Photo: Eric England

As tens of thousands of Predators fans clad in gold and blue filled the streets downtown in June, one group surveyed the scene and thought, “This could be us.”

MLS2Nashville formed last year in the hopes of bringing a Major League Soccer franchise to Music City. In the joy surrounding the Predators’ Stanley Cup run, parallels between Nashville’s hockey history and a soccer bid became apparent: Hockey arrived two decades ago into a market that was big on potential but short on tradition; hockey’s success would have been impossible without the support of the city leadership; hockey was also perceived to be a novelty in a region better known for college football.

And yet, here were gleeful fans, embracing the sport of another country (Canada) and creating traditions of their own (with a certain type of fish). Who cares whether TV execs might have wanted a bigger market than Nashville playing for the title? Viewers ultimately connected, and the ratings were some of the best in years.

It’s a formula the MLS2Nashville organizers want to emulate. Nashville’s chances of landing an MLS team got very real in the past few months, sometimes by the group’s own actions and sometimes through the stumbling of other cities’ efforts (see: "Who Is Nashville's Competition for an MLS Team.").

So how did we get here?

MLS announced three expansion criteria when it sought bids in January: a committed, well-capitalized local ownership group; a strong market on both the fan and sponsorship sides; and a plan for a soccer-specific stadium. The league plans to award two franchises in 2017 and two more in 2018, bringing the total number of teams in MLS to 28.

The expansion process is really a race by 12 cities to demonstrate strength in each of those areas. One franchise is almost assuredly going to Sacramento, which has sought a team for years and is ready to start building, so that leaves Nashville looking for one of the three other slots.

When Nashville’s bid launched last year, it was led by investor and former Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bill Hagerty and his chief of staff at ECD, Will Alexander, son of U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander. In December, the team added the considerable influence (and fortune) of John Ingram, chairman of Ingram Industries. The importance of Ingram can’t be understated given the costs associated with successfully launching a team — the league expansion fee will be at least $150 million, in addition to stadium and operational expenses — and also because, as one MLS observer told the Scene, “MLS likes billionaires.”

“Nashville had no history with major league hockey, and I think if you talk to people that visited for the [2016] All-Star Game, it blew people away,” Ingram told Sports Illustrated earlier this year. “Nashville is on an incredible trajectory from a growth point of view. If you use Wayne Gretzky’s analogy about not just looking at where the puck is but trying to keep track of where the puck is going, Nashville is a serious city. It’s a branded city. People know about it and love to visit it, and I’d like to see if I can help bring this globally branded city to the global sport.”

Ingram bought a majority stake in Nashville SC this spring, providing an actual team (which will begin play next year in the USL, soccer’s second division in the U.S.) to become a potential MLS franchise.

With ownership criteria shored up, the team needs a field. At the inception of the league in 1996, MLS games were played in often-cavernous NFL stadiums. So MLS has placed a high priority on soccer-specific facilities for new teams, to maximize both revenue and the fan experience. In Nashville, to find the space necessary to put a 25,000- to 35,000-seat stadium near the urban core (a stated preference of MLS), that almost certainly requires partnership with the city. Enter the administration of Mayor Megan Barry.

Barry has been supportive of the effort. In January she announced she wanted to develop a proposal for a new soccer stadium at The Fairgrounds Nashville, and days later she traveled to New York with the group of investors hoping to start a franchise here, joining them as they hand-delivered their formal bid for a team to the league offices in New York. In the coming months, more general gestures will be replaced by planning and politics.

“We’re at a point now where we’re going to have to make some real business decisions — the private sector, the MLS team and the city — over the next fairly short period of time,” Rich Riebeling, chief operating officer for Barry’s administration, tells the Scene.

The administration immediately sought to head off any lingering post-traumatic stress among the varied constituency of the fairgrounds — whose nerves are still raw from Karl Dean’s attempt to raze, then redevelop, the place — by noting that any stadium project would be part of an overall upgrade to the property. Riebeling reiterates that.

“I don’t think you can do this without making improvements to the fairgrounds part of the overall plan,” he says, adding that construction is about to begin on youth soccer facilities and playing fields at the property.

The Barry administration also started early in addressing the core source of debate whenever major league sports teams are on local government agendas — how much taxpayer money will be pledged toward the cause. In a January speech to the Downtown Rotary Club, she said, “When I talk about this in the form of what we have to do, it’s in the form of a private-public partnership … emphasis on the word ‘private.’ Because we have a lot of things to pay for. So the private sector is going to have to show up for this.”

And while bid organizers from some other cities have tripped up while trying to work through their states’ legislative halls, Nashville has already had quiet success on that front. Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill late last month that would allow state sales taxes collected at an MLS stadium to go toward covering its expense. That put the league on equal footing with the NFL, NBA and NHL in Tennessee. The fact that it breezed through the Republican supermajority is likely due to veteran Republican insiders and former state government officials working on the bid.

Riebeling says the Barry administration is committed to minimizing the amount of money that would come out of Metro’s general fund to go toward the project. He points to First Tennessee Park, as opposed to Nissan Stadium and Bridgestone Arena, as a model he’d like to pursue. That approach, he says, would see the administration “try to identify sources of revenue, both private funds plus ‘but for’ money — money that only comes because of the development of the soccer complex,” such as property taxes from related developments.

One significant variable in all of this could be the addition of Vanderbilt as a partner in the stadium. Dudley Field was built in 1922 and lacks any of the amenities — and revenue-producing potential — of modern stadiums. A 35,000-seat stadium stacked with luxury boxes and sponsorship opportunities would both meet the SEC minimum and give Vanderbilt a big upgrade over its current situation. Using football to offset stadium costs is a formula that has been successful in other markets: FC Dallas shares with Frisco high schools and hosts a bowl game; Sporting Kansas City hosts the Division II NCAA championship. Ingram’s dual positions on the Vanderbilt board of trust and at the head of the ownership group place him at the right intersection for this to happen, but MLS2Nashville officials declined to discuss the possibility, and calls to Vanderbilt Vice Chancellor David Williams went unreturned.

Photo: Daniel MeigsAsked how the administration plans to pitch the public on chipping in for a fourth professional sports stadium in a little more than 20 years, Riebeling says these opportunities come around only so often, and he cites the recent Predators Stanley Cup run and what it did for the city — not just economically but culturally.

“I know that critics will say, ‘You don’t need to subsidize the stadiums and the facilities,’ and that’s a fair argument and I understand that viewpoint,” says Riebeling. “But if you look at how they get done across the country, it’s usually a public-and-private joint venture that makes it happen.”

Accentuating a debate about civic priorities is the fact that the MLS push comes around the same time as Barry will be seeking public support for a referendum on funding to start a 25-year, multibillion-dollar mass-transit project.

“I see the soccer as being obviously not as critical — it’s not a ‘have to,’ ” Riebeling says. “It’s a nicety but not a ‘have to.’ Whereas transit is viewed as a necessity. So because of that, I don’t put it in the same pot, but I think that having a complex there that would be on a transit line in the future would be a great asset to the community, and something that we want to see happen if we can get to a place where it makes sense for the city.”

Once a stadium proposal is in place, it will likely need approval from three Metro bodies — the Metro Sports Authority, the Board of Fair Commissioners and the Metro Council. Councilman Colby Sledge, who represents the district that includes the fairgrounds property — and who discloses that he’s a soccer fan — says it’s an “interesting possibility” and that the location makes sense.

“The fairgrounds is an area where you’ve got the space, you can do it without really impacting any other uses, and you probably have the audience right there with the convergence of the heavy immigrant population and the heavy millennial population,” he says. “Those are the markets for soccer.”

Sledge says the viability of The Fairgrounds Nashville as the home of soccer in Nashville isn’t the primary question for him as a councilman, representing constituents in one of the city’s many rapidly changing neighborhoods.

“To me, it’s not so much the soccer stadium, it’s what comes with it,” says Sledge. “It would be foolish, I think, to just plop a stadium down and not have a plan for anything around the site. Over in the fairgrounds area, whether you’re talking about Berry Hill or Wedgewood-Houston, there has been a lot of development. But I guess the question you have to answer is, ‘What’s in it for us? What’s in it for the community to have a soccer stadium around us?’ I think there’s a lot of built-in excitement and all that, but there’s also impact. There’s traffic, there’s going to be some impact there, so what’s the trade-off? What are we able to accomplish with whatever comes with the soccer stadium?”

But even if stadium questions were fully resolved, the most hypothetical piece of all is the market. The Predators’ Stanley Cup run showed that plenty of local fans will show up and spend money on and around professional sports, but MLS advocates have to demonstrate that level of support was not an anomaly, and that it can be extrapolated — at least in part — to soccer.

Alexander points to a host of metrics tilted in Nashville’s favor: age, population growth, job growth, per capita income and GDP growth. All will be important barometers for the league during an evaluation process likely to begin this weekend, when MLS commissioner Don Garber arrives in conjunction with the Gold Cup matches. Without a significant history of soccer beyond the youth levels, ticket sales for the U.S. men’s national team game against Panama will be viewed as an indicator of enthusiasm for the sport. As of press time, tickets have been moving briskly enough that organizers opened up space in one of the upper decks, allowing for the possibility of a record crowd for a soccer game in the state.

MLS2Nashville organizers believe Nashville fans have enough disposable income to buy tickets and merchandise, and independent analysts seem to agree.

“Any time that you want to add an additional [major] or minor league team to an area, you have to look at whether, No. 1, there’s sponsorship and marketing dollars available, but No. 2, whether that would spread the expendable income of the individuals in the city too thin,” says Adam Pfleegor, an assistant professor of sport administration at Belmont University.

Team leadership also has to convince local businesses and multinational corporations with regional headquarters here to pony up for sponsorships, including for the stadium and the jerseys. Nissan has already signed on to be the uniform sponsor for Nashville SC’s under-23 squad, an early sign of corporate interest. Some USL teams, Pfleegor says, have local auto dealerships as uniform sponsors, not major international auto brands.

Finding a company to purchase naming rights for the new soccer stadium could be “a little challenging,” says Chris Snyder, a partner with Nashville-based Alliance Sports Marketing and a former operations manager and assistant general manager for the Nashville Sounds. “But I think there would be enough interest in naming rights where the team wouldn’t have to wait long to acquire one. Nissan, Bridgestone, Ascend and First Tennessee are already committed to venues, but other local companies could be interested.”

Snyder mentions Fifth Third Bank, US Bank, Regions Bank, Louisiana-Pacific, Dollar General, Infiniti, Firestone and Asurion as major brands with local presences that could be interested in various levels of Nashville SC sponsorship. For lower-level sponsorships, including in-venue signage for restaurants, professional services and local bars, “There’s enough competition in Nashville in these categories that these spots would fill quickly.”

“We understand the power of sports to build community and civic pride,” says Scott Becker, senior vice president of administration for Nissan North America. “It is why Nissan actively supports our local teams at all levels of sport. We call Middle Tennessee home for our North American headquarters and are honored to support the Nashville Soccer Club and the bid to bring Major League Soccer to this city.”

Despite apparent interest from the local business community, Nashville SC will still have to put butts in seats to turn a profit.

Was the Predators’ run a sign of an unsated interest in local professional sports, or just happenstance? Could an MLS team turn large crowds at one-off Nissan Stadium soccer games into season-long fans at the proposed MLS stadium at The Fairgrounds Nashville?

Those behind the MLS bid seem to think so, and one of their main selling points is Nashville’s demographic makeup. Market analysts tend to focus on millennial and Hispanic populations as key indicators for MLS success, both categories in which Nashville is trending in the right direction.

“We’ve got a real international community that’s growing in Nashville, and they’re importing their love of soccer,” says Alexander. “The placement of the stadium being at the fairgrounds, you’re right at the doorstep of the international community that’s thriving on Nolensville Road. I think that’s a plus, because you’ve got a lot of soccer fans in that part of town.”

Alexander says Nashville SC won’t compete for fans with the Predators and the Tennessee Titans, in part because soccer tickets will be cheaper, and the seasons only partially overlap.

“If you’re already a Titans fan or a Predators fan, I think soccer is a great addition,” he says. “But I think there are some other people that this will engage them into a sports team for the first time.”

A few numbers in the MLS2Nashville data set paint a less rosy picture, though. Nashville ranks 10th in the size of its TV market and 11th in population when comparing the 12 bids.

Yet Pfleegor, the Belmont professor, thinks the market is there for an MLS team, as long as it can foster a good fan experience.

“The demographics are there, the marketing dollars are there,” he says. “The key is going to be the facility and almost modeling themselves after the Preds. It’s not a European team. It’s a soccer team in the South, and if they can embrace that and go with the local culture, it could be a really positive experience.”