Selling 4,000 season tickets for their debut campaign marks a major milestone for the Toronto Wolfpack, but the rugby league club’s CEO is thinking even bigger.

Eric Perez watched 36,000 fans flock to BMO Field to watch Toronto FC defeat Montreal in an MLS Cup semifinal and envisions the Wolfpack building a similar following.

It’s an uphill challenge for the Wolfpack, who open play next year in English rugby league’s third division. Their transatlantic schedule is unprecedented in pro sport, and they’re hoping to crack a Toronto market that has been indifferent to tackle football recently. The Argos have been last in CFL home attendance the last two seasons, and apathy helped kill Buffalo’s Bills in Toronto Series two years ago.

But Perez is confident his product is different enough from football to reach fans the NFL and CFL haven’t, and says TFC helped identify and groom a market his team can exploit.

“What we have in Toronto right now is a drive toward Eurocentric sports,” Perez said. “Toronto is looking for new sporting interests. I think Toronto FC provided that and I think we’ll do the same.”

For the Wolfpack, opening-season success depends on making their product accessible to fans of North American football without diluting the authenticity that will attract fans familiar with high-level rugby league.

In terms of game-day fan experience it means adding cheerleaders while also creating space for the type of English-style supporters clubs that have always distinguished TFC from their MLS peers, Perez says.

And on the field it means blending the established rugby league veterans the club has already acquired with the players who emerged after a five-city open tryout tour the club staged earlier this fall.

Eighteen players earned invites to a 10-day training camp in England this month, and five figure to make the final roster. Several of those players might be Americans who hadn’t played rugby league before trying out for the Wolfpack.

Corey Knox played fullback for the University of Buffalo and joined the Bills for a spring minicamp in 2015 but was released before fall camp. The Buffalo native says he’ll attack his rugby league audition with the passion of a man who’s not yet ready to join the real world.

“It’s a last chance to play a pro sport,” says the 27-year-old Knox. “I feel like I got the short end of the stick with my deal with the Bills . . . This opportunity, I’ve got that chip on my shoulder again.”

Like Knox, Monte Gaddis is former college football star receiving a quick, immersive education on rugby league’s subtleties. Tackling, for example, is a different challenge without helmets and shoulder pads, which used to enable Gaddis to launch himself like a human cannonball into ball carriers.

“In rugby, I’m not lunging and I can’t lead with my head,” said Gaddis, a 24-year-old from Cleveland. “Everything is more fundamental . . . Tackling as a football linebacker I can just run downhill and smash a guy.”

While Gaddis learns a more measured approach to tackling, his club is approaching pre-season play with all the caution of a blitzing linebacker.

In late January the Wolfpack will face Hull FC, a Super League club that won this year’s Challenge Cup, an all-division single-elimination tournament similar to soccer’s FA Cup. Two weeks later, the Wolfpack will play the Wigan Warriors, who won last season’s Super League title.

Perez realizes it seems reckless for a third-division team to tackle Super League standouts after just two months of training together, but says his club’s final roster won’t contain many third-division lifers. Instead, the Wolfpack have acquired a collection of veterans who have Super League experience but, at their advanced ages, few Super League options. Tongan-born prop Fui Fui Moi Moi, for example, has played internationally for New Zealand and professionally in Australia’s National Rugby League — but he’s also 37.

Players like Moi Moi might seem overqualified for a third division, but Perez says that’s the point. He doesn’t expect the Wolfpack to languish in the third division any more than he expects the expansion club to topple Wigan in pre-season play.

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But he does expect his squad to earn a promotion quickly, and the Hull and Wigan showdowns will reveal how the Wolfpack measure up with the Super League elite.

“We’re just trying to lay a marker down to show everyone that we’re serious,” Perez said. “If you want to be the best, you have to hang with the best. If we can’t hang with the best, then what are we doing?”