Post by Webster on May 12, 2023 19:59:33 GMT
The Guardian: Ian Ayre’s journey from Liverpool CEO to running Nashville SC in MLS-Read more: www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/12/nashville-sc-soccer-team-ian-ayre-liverpool
Ian Ayre, Nashville SC’s CEO, had never given much thought to working in the US, let alone Tennessee. In fact, after his 2017 departure from the same role at Liverpool, he wasn’t really thinking about soccer very much at all: a decade at his boyhood club had proved as grueling as it was exhilarating. A visit to Nashville and a meeting with the club’s owners changed his mind. Back then, the club was a concept rather than a reality. For Ayre, it was a chance he knew he had to take. “How often,” he asked himself, “do you get a chance to work with a blank canvas?”
In December 2017, MLS confirmed Nashville would be awarded an expansion team, who would join the league in 2020 (Ayre joined the team in May 2018). The club’s birth would have seemed almost fanciful a decade prior. But the ambition, and investment, spearheaded by owner John Ingram, an avuncular local industrialist was crucial.
When the club played its first MLS game against Atlanta United to an almost 60,000-strong crowd in February 2020, it was at the home of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. But the club’s ambitions went beyond mere participation. Instead, it wanted to achieve something unique: the construction of the largest purpose-built soccer stadium in the US. Geodis Park, Nashville SC’s 30,000-capacity stadium, was opened on 1 May 2022 after two years of rapidfire construction. Eyebrows had been raised. Was there really enough demand in a city where soccer was often seen as a niche sport?
Certainly, there are US cities that spring more readily to mind when it comes to soccer. Though the sport in Nashville can’t claim the same lore as it does in New York, Philadelphia or Portland, it has its own distinct history. The game carved its niche in the city from successive waves of immigration, from Hungarians arriving after the second world war, to Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. The city saw the rise and fall of various amateur and semi-pro clubs, from the well loved and long-standing Nashville Metros to the Nashville Diamonds, a faintly disastrous short-lived 1980s experiment, who played in the equally ill-fated American Soccer League.
From inception, Nashville SC has made a great deal of trumpeting authenticity as one of its core values. Nashville has been considered a boom town for the last decade and more, thanks to strong economic and population growth. For some, this has proved a disruptive experience. Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect of Geodis Park being housed in the city’s historic fairgrounds, which used to host the Tennessee State Fair. In 2018, a coalition of locals under the name Save The Fairgrounds took the city’s government to court in a bid to delay construction of the new stadium, a cause taken up by incoming mayor John Cooper in 2019. After some financial wrangling, the club was allowed to proceed with construction of the new stadium.
Today, Geodis Park already feels like a fixture: an oddly unobtrusive addition to the local landscape, despite its size. “We didn’t want it to feel like a spaceship had crashed into Wedgewood Houston,” Ayre laughs. “Our stadium has four distinct stands rather than a bowl. There’s a home end and it’s designed so that there aren’t any bad seats. Even if you’re sitting at the top row, right at the back, you’re never more than 150 feet from the action.”
Despite the rate of change, the city retains much of its essence: a warm, welcoming place that takes little time to turn new arrivals into evangelists. It certainly didn’t take Ayre long to “go native”. The self-effacing Scouser arrived short haired and fresh faced. Five years later, he sports a neatly cropped beard, looking like a softly ageing country star....
In December 2017, MLS confirmed Nashville would be awarded an expansion team, who would join the league in 2020 (Ayre joined the team in May 2018). The club’s birth would have seemed almost fanciful a decade prior. But the ambition, and investment, spearheaded by owner John Ingram, an avuncular local industrialist was crucial.
When the club played its first MLS game against Atlanta United to an almost 60,000-strong crowd in February 2020, it was at the home of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. But the club’s ambitions went beyond mere participation. Instead, it wanted to achieve something unique: the construction of the largest purpose-built soccer stadium in the US. Geodis Park, Nashville SC’s 30,000-capacity stadium, was opened on 1 May 2022 after two years of rapidfire construction. Eyebrows had been raised. Was there really enough demand in a city where soccer was often seen as a niche sport?
Certainly, there are US cities that spring more readily to mind when it comes to soccer. Though the sport in Nashville can’t claim the same lore as it does in New York, Philadelphia or Portland, it has its own distinct history. The game carved its niche in the city from successive waves of immigration, from Hungarians arriving after the second world war, to Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. The city saw the rise and fall of various amateur and semi-pro clubs, from the well loved and long-standing Nashville Metros to the Nashville Diamonds, a faintly disastrous short-lived 1980s experiment, who played in the equally ill-fated American Soccer League.
From inception, Nashville SC has made a great deal of trumpeting authenticity as one of its core values. Nashville has been considered a boom town for the last decade and more, thanks to strong economic and population growth. For some, this has proved a disruptive experience. Not everyone was thrilled at the prospect of Geodis Park being housed in the city’s historic fairgrounds, which used to host the Tennessee State Fair. In 2018, a coalition of locals under the name Save The Fairgrounds took the city’s government to court in a bid to delay construction of the new stadium, a cause taken up by incoming mayor John Cooper in 2019. After some financial wrangling, the club was allowed to proceed with construction of the new stadium.
Today, Geodis Park already feels like a fixture: an oddly unobtrusive addition to the local landscape, despite its size. “We didn’t want it to feel like a spaceship had crashed into Wedgewood Houston,” Ayre laughs. “Our stadium has four distinct stands rather than a bowl. There’s a home end and it’s designed so that there aren’t any bad seats. Even if you’re sitting at the top row, right at the back, you’re never more than 150 feet from the action.”
Despite the rate of change, the city retains much of its essence: a warm, welcoming place that takes little time to turn new arrivals into evangelists. It certainly didn’t take Ayre long to “go native”. The self-effacing Scouser arrived short haired and fresh faced. Five years later, he sports a neatly cropped beard, looking like a softly ageing country star....
