Rocky Top World Cup: Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Role in Spain’s Triumph

Spain won its second FIFA Men’s World Cup on July 19, beating Argentina 1-0 in the final. Now holding concurrent world and European titles, it was a historic moment for La Roja, but it was not only the Spanish team and its fans across the Atlantic who were raising a glass in celebration.

Eight hundred miles away from New York New Jersey Stadium, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the world’s newest bloc of Spanish fans could take pride in knowing they had contributed to Spain’s triumph. For more than a month, that city of nearly 200,000, hard by the Georgia border, had welcomed Spain to town, with the club staying at the Embassy Suites Chattanooga Downtown and practicing at the nearby Baylor School, a college prep academy. Locals there can live long in the knowledge that they played a part in the winning team’s ascension to the peak of international soccer.

Base Camp

The Royal Spanish Football Federation (known as RFEF) bought out the entire 184-room Embassy Suites Hotel in downtown Chattanooga for its World Cup delegation. More than 125 media members accompanied Spain to the camp, where Baylor’s Alex Guerry Tennis Center was temporarily converted into a media center to support daily press operations. The campus and its high-performance sports facilities also included three match and practice fields for an elite setup.

A special lottery was held for fans to attend a public training session for the Spanish national team at Baylor, strengthening ties with the roster, its fans and the local community. An estimated 27,000 requests were submitted for the lottery, with only 1,000 or so individuals receiving tickets to attend.

Above all, it was the training facility’s location — overlooked by the Appalachian Mountains and located on the Tennessee River while still being close to major airports and roadways — that meant the team could simultaneously feel focused and comfortable in its new temporary surroundings.

Chattanooga Selection

At first glance, the selection of a mid-sized city with no major professional or collegiate soccer club might seem to have been a strange choice. Locals, though, refer to Chattanooga, nicknamed “The Scenic City” as a small town with big city energy, one that has ben revitalized with family-friendly outdoor facilities, a buzzing sense of community pride, and a vibrant Southern hospitality culinary scene.

In January, when the base camp was confirmed, the RFEF said it had selected Chattanooga due to its proximity to Atlanta (only two hours away by bus), which is where Spain played its opening Group H games against Cape Verde and Saudi Arabia. The team then concluded its group-stage campaign against Uruguay in Guadalajara, Mexico, before alternating between Los Angeles and Dallas in the knockouts, and eventually ending up in New Jersey for the Final.

The team would spend almost five weeks at Baylor School and Chattanooga before relocating to Los Angeles for the knockout rounds in July, but its primary base camp setting clearly left a long-lasting, favorable impression.

Full-Circle Moment

Chattanooga did not serve as a base camp for the last FIFA World Cup on North American soil in 1994, but it does have a unique connection with the tournament, one that would eventually help it land Spain when the World Cup returned to the United States this year.

Bill Nuttall, U.S. Men’s national team general manager in 1994, would later move to Chattanooga in search of new opportunities. Through his rolodex of contacts at FIFA, he was able to bring the U.S. Women’s National Team to town in 2015. That squad played an exhibition game in town en route to winning the World Cup, and two years later, the U.S. Men’s National Team did the same, beating Jamaica in a friendly.
A few years ago, Nuttall reached out to Tim Morgan (president of The Sports and Events Corporation — Spain’s primary day-to-day contact at WC 2026) and Sean McDaniel (FIFA team services venue officer), two longtime leaders in Chattanooga’s sports community, to work on the feasibility of another base camp in the city for 2026. By late 2023, they had brought over U.S. Soccer for a site visit, and an agreement was reached with FIFA a year later to place Chattanooga in the initial official base camp brochure — confirming it as the only base camp at the time to be located outside of the host cities (such as Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles).

Through the agreement with FIFA, Baylor School was established as a base camp for the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, when it hosted New Zealand club Auckland City FC. In a somewhat surprising move after the tournament, however, Chattanooga officials asked to be removed from FIFA’s World Cup base camp brochure as they did not feel they could fulfill FIFA’s requirements around facility upgrades and commercial needs that would have caused business costs to spiral excessively.

Some months later, according to Morgan, an unnamed person from the RFEF had made a phone call to a contact of Nuttall’s at Baylor School claiming to represent the Spanish delegation. The person who answered the phone did not believe the caller was who he said he was and immediately hung up the phone. That person then called Nuttall for verification and realized this was no hoax — Spain had deliberately been seeking a community that was not in FIFA’s official brochure. And in Chattanooga, Spain found the smaller market it was after, with luxury amenities but also the secure hotel and base camp environment it prioritized.

Nuttall’s pride in securing Chattanooga again for 2026 was immense. “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.”

The Spirit and Soccer Culture of Chattanooga

Chattanooga had been making great strides as a soccer destination in recent years. The Chattanooga Red Wolves, a USL League One team, plays at CHI Memorial Stadium, a 6,000-seat venue that opened in 2020. Meanwhile, Chattanooga FC, which was founded in 2009 and played in various smaller leagues, became a member of third-tier league MLS Next Pro in 2022. In 2019, it became the first club in the country to offer ownership shares to the public and its fans  In a milestone public equity crowdfunding campaign, the club raised over $870,000 from more than 3,000 investors worldwide.

Chattanooga FC plays its matches at Finley Stadium, which has a capacity of 20,000 and would occasionally draw crowds even bigger than that for amateur finals long before MLS had a presence in the city.

Team Unity

Spain had arrived at this year’s World Cup with the specter of not having won a single knockout game in the competition since winning the entire event in South Africa in 2010. Since then, the team had buckled under mounting national pressure, but it had regained its sense of unity under the leadership of Manager Luis de la Fuente, who had won championships with Spain’s U-19, U-21 teams and led its 2020 Olympic squad to a silver medal.

‘Family’ Atmosphere

The RFEF had been very particular about what it wanted before the tournament — the ability to train in a private, secure environment, no paparazzi, and the ability to walk down streets in a safe community. What followed, according to Morgan, was “the right people coming together at the right time.”

“We made sure restaurants and attractions were on board with us, asking them to be themselves, be hospitable, and keep them coming back for more,” said Morgan. “The Spanish love their meals and their siestas, and on numerous occasions, they repeated how shocked they were with our culinary scene and how good it was. They called us their ‘family,’ and they were texting us to say that ‘we miss our family’ even after they’d left.”

The Host City Authority was a collaborative group of organizations that worked together to welcome the Spanish national team to Chattanooga. This included The Sports and Events Corporation, Chattanooga Tourism Co., the City of Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Baylor School and Vision Hospitality.

Leaving Chattanooga for the final time, the Spanish Men’s National Team posted a video on social media thanking the city. Narrated by star midfielder/striker Mikel Merino, who would score the winning goal in both the Round of 16 and quarterfinal triumphs, it simply said: “A place changes with you. And neither you nor that place will ever be quite the same as when you first arrived.”

Defender Pedro Porro echoed those words: “Chattanooga is a very, very quiet place,” he said. “This type of environment and home base is exactly what we need to stay calm and focused on our goal.”

In Chattanooga, the Spanish national team and the local community came together to respect and embrace each other’s cultures. This “small city with big city energy” in Tennessee has now hosted two teams that became World Cup champions, a feather in the cap for the destination forevermore.

The Scenic City now has quite a view atop the soccer mountain.