How A Tennessee City Became Spain’s Secret Weapon At The World Cup

Why Chattanooga

Spain chose the private Baylor School as its training base for the group stage, a two-hour drive from its opener against Cape Verde in Atlanta. The Spanish Football Federation bought out the 184-room Embassy Suites in downtown Chattanooga for its World Cup delegation for close to five weeks, from June 5 to June 30, before the squad relocated to Los Angeles as it advanced through the knockout rounds.

Kelly, a Baylor graduate himself, said multiple countries scouted the school’s facilities before Spain settled on it. “The choice of Chattanooga is obvious for a logistical reason,” he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press, pointing to the two-hour drive to Atlanta, though he noted several nations had considered Baylor before Spain committed.

The choice looks less strange once you know the city’s football history. Chattanooga FC, the local lower-league club, has been a fixture of American lower-league football since 2009 and became a national story when it offered ownership stakes to its own supporters, with thousands of fans buying in.

Long before Major League Soccer reached the South, Chattanooga was drawing five-figure crowds to amateur finals at Finley Stadium. Kelly made the case for his city’s soccer credentials directly, talking up Chattanooga’s “great soccer culture” to Yahoo Sports in the run-up to Spain’s arrival.

Behind the scenes, the connection ran through Bill Nuttall, the former U.S. men’s national team general manager who moved to Chattanooga and had previously helped bring the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team to the city in 2015 and the men’s team in 2017.

Nuttall’s FIFA contacts also helped Chattanooga host Auckland City FC ahead of the 2025 Club World Cup, a trial run of sorts for Spain’s stay. “Seeing Chattanooga play a role on the global soccer scene is surreal,” Nuttall explained to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “What excited me the most is the fact that we could get The Baylor School involved and get the city involved and resurrect everything 32 years later,” a reference to his role behind the scenes of the 1994 World Cup.

The soccer logic

There is a competitive theory behind picking a quiet Tennessee city over a host metropolis. The best World Cup base camps have tended to be quiet ones, with squads that hole up in small towns and bond away from the spotlight routinely outlasting teams stationed amid bigger circuses.

Samantha Green, Baylor’s director of operations and systems during Spain’s stay, framed the appeal in similar terms to CNN. “They liked the security of the pitch,” she said. “It’s covered in trees and we’ve kind of created a bubble for them back here. They liked that they could remain focused. They’re getting world-class facilities in a beautiful area.”

Pedro Porro, Spain’s right back, put it plainly. “Chattanooga is a very, very quiet place,” he said to CNN. “This type of environment and home base is exactly what we need to stay calm and focused on our goal, which is to be at 100% in everything as we go after our goal of winning the World Cup.”

That freedom from scrutiny was not incidental to the setup. Kelly points to it as central to what made the camp work. “They were able to blend in so well and go to local establishments with their families and not be bothered by paparazzi,” he told me. “Making genuine connections with local people in the most authentic way, I think, is really special.”

It is a small detail, but one that matters for a squad built around teenage and early-twenties stars whose every public appearance elsewhere draws a crowd. A city where the biggest name in world football can get a coffee and walk down the street with his family is, in practical terms, a competitive advantage as much as a charming anecdote.

How the city responded

Nobody in city government asked residents to show up and support the team. They did anyway. “The streets were lined with fans,” Kelly told me. “We didn’t urge them to be out there. We didn’t pay them to be out there. They came out and did that.”

What followed was weeks of players moving through the city largely undisturbed. 19-year-old Lamine Yamal, the world’s most valuable soccer player, took a shopping trip to a Walmart in nearby Fort Oglethorpe with friends and his girlfriend, later posting a photo of himself alone, pushing his own cart to the car.

Local teenagers got their own version of the experience. Players from Baylor School’s own soccer team trained alongside Rodri, Pedri, Nico Williams and Yamal on their home field. “It’s kind of humbling knowing we’re playing for a state championship and Lamine’s playing for a World Cup,” Baylor defender Hunter McCoy told CNN, while Baylor’s director of soccer, Curtis Blair, saw a similar effect. “He’s a phenomenal player, but it gives our guys something to go like that’s what I want to strive to play for,” Blair said of Yamal.

Kelly sees a line between the calm of the camp and Spain’s results on the pitch. “Watching them through the World Cup as a fan, they have operated as well as a unit, as a team, certainly as any club in the tournament,” he told me. “They don’t have any one player. The U.S. media likes to put up the Golden Boot Award and who scored the most goals. Very clearly that team is not concerned with that. They’re concerned with winning as a team.”

Spain closed out its Chattanooga stay after the group stages came to a close, with Spain unbeaten and top of their grou, with a camp that delivered exactly what its staff wanted: good training surfaces, no distractions, and a squad that arrived at the tournament rested and sharp.

That quiet efficiency has been a hallmark of the Spanish federation’s approach since the golden generation of 2008 to 2012, and the current side, built around one of the most gifted young attacking cores in world football, has inherited the same philosophy.

The legacy question

When Kelly presented Spain coach Luis de la Fuente and sporting director Aitor Karanka with the Key to the City after Spain’s win over Uruguay, he told the Spanish coach: “You’ve inspired our children in a way that will last for decades to come.”

“The mobility of a talented soccer player at the global level is obviously unlimited,” Kelly told me. “I do think it will inspire a generation of kids in Chattanooga, and hopefully a generation of kids around this country.”

There is precedent for host-city afterglow outlasting the tournament itself. In 1994, the last time the U.S. hosted a men’s World Cup, Italy trained in New Jersey and Brazil charmed the suburbs of Los Angeles, leaving behind stories that outlived that summer. The difference three decades later is reach. A motorcade that would once have merited a local newspaper photo now reaches eight million people overnight, most of whom could not previously place Chattanooga on a map.

The city’s business community is already framing the visit as more than sentiment. Western European nations have directly invested $7 billion in the Chattanooga region over the past 15 years, according to Chris Wood, President of the Chattanooga Chamber of Commers, who also pointed to existing Spanish employers Grupo Sese and Gestamp with over 1,000 employees in the area as evidence the relationship could deepen in a post on LinkedIn.

When Spain left for Los Angeles, the team posted a group photo from Baylor School holding a banner thanking the city, and a plaque commemorating the visit now hangs on the wall of the Embassy Suites. For a city that spent nearly two decades building a soccer culture from nothing, Spain’s stay looks like the moment that culture got noticed.