the process.”

The Aveva Stadium in Houston, under a typical Texas sky. Photograph: Brian Colona

Prairie View can offer tax incentives and hopes the cricket complex will spur more action on what is largely empty grassland by a freeway.

“It’s definitely ambitious but extremely doable,” Allen said. “When you think about it, if we had built a football or baseball or basketball stadium, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation because they’re so plentiful.”

The SaberCats are near the bottom of MLR and recently parted company with their head coach, the former Ireland prop Justin Fitzpatrick. Crowds are in the 1,200-1,500 range but, Colona said, they will need average attendances of 2,500-3,000 and to attract additional events if they are to be viable.

“We’ve taken a huge risk,” Colona said. “We’ve spent this money, our money, on a bit of a wing and a prayer.” The $12m share of the cost and the club’s annual losses are covered by wealthy owners in Houston and London, eyeing long-term success.

“MLR is entering the sports realm in a measured way, understanding that crowds will be small and revenues small at the start,” Colona said. “We can tread water for as long as it takes until this thing catches fire.”