Hiring, recruitment, branding, marketing, uniform design, community engagement, scheduling — the to-do list stretched for miles in the leadup to the club’s first game.

So while Saturday’s opener at Gillette Stadium feels in some ways like a finish line, it’s also just the beginning.

“I’ve realized that while we’ve been looking forward to this moment, the moment is just a kickoff,” said general manager Domè Guasch, who has been with the club since December 2024. “We’ve been working a lot to get to zero, and now this is where we actually begin.”

The whole enterprise has felt, at times, like a different world for Guasch, who spent his career to this point with Barcelona, his hometown team and one of the most successful and established clubs in the world.

Much behind-the-scenes work goes into operating the Barcelona machine, but there was lots that Guasch and the staff never needed to discuss. It just got done, year after year.

“There was a historic alignment,” he said. “Once you’re up and running and people have been in the job for many years, there are many things that everybody knows very clearly.”

That’s not the case in Boston. Everyone is new to each other. Every decision the staff makes is unprecedented. Guasch is in meetings constantly. Coach Filipa Patão only allows her mind to wander from the pitch in the rare moments when she finds time to go to the gym.

The club’s early roadblocks haven’t made things easier.

The original name and branding — BOS Nation FC — fell flat upon launch in October 2024, and the club ditched its accompanying “too many balls” campaign after fans received it with anger, dismay, and disappointment.

The campaign was intended to be a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek introduction to the team and herald the arrival of a new era in a Boston sports scene that has leaned for more than a century on the pro men’s teams.

Instead, the backlash was swift, and the team immediately scrubbed the campaign from its social media platforms and took down the billboards that had dotted the city.

Three months later, controlling owner Jennifer Epstein announced that “revisiting our team name is essential” following fan feedback, and three months after that came the announcement of the name that stuck.

But the name and branding controversies pale in comparison to the battle over the team’s future home.

In July 2023, what is now the Legacy’s ownership group proposed a plan to renovate White Stadium, with costs split between the city and the club.

Proponents of the redevelopment, including Mayor Michelle Wu, say it’s a way to lower the taxpayer cost of building a new, state-of-the-art facility that the athletes in Boston Public Schools will have access to.

But some critics favor a smaller project solely for use by the BPS sports teams and argue the project is too costly, as the estimated cost to taxpayers has nearly tripled from $50 million two years ago to $135 million today.

The initial proposal received immediate pushback, including from a local environmental group that serves as the steward of Franklin Park, which filed a lawsuit in early 2024 to halt the redevelopment. A Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the city and the soccer team in April 2025, but in December, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed to take up the lawsuit.

On top of it all, the fledgling Legacy will take the field for the first time against Gotham FC — the reigning NWSL champion and a club that predates the league by six years.

Playing established teams in what Guasch called “the most competitive league in the world” without the advantage of a draft — the current CBA, ratified in the fall of 2024, abolished expansion and college entry drafts — won’t be easy.

“We’ll be building and we’ll be facing teams that have been working together for many years, so in that regard we could potentially see ourselves at a disadvantage,” Guasch said.

With a patchwork roster comprising international players, first-year pros, and a handful of NWSL veterans, time will tell if Guasch’s goal of being “competitive from Day One” is attainable, but the GM sees promise in his group.

“If you compare it to Barcelona,” he said, “one thing that made me very happy after the first week is — and it’s hard for me to be objective, and I’ll recognize that — was like, if I didn’t know this was an expansion team, I would not know by looking at it.”

Up until training camp began in Bradenton, Fla., in mid-January, nearly 100 percent of Guasch’s time was spent building the roster.

Now that he’s seen the players on the field and has confidence in who he signed, recruitment no longer occupies the majority of his schedule.

“We need to constantly be evolving, constantly looking at how we can improve internally,” Guasch said. “But we can be very picky about who we bring in because we’re confident with who we have.”

In recent months, the front office has ramped up its focus on the fan experience, which is complicated by the fact that about half of the home games in the inaugural season will be played at Centreville Bank Stadium in Rhode Island because of scheduling conflicts at Gillette.

The club has sold 25,000 tickets for the opener in Foxborough, and 3,800 fans are full-season ticket holders — a figure that doesn’t include partial-season packages, which many fans preferred because of the split-venue situation. The projected capacity of White Stadium is 10,000, meaning it is possible it will be half-full of season ticket-holders when the team begins play there in 2027.

But the sales for the opener don’t touch that of fellow expansion club Denver — the Summit announced in mid-February they had eclipsed 45,000 tickets for their inaugural home game at the Denver Broncos’ stadium — but the Legacy front office feels the early returns are promising.

Van Dijk said she and her team feel confident in the work they’ve done to prepare for the opener, and when the inaugural game arrives, it will be up to the fans to shape the club’s game-day identity.

“How do we really define those important moments that make the Legacy fan experience special?” van Dijk said. “A piece of that we can create, but a lot of that, fans are going to create with us.”