Goodwill ambassador for MLS2Nashville movement says Sacramento is also in country's top soccer league

Eddie George might have fumbled away a Major League Soccer secret on Wednesday.

There has been no word from the country’s top professional soccer league about which city will join Nashville to complete the current round of expansion, which will bring the number of teams to 26. The former Tennessee Titans running back sounded like he knew, though.

“I know a guy in Sacramento, one of the owners of the Sacramento Kings,” he said. “He was telling me good luck with the bid and so forth.

“They also got a team.”

George was a goodwill ambassador for Nashville’s ultimately successful effort to bring an MLS franchise to this town. As such, he had a prominent place on stage at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMT Theater when MLS Commissioner Don Garber, city and state officials formally celebrated Nashville’s selection as the league’s 24th franchise.

Garber said the league planned to announce Thursday “what our timing is to name the second expansion team that will join Nashville.” The official announcement, like Wednesday’s, will take place in the city to be awarded the franchise.

Sacramento is one of three cities currently under consideration. Detroit and Cincinnati are the others. Garber called all three “MLS-ready.”

“Sacramento is in good shape,” he said. “They’re MLS-ready. They have some things they need to finalize with their ownership group that I think would make them optimum. We’ve said for a great many years that there’s a great level of support for the game in Sacramento and I think there’s a great interest in joining Major League Soccer.”

George is not an MLS employee nor is he involved on a management level with Nashville’s effort. So his is not the final word on the subject. Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau Corp CEO Butch Spyridon asked him and model Lilly Aldridge to get involved in order to raise the profile of the MLS2Nashville effort, which they did. It is difficult to know just how much their participation helped Nashville, which got involved in the expansion process relatively late. But it seems everything the city did worked.

“They said we were a long shot getting it, but why not?” George said. “I knew the potential of Nashville. I know what it holds. … The city just seems to be growing in leaps and bounds and it’s only fitting that they have a Major League Soccer team here.

“… I did a couple of things for them, some social media posts, a couple things with the media promoting the [international] games [at LP Field], went to some of the games. I was not entrenched in the details but … I was well aware of the process.”

Now it seems he might know something the rest of the world will learn soon enough.



