Joey Garrison

jgarrison@tennessean.com

Goodbye, Nashville Football Club. Hello, Nashville Soccer Club.

An investor group that was recently awarded a new United Soccer League expansion franchise has suddenly changed its name from Nashville FC to Nashville SC after discovering trademark issues because of a youth soccer team with a similar name that has operated in Nashville for several years.

The move, which also includes a new logo, comes just two months after the investor group DMD Soccer held an event at Bridgestone Arena to announce they had adopted the name Nashville FC, the name of city's existing amateur soccer team that plays at Vanderbilt University.

DMD Soccer had an agreement in place this summer to purchase the assets of Nashville FC, but Chris Redhage, one of the group's three lead investors, said they ran into intellectual property concerns because of the existence of Nashville FC Youth, which has different teams of boys and girls that compete in the nonprofit Harpeth Youth Soccer Association.

In addition to legal concerns, Redhage said the group opted for a name-change to eliminate potential confusion.

"We started to realize it didn't have the (intellectual property) protection that we needed to be able to build the brand, both from a local standpoint but also from a national standpoint," Redhage said. "We also wanted to make sure the name that we use really unified the city. We didn't want the confusion that could come with a local youth team using it as well.

“Our Nashville SC brand incorporates the history of soccer in Nashville and gives us an identity that every soccer fan in Nashville can rally around for years to come," he added.

The new Nashville SC logo has the same blue and yellow colors of the previous Nashville FC logo that was unveiled earlier this summer. The center of the new circular logo features a stylized N around six stripes to emulate guitar strings with the letters “SC” included in the circle.

USL is considered the third tier of play in North American professional soccer, two leagues below Major League Soccer.

Nashville SC hopes to open play in the USL in 2018, but the team has not identified a stadium where they will play.

Meanwhile, prominent Nashville businessman Bill Hagerty, former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, is leading a separate push to try to lure a pro Major League Soccer franchise to Nashville. Hagerty last month enlisted a who's who of Nashville corporate giants to support the MLS push.

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.