ACTabScrollView | fancy Menu and Pager UI extends UIScrollView | Menu library

When you should load the data from Firebase is a design decision. You said that the content view controller needs to have the array loaded before the view controller is loaded, so you should request that data from Firebase at some point in your app flow where you can be guaranteed that the request will have come back with data before your TableView is attempting to load that data.

You may be running into a race condition where you are requesting the data, and then going to the content view controller before the request finished.

In general you don't want to have to rely on a guarantee that a request will finish in time, so I recommend doing what @rmaddy suggested, where you load the data before hand, and then have some sort of completion handler / notification / delegate call that will call reloadData on your tableView once the array from which you are pulling your data is updated.

The project sample you are referring to does not handle an asynchronous case, as you are handling. The didSet in the property declaration is just a closure that gets executed when you set a value for that property. In the case of the project sample, the news category is set at the time of the view controller instantiation, and then the didSet executes once and attaches the appropriate news array for the tableView to access. Again, in your case, as long as you are updating your array that contains your tableview's source of data after the data returns from Firebase, calling reloadData on your tableView should achieve the result you are looking for. If it doesn't, then that means you aren't properly updating that teamArray.