Good as Gold: Nashville SC Makes Its Case

It’s been more than a quarter-century since the Tennessee Titans saw their Super Bowl dreams dashed in Atlanta, the collective groan of their fans echoing across Music City when Kevin Dyson was tackled a yard short of the end zone in January 2000.

It’s been more than eight years since the Nashville Predators fell just two wins short of capturing the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup, giving superstar Sidney Crosby and the favored Pittsburgh Penguins all they could handle before succumbing in a six-game final series.

Sure, plenty of great memories remain.

Who can forget the Music City Miracle, which served as a playoff prelude to the Titans’ Super Bowl appearance, the day Dyson’s 75-yard kick return for a touchdown in the closing seconds gave the team a stunning win over the Buffalo Bills?

Who can forget the jam-packed streets of downtown Nashville in spring 2017, when the underdog Preds knocked off three straight favored opponents and turned Lower Broadway into a three-ring circus for weeks en route to the Cup final?

Still, the fact remains that nearly three decades after the Titans and Predators settled on opposite banks of the Cumberland River, this city — not to mention the state of Tennessee — is still seeking its first major professional sports championship.

Might a relative upstart change all that over the next several weeks?

There are rumblings coming from Geodis Park, where Nashville SC — in just its sixth season of Major League Soccer existence — is chasing trophies as the MLS season draws to a close.

The Boys in Gold, as they’re sometimes called by the NSC faithful, are still in contention for not just one, but two pieces of soccer silverware as of late September.

NSC is in the running for the U.S. Open Cup trophy, given to the winner of the nation’s oldest soccer tournament, and — most importantly — the MLS Cup trophy, given to the winner of the league’s playoffs.

How’s that for an entertaining close to the 2025 season, and one to give Nashville sports fans some hope as the Titans and Predators struggle to regain respectability?

“It’s a city that has been bridesmaids for so long, and it deserves to win a championship,” says Mike Jacobs, Nashville SC’s president of soccer operations and general manager.

“We’re so prideful in what that means for our fans and our city that we want to provide that for them. … We’re desperate to provide that for them.”

Talking Trophies and Titles

We should note that the trophy cases of the Titans and Predators aren’t barren.

The Titans, for instance, captured the Lamar Hunt Trophy for winning the AFC Championship en route to playing in their only Super Bowl.

The Predators earned the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl for winning the Western Conference playoffs in 2017, and also captured the Presidents’ Trophy for piling up the NHL’s most regular-season points in 2018.

But neither team has enjoyed that last-team-standing championship moment.

We should also note that professional soccer offers more opportunities for trophies, as there are awards for a couple of in-season tournaments, as well as for both the regular-season and playoff champions. The most significant title would likely be the MLS Cup, as it decides the league champion through a traditional playoff format — like that of the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB.

“The MLS Cup for me is the most important one,” says Nashville SC goalie Joe Willis. “They’re all important, but that’s how we define who is the champion for the season. … It’s something every player who plays in the league aspires to win.”

There are of course no guarantees NSC will capture any of the crowns this season. In fact, the club is dealing with its first real slump of the season after hitting “a bit of a sticky patch,” in the words of the team’s star striker, Englishman Sam Surridge. NSC has lost six of its past seven MLS contests.

But a landmark Sept. 16 victory over the Philadelphia Union in the semifinal of the U.S. Open Cup — a yearlong, 96-team tournament that takes place at the same time as the MLS regular season — vaulted Nashville SC into the Open Cup final for the first time. That means NSC’s first opportunity to record a history-making pro sports championship will occur Oct. 1, when the team travels to Austin FC for the tournament’s title match.

“All of our preparation for the whole season is to match the ambition of this club, which is to pursue trophies,” Nashville SC coach B.J. Callaghan says. “That’s not something we hide from. That’s the business that we’re in. This season, our opportunity is to win … trophies. That’s what we can play for, and that’s what we want to do.”

The fact that the Boys in Gold are in the running for trophies — “hardware,” as players and fans often term them — is all the more impressive given how quickly the team rebounded after suffering through the worst season in franchise history in 2024. NSC missed the playoffs last season for the first time in its six-year existence, finishing with just 36 points — the fifth-lowest total among the league’s 29 (now 30) teams.

Less than a year later, Nashville SC had already totaled 50 points through its first 30 of 34 contests in 2025, and the team was on pace to break the franchise record of 54 points set in 2022.

What a difference Callaghan — a coach in his first full season with the team — as well as a series of shrewd personnel additions can make.

Spearheading a Turnaround

General manager Jacobs has played a central role in the team’s reversal of fortune.

It was he who guided the coaching search that landed on Callaghan, a former U.S. men’s national team assistant coach. The 44-year-old Callaghan, a New Jersey native who played at Ursinus College, had never served as an MLS head coach in the past. 

But he’s brought to the club an attacking, entertaining style of play, something fans had begged for after watching a largely successful — but very defensive-minded — style of play under former coach Gary Smith. 

“When we hired B.J., it wasn’t, ‘Hey, can you come in and change things?’” Jacobs says. “We had a very definitive idea of what we wanted to do as a club and where we wanted to go. Then when we had that idea, it was, ‘Which potential candidate looks the most like this profile?’”

Among the key new players signed by Jacobs for this season: midfielder Eddi Tagseth, an energetic, 5-foot-7, 148-pound Norwegian with long blond locks who looks more than a little bit like a Christmas elf; Jeisson Palacios, a rugged, athletic central defender from Colombia; and outside back Andy Najar, a slick-dribbling playmaker from Honduras.

They’ve blended well with Nashville SC’s core of standouts, which includes Surridge, Willis, former MLS MVP Hany Mukhtar, team captain Walker Zimmerman, left back Daniel Lovitz, midfielder Alex Muyl and other veterans.

Najar, selected to play in the MLS All-Star Game earlier this season, is a good example of the more offensive-minded players the team sought to make over its personality.

“We were changing our game model,” Jacobs says. “We knew fans would be excited to see a marauding right back like Andy Najar bombing down the right side, getting involved in the attack. 

“But not only would it be more fun for fans — it was also the best way for us to win,” he continues. “So it wasn’t compromising one for the other. The feeling was that how we were going to play — whether it was ambitious or not — was going to be more attractive to watch and help us win games.”

While Nashville SC’s peers, the Titans and Predators, have labored to emerge from recent seasons of struggle, NSC has seemingly made it look easy.

“I think that after you have a down year like we did, there needed to be some change — but you don’t necessarily have to start from square one,” says Willis, who’s been with the team since its MLS expansion season in 2020.

“I think we did a good job of taking some of the things that made us good in our early years, like our defensive abilities and the way we were able to get [shut-outs],” he says. “But what we added on to that was a little more of a game plan moving forward in the attack and scoring goals, and finding ways to become more consistent in that aspect.”  

Bringing Back a Fan Base

Winning, it turns out, is good for business.

Nashville SC took some hits on the ticket front following the 2024 season, when the team stumbled to the finish line, winning just three of its final 14 games.

Geodis Park looked noticeably not full at the start of the 2025 season, with some fans clearly taking a wait-and-see approach before buying NSC as both competitive and entertaining. Things began to change during a hectic but highly successful May, when Nashville SC went unbeaten in nine games across all competitions, posting five victories and four draws.

All of a sudden, those empty seats started to fill in.

Since May, the team says it has averaged more than 28,200 fans per contest, which is in keeping with the season-ending figures over the past few years at Geodis Park — a 30,000-seat facility that is the largest soccer-specific stadium in North America.

Nashville SC’s season ticket base is “in the low 20,000s,” according to the club.

But Lindsey Paola, NSC’s chief business officer, notes that the franchise — which is in the process of wrapping up season ticket renewals for the 2026 season — has seen 25 percent growth in seat renewals from 2025, along with an 8 percent increase in revenue.

“Sometimes in the hardest times, you learn the most about yourself as an organization,” Paola says. “So it was difficult last year, but great this year. … And every time we do well on the field, it makes it easier, right?” 

Something is clearly going right on the home pitch, as NSC has totaled a 13-2-3 record in all competitions at Geodis this season. The team’s 10 league victories, in a stadium that’s once again being referred to as “The Castle,” have NSC tied for third-most in MLS.

“In any sport, when you’re really good, your team has a home-field advantage, and the place you play is an awful place for visiting teams to come into,” Jacobs says. “When you think about the best years of the Titans in Nissan, and you think of the Preds going on the Stanley Cup run, that’s what Bridgestone was like. I think what’s great is we’ve had that year after year at Geodis.” 

Championship Dreams

What might winning a championship this year mean for the franchise — especially a title that would be a first for both Nashville and the entire state?

From a financial standpoint, it would undoubtedly open new sets of eyes, stirring interest in potential new Nashville SC season ticket holders and new corporate partners. Who wouldn’t want to be associated with a champion?

“I do think from a business perspective, it would open doors with potential sponsors down the road,” Paola says. “It would also bring new fans into the building, so there’s a lot of economic effects of a big win like that. … It would be a huge moment.” 

A title would also offer a larger platform to spread the gospel of soccer in a region where the sport’s roots don’t run especially deep.

All of a sudden, there might be more enthusiasm for building mini pitches, an MLS initiative that began a decade ago, with the intent to provide safe soccer-playing places for children in underserved communities.

All of a sudden, there might be more kids participating in Nashville SC’s coaching clinics around town.

“Long-term, it just grows the sport of soccer in the South,” Paola says. “We’d heard hockey couldn’t happen in the South. It did. We heard soccer couldn’t happen in the South. Well, it’s happening.” 

From a front-office perspective, winning a championship would serve as proof positive that the plan Jacobs and his staff began to put in place in the midst of last year’s troubling season was the right one.

So many questions must have kept him up nights heading into the 2025 season: Would Callaghan, a longtime assistant, prove the right man as head coach? Had Jacobs made the right kind of multimillion-dollar personnel additions? Ones that would bring energy and entertainment to a team that looked old and stale in 2024? Would the Boys in Gold finally — finally — find a way to score more goals?

In sports, nothing confirms quite like the feel of cold, hard silverware.

“For our club, [winning a championship] would be validating and affirming, that all this work and all this planning, that it was right and it was worth it,” Jacobs says.

For the players, the chance to win a championship this season means a shot at history.

A handful of Nashville SC members — including Lovitz, Mukhtar, Willis, Taylor Washington and Zimmerman — stepped on to the pitch for the franchise’s first MLS game, when more than 59,000 fans packed Nissan Stadium to experience the milestone moment in 2020.

Not many memories will top that.

But lifting a trophy certainly would.