Nashville joins race for MLS expansion team

Nashville joins race for MLS expansion team

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:43 p.m. ET

There is a new city in the race for an MLS expansion team: Nashville.

The Music City, which has never been seriously linked with an imminent bid for an MLS team, now has a group of wealthy investors and a well-connected leader for their bid. The Nashville MLS Organizing Committee is made up of 22 people and includes executives from almost all of the city's biggest companies, as well as those from the Nashville Predators and Tennessee Titans.

“Our optimism is very, very high about this,” Bill Hagerty, who is leading the committee, told the Tennessean. “The voice of support that we’ve seen from the leadership of this community has been really, really strong.”

Hagerty is the former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. He expressed interest in bringing an MLS team to Nashville in May and now he's acting on it.

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MLS has announced that it will expand to 28 teams in the near future. With expansion already set to go to 24 teams, that means four new spots will become available, and with commissioner Don Garber saying that the league will pause expansion after 28, there is an urgency for cities to get teams this time around. That is what is motivating Hagerty to get going ASAP.

Sacramento, St. Louis, San Antonio and Cincinnati would appear to be the front runners for the four expansion spots, but only Sacramento is close to being ready to get a team. The other three are very much up for grabs.

Nashville could be attractive to MLS in large part because of its location. The league has made a concerted effort to grow its footprint in the south, with Orlando coming on board last season, Atlanta joining the league in 2017 and Miami set to get a team as well. Putting a fourth team in the south would give the league more geographical balance.

It's good that Nashville now has a group set up to pursue expansion, but as is always the case in these matters, the biggest hurdle is a stadium. Hagerty said that they are focused on getting their own soccer-specific stadium instead of playing at Nissan Stadium, where the Tennessee Titans play. That could be with a new building or renovating an existing venue in the city.

“The focus on our effort right now has been on building a new stadium,” Hagerty said. “We haven’t ruled out a retrofit, but we haven’t put any plan like that squarely in our sights either."

Nashville mayor Megan Barry previously allocated $50 million in proposed revenue bonds for a soccer stadium in the city that Hagerty's group will almost surely try to use. They will have some competition, though, as Nashville was recently awarded a USL expansion team that would also like to build its own ground.

Very quickly, Nashville has gone from a city with no professional soccer, to one with an incoming third division side and now, potentially an MLS team. It's quite the growth for a city without a long soccer history, but Nashville has done a tremendous job supporting the United States men's and women's teams in recent years. Now they want to get into the club game, and that includes a bid to go straight to the top -- MLS.

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