“Authentically Nashville” is a phrase you see a lot of these days, one tossed around by developers and newcomers to the city eager to crib a bit of its authenticity for their own gain. Poke around on Google and you’ll find it affixed to any number of things: cookie shops, sporting events, housing developments.
Major League Soccer’s Nashville SC has been using the phrase for years, sometimes interchanging it with “uniquely Nashville.” They’ve slapped the moniker on everything from their in-stadium experience to their ownership group. Most recently, their partnership with a cryptocurrency firm, one paid entirely in Bitcoin, was touted as fitting the model of being authentically Nashville.
Nashville, of course, has been one of this country’s “it cities” for over a decade at this point. Its transformation feels almost comical to those of us that grew up there. I’ve visited once a year or so since I left in the early 2000s and with each visit, I get more and more lost. One by one, I’ve watched the landmarks of my childhood and adolescence disappear, and so many of these meaningful places have been replaced by things that feel alien. There were no pedal pubs in the 80s and 90s, no hoards of bachelorettes staggering through a nightlife district that now feels more Vegas than Vandy.
The city’s sports scene was also decidedly minor-league. There’d be the occasional chatter about bringing an MLB team to town, but those plans would always disintegrate. And soccer? That was a sport mostly consumed by the city’s immigrants and played by those of us who couldn’t hack it as quarterbacks or outfielders.
The idea that the city would be home, then, to not only an MLS team but the largest soccer-specific stadium in the United States, was unthinkable. Yet on Sunday, when I walked into Geodis Park, that pipe dream became a reality. And as I studied the crowd, I felt surprised. Certainly there were elements of the Nashville I’ve disowned, but there were pockets of the Nashville I grew up with, too, and the one I still love. By the time I ran into my youth soccer coach on the concourse — a man I had not seen in 30 years — I had to ask myself the unthinkable:
Is Nashville SC actually authentically Nashville?
The interior of the Geodis Park is elegant, if a bit understated. Four stands, each different from the other, rise skyward. The stadium’s seats bear a randomized pattern of the club’s colors, something which makes them look full even when empty. It’s a visual trick that may prove handy during a few midweek games in Nashville’s oppressive humidity.
On the eve of the stadium’s opening, Nashville SC CEO Ian Ayre sits down in a seat in the stadium’s lower level, ready to chat. The only outside noise is provided by a lawn tractor that’s giving the pitch one last trim. Walker Zimmerman, probably the face of the franchise at this point, plods around the field with his 8-month-old in tow.
I last spoke with Ayre in 2019, when the club he helms was still a minor-league outfit playing a minor-league baseball stadium and before Geodis Park was even a pit in the ground. Ayre looked fresh-faced back then but is a bit more traveled these days, sporting a white beard and a few more miles on the odometer. He’s at the tail end of what’s become a weeks-long media blitz, and seems eager to just open the gates already.
“It’s a mix of excitement and terror right now,” Ayre says. “The excitement of coming here in May of 2018 and just being at the stadium, watching it as a drawing on a table, then a hole in the ground, and now here we are. That’s the exciting part of it. And the terror, about tomorrow — so many people put so much into this. But it’s not really about tomorrow, it’s about the next 50 years or so. But this is a bit like Christmas, when it’s coming in a couple of days. You can’t sleep the night before.”
The scale of the stadium he sits in takes some getting used to to anybody familiar with American soccer. Geodis Park seats 30,000, and you can truly feel the six or seven thousand seats that separate its size from MLS’s now-traditional soccer-specific venues. In some strange way it creates a bit of unease in those of us old enough to remember the days of MLS clubs playing in comically oversized stadiums, a smattering of fans present in a giant bowl. Even now, some clubs — the Houston Dynamo come to mind — struggle to fill stadiums that are modestly-sized.
A handful of the league’s more ambitious clubs, though, could stand to have a larger facility at this point and Nashville is planning for the future, not the present.
“When I first talked to (Nashville SC majority owner) John (Ingram), he told me he wanted a 30,000-seat facility,” says Ayre. “My first question was ‘why the hell would you build it that big?’ Everybody else was in the low 20s or around there. And John said ‘I want to build the stadium for where we’re going.’ The irony of that is here we are two or three games from opening and we’re staring down 23,000 season tickets, and (the opener) sold out in 20 minutes.”
The season ticket total is remarkable but not entirely surprising; locals have always seized on almost anything that presents itself with the opportunity of being “theirs.” Few considered Nashville an NHL market when the Predators became the city’s first major league franchise, but Nashvillians very quickly took a shine to the team, named for a saber-toothed tiger discovered while excavating a nearby building. Ayre himself says he’s still waiting to see if the current season ticket total is just an effect of the “shiny newness” of the team and how much is actually demand-driven.
Even after three years in Nashville, Ayre is frequently associated with his time as board director at Liverpool. Undoubtedly, he was part of helping to modernize the club and grow it into the global powerhouse it is today. His fingerprints are on some of the club’s most successful signings, and he was instrumental in bringing current LFC manager Jurgen Klopp to the touchline. His tenure was not without incident — Ayre clashed from time to time with fans over ticket prices and some of his boardroom decisions — but by most accounts his three-year run, which ended in 2017, was a success.
Yet Ayre will tell you that even that experience was not as satisfying as what he’s attempted to do in Nashville — build a club from the ground up.
“People always talk about my time at Liverpool, and I’m hugely proud of that,” he says. “I enjoyed it immensely. But for me, this has turned out to be everything I hoped it would be. Who gets the opportunity to build something like this from scratch? Who gets the opportunity to do it in such a cool place with such great people? This is definitely the best thing I’ve done in my career.”
Still Ayre cannot help but see touches of Anfield in Geodis Park — the proximity of the seating area to the pitch, the brick and metal-work. On the eve of its debut, Ayre also finds himself wondering how the stadium will sound.
“I’m looking forward to hearing the supporters section to see how they compete with the Kop.”
Geodis park itself sits on a mound of land, sort of sunken into it. On one side, you’ve got the city’s racetrack, a decades-old oval that has been falling into disrepair for years. On another, a row of plain, brick duplexes buts right up against the stadium’s facade, giving the facility a bit of a neighborhood feel while also laying bare the realities of gentrification.
Approaching the stadium from the South, the place feels a bit like a soccer acropolis, a gleaming jewel atop a hill. Walking across a set of recreational soccer fields, you follow a winding staircase up to the stadium itself, and it gradually comes into view. To those who fought for the stadium’s construction, it is a glorious reveal. To others, it likely creates heartburn.
Not everybody was happy about the city’s choice to allow NSC to build its soccer stadium here, on Nashville’s fairgrounds, which for years were used to host the Tennessee State Fair. A local coalition, Save Our Fairgrounds, fought tooth and nail to keep the stadium from going up. The group, made up of vendors from the local flea market and other concerned citizens, sued Nashville’s metro government, claiming the stadium violated the existing charter for the site and would make it impossible for long-time vendors of the flea market to exist.
The lawsuit never really had a chance, but things grew truly acrimonious when Nashville’s newly-elected Mayor, John Cooper, tried single-handedly stopping the deal in 2019. Cooper had replaced Megan Barry, one of the stadium project’s staunchest champions who had resigned in scandal. Within weeks of taking office, he was offering his own concerns about the city’s stadium-related financial commitments and refusing to sign demolition orders, delaying progress on the stadium for months.
Things grew so difficult that Cooper, along with Ingram, met with MLS commissioner Don Garber in New York, with Garber taking an uncharacteristically hostile tone. The league never would’ve awarded the city a franchise, Garber told Cooper, had the city not committed to a stadium deal. For a moment, it seemed like the city might actually lose the franchise. In the end, the club made some additional financial concessions, allowing both sides to claim victory.
“It was a challenge,” says Ayre. “But from that point on, I never really looked back. The things that should’ve probably should’ve derailed us, like COVID, in some ways actually ended up helping. We had to dig a giant hole in the ground (at the stadium site) — and all of the dirt, and rock, we had to haul out of here. And at one time about a hundred dump trucks a day were lining up a day to haul it off. They were all doing that with no traffic on the road. So that definitely helped us.”
To some, the conflicts over the stadium’s inception felt a bit like a push and pull between the city’s past and future. I have my own memories of the fairgrounds, of course, which to some of us seemed like a haven for the city’s most unvarnished activities. It was where you went to catch a low-rent, amateur wrestling show or a demolition derby. It was where you went to drink underage, or gorge yourself on funnel cake and pork rinds and watch a bunch of home-built stock cars trundle around the speedway. It was, in many ways, one of those places that felt like an outlaw country song come to life.
Nowadays, the fairgrounds are something else in entirety. Yet a soccer stadium feels an oddly good fit for a place that once brought the city’s outcasts together.
As I pull up to the stadium to park, I’m directed not into a parking lot but onto the surface of the racetrack itself. I drive along the banked oval before being flagged into a spot along the near straightaway. It’s probably the strangest, most scenic place to tailgate in all of MLS: fans blast music, drink beer and play pickup soccer in the shadow of the grandstand, their Toyotas and Hondas parked on the same pavement Dale Earnhardt and Darrel Waltrip used to tear up. It is truly bizarre.
Tailgating is an entire culture in the south, and Nashville SC has embraced it, using a portion of the flea market as a home for its most ardent supporters. In the collection of faces at the club’s tailgate I find a bit of “old Nashville.” Many teenage weekends took me up Nolensville Rd, not terribly far from the fairgrounds, to eat tacos at La Hacienda or dig through dollar cassettes and records at Phonoluxe. La Brigada de Oro, the club’s predominantly-hispanic supporters group, has brought their own touch of Mexico to the fairgrounds. Across from them, The Mixtape, the club’s Black-led supporters group, has their own scene and raises their own voice, pushing for inclusivity and representation in the club’s supporters culture.
To many Nashvillians, the city’s diversity has always been what makes it a special place. The place may have looked monochrome to an outsider back in the 80s and 90s, but it was never really that way. It was vibrant and multicultural to many of us, a southern city that proved a refuge for progressive views and the arts. And you feel that at the tailgate.
A handful of club executives arrive on a golf cart to check out the scene, wearing slacks and blazers. They do their own bit of mingling. If anyone feels out of place here, it’s them.
Nashville’s players, dressed in their distinctive gold kits, look like little jewels in the sunshine below as their opener against the Philadelphia Union plays out. They’re watched by a capacity crowd that arrived well before the game kicked off. It is 80 degrees, there is next to no humidity and very little feels wrong with the world.
Major League Soccer is full of overnight success stories these days; clubs that appear seemingly out of nowhere and play in front of sold-out stadiums on a regular basis. Most of the league’s recent newcomers are playing in markets that few considered soccer hotbeds years ago, a few of them tracing their roots back to successful USL teams that outgrew the league in the blink of an eye.
Nashville SC is such a club, playing in a market no major professional league paid attention to just two decades ago and playing a sport that many in the general public here marginalized for decades as being, well, too foreign. There is nothing in Geodis Park, not anywhere, that even acknowledges the history of soccer in the area. Yet in that history — brief as it may be — you’ll find the seeds of the club’s explosion in popularity, and Devinder Sandhu has played his own part in it.
Soccer was brought to Nashville the same way it was brought to nearly every other city in America — by immigrants. First by Hungarians displaced by World War II in the 40s and the Hungarian Revolution in the 50s; then by Iraqi Kurds fleeing Sadamm Hussein in the mid-70s and doing so again in the 90s. Vanderbilt University picked soccer up as club sport in 1964 and Nashville’s first organized team to speak of — the Nashville Internationals, a collection of amateurs that included immigrants from nine different countries — took the field that same year, playing matches under the shadow of The Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park. They were the showpiece of the Dixie Soccer Association, the city’s very first league.
It wasn’t until the early 80s that Nashville had its first pro team — well, semi-pro, at least — the short-lived Nashville Diamonds of the American Soccer League. Featuring a collection of talent that included a player named Bones O’Toole, they struggled mightily both on the field and off it, in the end drawing crowds in the low hundreds and folding after just two years in existence. The whole league would follow suit a couple of years later.
None of this deterred Sandhu, who came up playing against those Hungarian refugees, eventually carving out a spot on Vanderbilt’s team and then founding the Nashville Blues, a well-regarded amateur side in the area. By the late 80s, the Blues were a known club regionally, and the USL — then known as the Sunbelt Soccer League — came calling. Sandhu bit, and along with local lawyer Lynn Agee, he paid $5,000 to join the league, birthing the Nashville Metros.
Truthfully, the Metros were the only high-quality soccer available to Nashvillians in the late 80s, 90s and the early aughts. Often playing their matches at local high schools before eventually settling in at a local park, they featured a handful of future Major League Soccer players, The most notable of which would likely be future San Jose Earthquakes goalkeeper Jon Busch. Crowds in the club’s early days consisted mainly of friends and family, along with a handful of immigrants, soccer evangelists…and myself.
Having returned from a year living abroad with my family in Spain, I begrudgingly traded the Bernabeu for Ezell Park; Romário, Michael Laudrup and Hristo Stoichkov for Steve Klein, Danny DeVall and Pasi Kinturi. And while the quality wasn’t comparable, the sheer existence of the Metros was enough — like so many other soccer fans in this country, I had a sizable affection for the soccer that was in my backyard, no matter what it looked like.
In 1999, right around the time that Major League Soccer was watching its teams go bankrupt and Nashville began its climb towards being an “it” city, Sandhu says he was approached by MLS, who wanted him to partner with former Tennessee Titans (then the Tennessee Oilers) owner Bud Adams on a new franchise. The cost to enter the league? A scant $2.5 million, somewhere around 1% of the total paid by Charlotte to enter the league in 2019. Adams passed, and Sandhu and Agee needed backers, so Sandhu says they approached John Ingram.
“John didn’t think soccer could make it back then,” says Sandhu, “So everytime I see him, I ask him — ‘remember when I asked your family to invest years ago?’ They missed out on that opportunity back then because they didn’t believe in the sport.”
The Metros were in existence for 23 years before they closed up shop in 2012, a remarkable run given how many clubs, nationally, came and went during one of the darkest periods in American soccer history. From the wreckage of that club, dozens of players stayed in the area, many turning into coaches at every level of the youth game. A decade after folding, you can still feel the presence of the club in the city they called home.
The Blues, the other team Sandhu helped found, are still around, and Sandhu still plays with them while he can. He has no involvement in Nashville SC aside from a cordial relationship with ownership. You can sense he feels a little overlooked these days, but as a soccer evangelist, he mostly seems grateful.
“It is what we always wanted,” says Sandhu. “A church, a temple, a mosque for the game of soccer.”
Early in the second half, Union forward Mikael Uhre gets the game’s opener. It comes as a shock to the locals, who have been spoiled by a Nashville side that basically never loses at home. NSC has had the better of the play through the game’s opening 45 minutes but all of the sudden, there’s a bit of dread in the air. It’s probably the first bit of negativity that’s crept into the stadium all day.
The game opened with a gimmick — Tommy Shaw, the guitarist for the classic rock band Styx, stepped onto the stage at the stadium’s northeast corner and started shredding a riff from the band’s 1979 hit “Renegade,” whipping the place into a bit of a frenzy. It seems doubtful that many in attendance are die-hard Styx fans, but in the end, rock music is like red meat at a sporting event. The response is Pavlovian. The team has also installed a record lathe pitchside, and they press a vinyl record for the fan-selected man of the match every game, as well.
These things actually feel authentically Nashville in a way, even if they’re highly stylized. Maybe unintentionally, they also feel deeply and truly authentic in terms of what American soccer was for damn near its entire existence: wonderfully carefree at times, bereft of pretension, reminiscent of the days when clubs were teams and crests were logos. Nashville, a place that features a baseball stadium with a 50-foot-tall guitar-shaped scoreboard and the aforementioned full-scale replica of the Parthenon, is a safe space for such stupidity.
Soccer Moses is such a tradition. What you’ve got there is basically the guitarist from Christian rock band Jars of Clay who decided to dress up like Moses for NSC’s first MLS game, holding a scroll aloft with a fairly terrible dad joke on it: “LET MY PEOPLE GOAL.” The club’s fans seized on this and years later, Soccer Moses — real name Stephen Mason — is a club fixture. Outside Geodis Park, a 30-foot-tall banner bears his likeness.
Shadows begin to creep across the pitch as the afternoon winds down. The 80th minute approaches, and Nashville is still looking for their goal. Soccer Moses himself is stroking his beard in concern as he prepares to play guitar in a post-game performance. The Union fall back and defend their lead, and for a time it seems that Philly goalkeeper Andre Blake might single-handedly ruin the party, standing on the head to preserve the narrowest of margins.
There is a tremendous release, then, when Nashville equalize on a late penalty kick, sending the crowd into a frenzy.
HISTORY. SCENES. RANDALL LEAL. pic.twitter.com/NA2Y3LDf3W
— Nashville SC (@NashvilleSC) May 1, 2022
Players and staff linger on the field after the final whistle, soaking it all in. It’s a draw, yes, but now the club can get on with the actual work — building a history at Geodis Park. The stadium is beautiful and new and, as Sandhu put it, a temple for the modern game. But it needs a little seasoning. So much of Nashville is that way now: lacking the grit and, well, authenticity that it once had.
When I left the city years ago, I was always convinced I’d come back someday, return to what was then a relatively undiscovered gem, written off by many as a southern backwater. It was, and sometimes is, the only place that feels like home to me. But as I changed over the years, the city did too. I probably got decidedly less hip as the city grew in the opposite direction.
And that’s fine. It’s also fine that NSC are largely catering to the new realities of the city they call home — it would be suicidal, from a business perspective, if they didn’t do so. Authenticity is subjective, and we’ve probably just reached a place where the segments of Nashville I abhor — the drunken masses on Lower Broad, the twee Instagram posts, the ‘it city’ stuff — actually are the authentic segments of the place. What the city was to me can live on as a fuzzy memory, and the club seems to be doing a decent enough job of catering to old Nashville. To an entire subset of the city, the fact that the stadium, and the team exist at all feels like enough.
“One of the reasons that soccer was such a great choice is that it appeals across such a wider community than more traditional American sports,” says Ayre. “Nashville itself, today, you’ve said it, other people have said it, it’s almost unrecognizable. The landscape is changing, the cultures and communities and ethnicities are changing. So I think we represent a new Nashville, a wider community.”
(Top photo: Christopher Hanewinckel / USA TODAY Sports)