Nashville SC's First Game at GEODIS Park Goes Down Easy

We were not supposed to be here.

We were not supposed to be sitting in this gleaming new stadium, watching a Nashville team on the soccer field on Sunday.

Nashville was not supposed to beat out other cities like Sacramento, St. Louis and San Diego for a franchise. Phoenix, the pundits said, was serious. So was Charlotte. Nashville? What kind of tradition did Nashville have?

The stadium was not supposed to be in this spot. When the ownership group pulled in a capital-B Billionaire in John Ingram, the original thought was that a stadium should go on the east bank of the Cumberland where the PSC Metals facility has vexed a succession of mayors. But Megan Barry and the city offered up the Fairgrounds Nashville as a landing spot. It was an unorthodox but interesting idea. A stadium on a hill in a neighborhood on the rise.

The political support was never supposed to be here to build it. The coalition of fairgrounds supporters who had turned away Karl Dean’s attempts to raze the place in the previous decade were supposed to be too fearsome and too litigious. But battle by battle and court case by court case, they lost. The old sheds were torn down and replaced with new ones. A spot was cleared near Bransford Avenue. 

This mayor was never for it. John Cooper, a voice of opposition when he served on the Metro Council, dug in as mayor and sought concessions that could have proven fatal to the whole deal. 

A series of highly unlikely events led to this day — this glorious day bathed in sunshine and smiles, good vibes and sport.

There were 30,000 people at a professional soccer game in Nashville cheering on their team. Not the national team. Not a couple of European teams stopping by on a summer exhibition cash grab playing without their stars. Their. Team.

Everyone wanted a piece of opening day. 

Maybe it was the warnings about a looming parking disaster that never really materialized, but fans piled into the stadium early, hitting the team stores and the concessions en masse an hour before kickoff. 

Standing in a line that stretched down the concourse, Mathew Portell and Nate Towne were typical of the day’s throng, clad in Nashville SC gear and sporting a slight grins as if to say, “Can you believe this?”

They weren't lifelong soccer fans, but came to the sport charmed by the energy and the efforts of NSC. 

“This is our first time buying season tickets,” Towne says. “I’ve got two young kids, a 6-year-old and 4-year-old, and we went last year and just had the time of our lives and decided to come in for season tickets.”

As for standing in a line that stretches halfway down the east concourse? 

“To me it's the Hatch Show Print [poster] that is for today,” Portell says. “That's obviously an iconic Nashville symbol. And the scarves, because you can only get an opening-day scarf one time.”

The Hatch print is indicative of the number of small touches everywhere the club has gotten right. There’s nothing more “Nashville” than Hatch. Many of the concessions are provided by familiar local restaurants. Even the mascot, Tempo, is a reference to a viral photo of a coyote that snuck into a Music City Center bathroom. On the southwest corner of the stadium is a banner displaying Tempo that flies over a concession stand dedicated to the mascot. It’s a meme come to life.

The wide concourses make a massive difference. Spanning 60 feet across, even at its most crowded the space never feels claustrophobic — something that is a definite problem with FC Cincinnati’s new stadium, which opened last year. Everywhere around, you can see where the club learned from other MLS clubs and tried to build on the most successful pieces. The results are tangible. 

What happened on the field mattered, but it was incidental to the day. The final score was a tie, a 1-1 result against the Eastern Conference-leading Philadelphia Union. But even that felt like a win after the team had to come back late behind a Randall Leal penalty.

At some point, those ties will need to become wins or the fans will become restless. Like the stadium, the club learned from other MLS mistakes and has put a good, quality product on the field. If they lean a little bit defensive — and they do — that solidity means they’re in almost every match. Last season, they won enough of those little battles to become one of the top teams in the league. They’ll have to find some more scoring to repeat that success, or at least convert their missed opportunities — like two first-half shots that found the woodwork and another point-blank effort negated by a stellar effort from Andre Blake, Philly’s goalkeeper.  

Even for Gary Smith, the team’s coach, the result was not as important as moving into a place that is truly theirs.

“To have our own home is vitally important,” Smith says. “As much as we were well-cared-for and supported [at Nissan Stadium], there is no beating your home stadium. And, you know, Ian [Ayre] has spoken about memories that you start to create. This venue now, will be the place over the coming years and decades that, you know, fathers and sons will come to and look back on and say, 'Do you remember?' Very, very important that we've started on that road.”

Yes, a win would have made for a storybook ending, but those will come. The supporters' sections on the north end didn’t seem to care that their pregame tifo banner had to be cut into three pieces instead of raised high on the rigging. When Leal’s penalty crossed the line in front of them, they responded back with a wall of sound and a plume of yellow smoke bombs. 

The day was not perfect, but it was a perfect day.