NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Yesterday’s MLS announcement was a watershed moment in Nashville for obvious reasons: a third team from a major sports league will call Music city home in the future.
There are also more subtle aspects in play, both already or that will avail themselves over time. For example, we will find out whether the city – without extensive soccer history – can truly support a pro team on a week-in and week-out basis. We certainly know that one-off games are widely attended, but there’s still a significant leap of faith from MLS brass.
“Last July, Nashville showed the entire country that in addition to all the other great things that are happening here, there’s real strong support for the game,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said. “Over just a few weeks in July 48,000 people packed Nissan Stadium for the USA-Panama match, and then 56,000 came for a Man City-Tottenham game. That got everyone’s attention.”
An attention-grabbing process was needed, because it’s been clear for quite some time that Nashville was not among the top options when MLS announced the process for fielding expansion bids. It’s been discussed ad nauseam at this point, but the city’s rapid rise from afterthought (or not-at-all-thought) to the lone city to get approval in 2017 for this round of expansion is noteworthy.
Without several factors coming together – whether it was the hard work put in by the original Nashville FC investors, the financial commitment made by John Ingram and others, and even external factors like the success of the Predators from an on-ice and financial perspective last year – this would not have happened.
“Nashville was not on our radar screen,” Garber said. “One of the things that we take pride in is any discussion that will lead to growing the game in North America.
“Nashville is a city on the rise. You know that…”
Ingram chimed in with plenty of love for his hometown.
“The enthusiasm of this city is infectious, and it all really mattered,” he said. “My dream for this new MLS club is for it to be Nashville’s team, just like the Predators and the Titans in their sports have become Nashville’s team. More than just an owner, I really see my role as being an engaged curator. I want to take care of this team and its people.”
Though the MLS announcement has been made, there’s still plenty of time before the team will take the field. It’s important for fans to reward the league’s faith in the city by supporting the USL edition of NSC. Nashville’s quest to make Music City into Soccer City did not begin and end with this announcement, nor does it go on hiatus until the opening kick is taken under the banner of Major League Soccer.
“We have a great professional soccer club that’s about to launch in a couple months,” Ingram said. “It’s somehow fitting that we’re going to kick off playing Atlanta United, coming to play our USL team.”
Nor does it begin with the building of a stadium (which likely won’t be completed until a couple years into the MLS tenure of the team). There’s at least one season to play at First Tennessee Park, likely one or two in Nissan Stadium, and then our soccer-specific dreams can come to fruition.
“It is, as said, a true private-public partnership,” Mayer Megan Barry reiterated. “This is a way for us to make sure that we can build a world-class soccer-specific stadium, and also do some other great things, because we’re going to make other investments at the Fairgrounds.”
One thing that seems to have gone under-the-radar is the way Garber phrased the key statement in this whole ordeal – that Nashville appears to have jumped the total mess in Miami in the timeline for joining the league.
“Nashville will be Major League Soccer’s 24th team,” he said.
With LAFC joining as the 23rd team this coming season, it seems likely that the hope is for NSC to get its act together in time for a potential 2019 debut in MLS. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it specifically asked by any of the media (if there’s something out there, send it along to me), and I had to scoot because the announcement was inconveniently on a very busy occasion at the day job.
We’ll see in the coming weeks and months exactly how the mechanics of the expansion process between “announcement” and “debut” phases play out. But there’s no longer any question about whether Nashville can reel in an MLS squad: the deed is done.
Club and Country 