On Saturday the Columbus Crew travel to Dallas for the 22nd and potentially final time. Crew owner Anthony Precourt is intent on taking the original MLS franchise to Austin next year, unveiling a black and green branding and what was hoped to be a Downtown stadium that has since turned into a site off Burnet Road near Austin's Domain.

An illustration of the proposed stadium at McKalla Place in Austin. (MLS2ATX)

For the presumptive Austin FC fans, this is the only time the team will play in Texas before the scheduled 2019 move to Austin. As such, some Austin fans will be in Frisco in the hope that Gyasi Zardes and co. could be in Austin next year.

Leaders of the MLSinAustin group sent an email to members planning to attend in an effort to harbor good relations with Dallas' largest supporters' group, the Dallas Beer Guardians. Unfortunately, this idea was mentioned without actually speaking with the Dallas Beer Guardians or anyone at or around FC Dallas.

The timing is also poor. The Crew still belong to the city of Columbus and this is both MLS' Childhood Cancer night and Dallas' LGBT Pride weekend. It's also the first game after the revelation that Technical Director Fernando Clavijo is taking time away from FCD to focus on his treatment for cancer. With all the things happening at Toyota Stadium on Saturday, fans of a team that doesn't yet exist may not fit well into the schedule.

To muddy Dallas' role in what could be the first face-to-face Columbus-Austin interaction, there is also the factor of the Crew's history with FC Dallas owners, the Hunt family. Lamar Hunt's legacy has a greater footing in Columbus than any Hall of Fame could provide in Frisco.

Columbus was Hunt's first MLS team, the very first MLS team at that. It was the site of the first Soccer Specific Stadium, the blueprint for the growth of the league and soccer in this nation. Crew Stadium, later MAPFRE Stadium, was also the site of the 'Dos a Cero' and the US Mens' National Team's impenetrable fortress for nearly 20 years. The Crew's 2004 Supporters' Shield triumph was also the last trophy Lamar Hunt won and the 2008 MLS Cup was the last time the Hunts won a league championship.

When Clark and Dan, along with their siblings, sold off the teams in Kansas City and Columbus, fans in those markets breathed a sigh of relief that things could only get better.

In Kansas City, Robb Heineman and the Sporting Club consortium rebranded as Sporting Kansas City, invested heavily in a new stadium and their team, becoming the shining example of success in a smaller market and turning around a struggling 'MLS 1.0' franchise.

In Columbus, things appeared to be starting on a similar path with Precourt promising greater fan engagement and investment, but it never materialized past their run to MLS Cup in 2015. After falling to Portland in MLS' showpiece game, the team fell to the fourth-lowest payroll and promises of stadium improvements turned out to be little more than fixing the scoreboard after it caught fire. Numerous health and safety violations have been reported, from hygiene issues at concessions stands, to opting to heavily reduce security leaving only one entrance open for a playoff game.

Precourt decided that Columbus had let him down and now he wanted to pick up and try elsewhere. The Hunts had a clause in the sale of the Crew that the team could not move from Columbus which was negotiated to permit an exception for the city of Austin.

Austin has historically been an awful market that can't sustain semi-professional sports amid the burnt orange stranglehold that the Longhorns have on all sporting activities in the state capital. This is a city that has never seen a lasting professional sports organization within its boundaries.

Surely Dan and Clark joked that no-one in their right mind would want to go cap in hand to the University of Texas or attempt to build in such a desolate location for professional sports. Perhaps Precourt fooled them with that unlikely exception and has, in essence, purchased what could be a $200m expansion slot for a mere $60m.

The irony is that this potential move of the Crew has coincided with the Hall of Fame being built in Frisco. All the lines about Lamar's legacy and Lamar's vision are coming out of Frisco at the same time the Hunts' first and most successful MLS team was being primed to vanish off the map and the Lamar Hunt statue in Columbus would either be demolished or covered with weeds in an abandoned stadium.

A nine-foot-tall, bronze statue of Lamar Hunt stands at the north gates of Pizza Hut Park after its unveiling before FC Dallas' 2-2 tie against Inter Milan Thursday, August 5, 2010 in Frisco. (G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News) (G.J. McCARTHY/Staff Photographer)

It's not as though moving teams is a taboo in other sports, or even to Lamar Hunt. The Kansas City Chiefs were the Dallas Texans until Hunt saw competing with the Cowboys was a dead-end and relocated to KC. The Dallas Tornado were folded into the Tampa Bay Rowdies after several years of losses that cost Lamar Hunt up to $20m.

There are sports where franchise movement has been relatively fluid in past years. Soccer has always been more of a faithful product, partly for its global element where teams stay in the same stadium for a lifetime and a player isn't considered loyal without ten years' service. Moving city is just not something that is accepted.

West Ham put up with large protests when moving just three miles from their Upton Park home of 104 years. Arsenal moved ten miles from south of the River Thames to Highbury in 1913, many Londoners still do not consider the Gunners a North London club a century later.

MLS is looking to increase its global appeal, and this is what legitimacy entails on a global scale. An owner taking a team out of the range of its existing fanbase is unprecedented in modern soccer.

There are the comparisons here to the Milton Keynes Dons, the former Wimbledon, that is a pariah of the sport. I grew up 15 miles from Milton Keynes. As a Luton fan and a fan of the sport I protested against the move as Pete Winkleman took Wimbledon FC to Milton Keynes, but it did have its merits. Wimbledon had been without a home for 13 years and had no prospect of playing in their home borough of Merton. AFC Wimbledon hoped to return to Wimbledon in 2020, some 22 years after Wimbledon FC left their Plough Lane ground.

The reality was that Wimbledon FC was on their way out of business as a nomadic club with very little income. The Milton Keynes option did present a fresh start and the structure of the English pyramid allowed AFC Wimbledon to assume the mantle as the Wimbledon club with an opportunity to return to the levels Wimbledon FC competed at.

Wimbledon FC fans had two viable options, some drove the extra hour to continue supporting what they felt was still their club, and many more invested in their new local club which now plays a division higher than the MK Dons.

Unless MLS changes their expansion plan, the city of Columbus will not be afforded that opportunity, particularly with FC Cincinnati's forthcoming arrival from USL. The Cincy-Columbus rivalry could be a fantastic All-Ohio rivalry, potentially one of the best in MLS.

Similar to the ill-feeling the MK Dons have received the past 14 years, many soccer fans across the country have come out in support of the #SaveTheCrew movement with banners seen at most MLS stadiums including Toyota Stadium.

Financially, an Austin team could also harm the local side, FC Dallas. US markets and sports have a greater proportion of 'fairweather fans' than other nations. FC Dallas has a good number of fans in Austin and would naturally lose many of those to Austin FC.

Then you have the impact on away fans. The several hundred Houston fans that drive up for the Texas Derby could be reduced with some traveling to the closer game in Austin instead; likewise the Waco-based Portland fans or the Houston branch of Atlanta's supporters group. The 600 Sporting Kansas City fans that have invaded Toyota Stadium before may be more tempted by the shiny new stadium another couple of hours down I-35. Toyota Stadium is a stadium that regularly announces 16,000+ tickets distributed, but the reality is that FC Dallas suffers from poor attendances and cannot afford to lose those few chances at a larger crowd.

We requested an opportunity to speak to the Hunts about their views on their time with Columbus and the potential impact of a team in Austin but were rebuffed. Dan Hunt told assembled fans at a tailgate early last year that he hoped there would be a vote by the MLS board of governors and that he was for the Columbus Crew remaining in Columbus. There's certainly an element of passion in the sport versus what's good for business in the Hunts, Dan being the former and Clark the latter. As such, we shouldn't surmise the FCD official line from an interaction with fans back when this all just seemed like an unlikely scenario.

I would hope that the Hunts are for the Crew remaining in Ohio and they would want to see a successful team that they guided through more than 20 years, winning all three major trophies along the way, stay available to MLS clubs to play.

The most logical result, if Austin is indeed a market MLS wants a presence in, is to award Precourt an expansion team or encourage him to buy into Austin Bold in anticipation of an expansion bid. The Crew has interested parties at home that are attempting to keep the team in Columbus, but simply selling the team doesn't fulfill Precourt's Austin dream.

The problems in Columbus leaves MLS treading carefully on a legal front. Austin was never part of the expansion process while San Antonio was a leading candidate. The City of San Antonio and Bexar County, on the other hand, were given assurances of their city's future place in MLS if they purchased Toyota Field along with the San Antonio FC ownership group, Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

The Spurs group, owners of the city's NBA franchise, withdrew their application which eliminated the threat of suing for the loss of a $5m penalty that SS&E will pay the city and county for failing to deliver an MLS team to the city of San Antonio. However, investigations have been ongoing into whether MLS executives acted fraudulently in their dealings with Bexar County.

An illustration of the planned Bold Stadium at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, TX. (Austin Bold)

Austin will have a team next year either way as Austin Bold FC begins life in USL at the Circuit of the Americas. Two previous attempts at maintaining professional soccer in Austin have failed. Perhaps MLS/USL should take lessons from Kansas City, Portland, and Seattle. You don't have to be a top-10 market in order to have success, but it will take work to create a strong brand that engages the community and pulls in soccer fans.

Anthony Precourt has proven over the past five years that this simply isn't in his understanding. Even fans in Austin are divided as to whether this is the opportunity they've waited for or another instance of Phil Rawlins and his bait and switch that took the first incarnation of the Austin Aztex to Orlando.

If this situation can serve to hearten FC Dallas fans in any way, it's this. You may never see a full stadium, big-name players, fan engagement, or any kind of marketing, but the Hunts aren't going to move this team. Partly because Dallas won't give them a stadium, partly because the lease in Frisco prevents any team playing outside of Toyota Stadium for the next 40 years, but partly because Dallas is home to the Hunts and FC Dallas is their chosen team.

EDIT: The MLSinAustin supporters group was misidentified as MLS2ATX.