The cities of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh have had some storied professional sporting rivalries over the years, with the battles between the Reds and Pirates in baseball going back more than a century and that between the Steelers and Bengals being one of the most heated currently in football.

That level of animosity hasn’t trickled into the meetings between FC Cincinnati and the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, yet. Saturday night’s game at Nippert Stadium has high stakes for both teams, however, as they sit one point and one place apart on either side of the playoff line in the USL Eastern Conference.

“This is a big moment for the team,” said FCC supporters group member Ryan Lammi of Die Innenstandt. “You can see it not only with the ticket sales, but we have internal systems where we can sell tickets among members, and everybody seems to be looking for tickets to this game and the next game. A lot of people are very interested in this game because of the implications it has for the playoffs.”

Cincinnati has announced it has sold more than 20,000 tickets to Saturday’s game, one of a number of marquee matchups across the USL this weekend. As far as the rivalry between the clubs, though, that will probably take more time to develop.

For one, both FCC and the Riverhounds already have a serious rival on their hands in Louisville City FC and the Harrisburg City Islanders. Then, there’s the fact that this hasn’t been the most compelling series over the past two years. FCC is 3-0-1 all-time, with all three wins coming by a 1-0 final score. The other game ended in a 0-0 draw, leaving the two sets of supporters with little to grab hold of in the short history between the teams.

“We are of the mindset that a rivalry gets built on the field, in multiple games and different dramatic events,” said Riverhounds fan Jordan Allen of the Steel Army. “With Harrisburg, they’re our main rivals, we have the Miracle on the Mon, the time we spoiled them from getting into the playoffs, the time they took the Keystone Cup away from us. We just don’t feel like we have enough of a relationship with Cincinnati yet as a sports franchise to talk about a rivalry.”

“It doesn’t quite have the same excitement on gamedays,” added Lammi, “and there’s obviously controversies between players and coaches in Cincinnati and Louisville where we don’t really see that happening between us and the Riverhounds. I think it’s going to take something on the field, or some comments off the field, to really stir something up.”

That said, the similarities between the cities and the history in baseball and football shows that something could certainly develop. Allen points to the proud nature of sports fans in both Pittsburgh and Cincinnati as the root of the rivalries, and the on-field action in the postseason from the battles between the Reds and Pirates in the 1970s and 1980s to the more recent skirmishes between the Steelers and Bengals have only accelerated that passion.

“We like to think our sports teams are better than most peoples, and I think Cincinnati has that mindset as well,” said Allen. “You can look at football, especially, and the passion in the fan groups, how much they support their crew and their teams. Whenever someone’s against you they rally together, an ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us,’ type of mindset.”

While Cincinnati has had the upper hand on the soccer field, the Steelers’ regular postseason success against the Bengals has been a storyline that’s connected the two AFC North rivals across multiple NFL seasons.

“Just in the last two years, it’s been really difficult between the Steelers and Bengals with the Steelers knocking us out of the playoffs,” said Lammi. “Going back to 2005, all of the Bengals fans were thinking that this was going to be the year they win the Super Bowl, and then one of their linemen rolls over Carson Palmer’s ankle and takes him out of the game. That Bengals-Steelers rivalry has really picked up in the last 10, 15 years.”

If a rivalry is going to take hold between FCC and the Riverhounds, though, Saturday’s game would be a very good place for it to start.

“The Riverhounds are on a hot streak right now, Cincinnati coming off that great U.S. Open Cup run, the amazing attendance records that they have,” said Allen. “That’s such an amazing thing to see in Cincinnati, their attendance continuing to grow and grow, it’s great to see for them. … Definitely this game carries a lot of implications, and depending on the result that we get, it could be the definite start of a rivalry for sure.”