New effort to bring semi-pro soccer to Knoxville gains traction among organizers and fans
Knoxville is a football town, and Drew McKenna and his partners aren’t looking to change that.
They are, however, looking for a seat at the table for another sport. Plans are under way to bring a semi-professional soccer franchise to the Scruffy City, and by giving it an exclusively Knoxville identity, McKenna and the four co-owners of the new franchise feel it has the potential to add to the East Tennessee zeitgeist.
In other words, McKenna told BLANK Newspaper recently, while Knoxville has been underserved by professional soccer, the city’s embrace of the sport on a professional level will elevate the game for players and fans, as well. And having moved from Chicago a few years back (his wife is from Knoxville), East Tennessee seemed prime to join the soccer renaissance that’s transforming the sports landscape in America at all levels, he added.
“Chicago and Knoxville have one thing in common from a soccer perspective, and that’s a great youth soccer culture,” he said. “Youth soccer is growing nationally, and Chicago and Knoxville are no exception. The biggest difference is that Chicago has a Major League Soccer club [the Chicago Fire], while Knoxville doesn’t have any professional or semi-professional teams here. I think our biggest driver was understanding what the existing professional and semi-pro soccer landscape looked like and how disproportionate it is that Knoxville wasn’t a part of it.
“Only three other cities of Knoxville’s size don’t have something in one of those tiers, and why? There’s no reason. Knoxville has a great youth soccer culture, a growing and robust culture in general, so why can’t soccer fit into that? That’s probably been our biggest incentive to get something going: It doesn’t seem proper or right that there isn’t something here.”
A decade ago, semi-professional soccer debuted in East Tennessee when the Knoxville Force played its first match in 2011 as part of the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL). Owned by the organization Knoxville Soccer LLC, the organization changed hands after the 2014 season and was administered by the Emerald Youth Foundation. Games were initially played at Regal Soccer Stadium on Stephenson Drive before moving to Hackney Field, part of the foundation’s Sansom Sports Complex on Dale Avenue. Despite finishing first in its division in 2017, the franchise, which by that point also included a women’s team, was shuttered in January 2019. Emerald officials cited philosophical differences – the league sought to develop players that advanced professionally, while the youth foundation’s focus was on character development and leadership – as the reason.
While the team, which was rebranded as the Emerald Force Soccer Club when the foundation took over the team’s administration, may have been dissolved, the youth culture it nurtured has continued to thrive. And that, McKenna said, is one of the things about Knoxville that can be tapped to build the impending franchise – unnamed for the moment, depending on fan input – into a truly regional representation.
To do that, McKenna and his associates are courting the United Soccer League (USL), based in Tampa, Florida, and sanctioned by the U.S. Soccer Federation. USL bills itself as “the largest and fastest-growing professional soccer organization in North America, possessing more than a decade of experience in bringing the world’s game to communities across the United States and Canada,” and it’s composed of three tiers: Championship, a Division II professional league with more than 30 clubs, or teams, around the country; League One, launched in 2019 as a means of targeting population centers with 150,000 to 1 million people; and League Two, made up of 72 franchises and designed as a “stepping-stone for top professionals now playing throughout the world, with more than 70 percent of all selections in the MLS SuperDraft since 2010 having [League Two] experience, including 66 selections in the 2018 MLS SuperDraft.”
Right now, the plan is to get a Knoxville USL League Two team ready to play by 2022, McKenna said.
“At the League Two level, most of the players are very high-caliber college players on summer break, and 65 percent of the players in the last MLS draft were League Two alums,” McKenna said. “We’ll have open tryouts, because we’re looking for talent in Knoxville, and it’s the right thing to do to give Knoxville players opportunities. If we can find youth players or those just past that who can cut it at our level, we’d love to have them. By the same token, we’d love to have Knoxville natives who come back home from the summer after playing in other places play for us.”
The No. 15 jersey, he added, will be reserved for a Knoxville player, because the Roman numerals – XV – fit perfectly into a logo of the city’s name. One of the goals, McKenna added, is to boost soccer at the youth level, but also to support and promote the adult recreational leagues around the city. As a latecomer to soccer fandom, McKenna says he’s a “better fan than I am a player,” but despite his background in the sport on which Knoxville hangs its hat, he believes that anyone who gives soccer a chance will become a convert, just as he did.
“I grew up with baseball and football. I went to Notre Dame, and I spent my undergrad and post-grad working with the football team, but the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve come to love soccer through the men’s national team,” he said. “Through that, and the great success those players are having now, I’ve been able to adopt a number of national club teams where Americans are playing at the highest level, all because it was so much fun to learn more about the game and fall in love with the game through the American national team.”
His experience isn’t unique, he pointed out: While soccer is immensely popular around the world, it’s been slower to catch on stateside for a number of reasons, many of them having to do with uniquely American sports like baseball, basketball and football, which took precedence over an imported sport like soccer. It’s interesting, McKenna added, to point out that soccer’s contemporary explosion in popularity mirrors the growth of the internet and digital forms of entertainment.
“If you look at the growth of the sport of baseball and the ubiquity of radio, it’s almost totally parallel,” he said. “From the ’20s to the ’50s, that was the golden era of radio and baseball. If you look at the growth of football and TV from the ’60s to the ’90s, it’s very similar. I think the internet has been a very big deal to soccer, because as the internet has grown, so has soccer’s popularity with the plugged-in generation. The internet has made it more accessible, and it brings some of the biggest clubs like Chelsea or Barcelona right to your living room.
“Soccer is the fastest-growing sport at the millennial and Gen Z levels. For Gen Z over Gen X, twice as many folks identify it as their favorite sport. And there some other huge tailwinds happening: The 2026 World Cup is going to be in the U.S., and that will be an impactful inflection point for the game.”
And as that popularity continues to grow, it only makes sense for Knoxville to have an opportunity to take advantage of it, McKenna added. He began making entreaties to the USL a couple of years ago, but the project picked up in earnest about six months back, when he founded a partnership with four other like-minded individuals, each of whom brings a set of complementary skills to the table. Their goal: to make Knoxville the center of everything they do and that the team does.
“We want to make this totally Knoxville-led,” McKenna said. “We’re going through the branding process with an online survey, and we’ll hit other touchpoints based on what Knoxville thinks of Knoxville, rather than what the five of us think of Knoxville.”
They’ve established a website (www.knoxprosoccer.com) and a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/knoxprosoccer), and those who signed up for updates and information were invited to fill out a survey that will help shape the branding, look, logo and name of the team. An initial fan forum was held over Zoom on Feb. 25 – others will be in person, McKenna said – and the hundreds of responses have created the tailwinds the five owners are looking for to get the team off the ground. The goal, he added, is to continue to collect feedback, unveil the team’s name, jersey design and logo by late summer and kick off play in May 2022. There’s no designated home yet; they’re looking at Regal Stadium, and there have been talks about possibly using the new Smokies baseball stadium in the Old City if and when that project is completed, but for right now, all of those details are preliminary. What matters most is getting Knoxville on board, and to date, that hasn’t been a problem.
“As far as what people are saying, Knoxville folks are really proud of Knoxville, almost ubiquitously,” McKenna said. “There’s a family feel to a lot of the responses, and we see that Knoxville folks support Knoxville businesses, that there’s a general feel of how we’re all in this together. We’ve gotten a lot of suggestions for names along the lines of Scruffy City or Marble City – some of the stuff you might expect, but also some of the stuff we haven’t expected. For example, someone suggested the Red Pandas, because we have the largest population in captivity here at the Knoxville Zoo.
“We’ve just gotten some great feedback across the board. And the overarching feeling is one of unity and inclusion among Knoxville folks.”
And while some of the recommendations have been Vols-centric, McKenna and his partners aren’t looking to put USL soccer head-to-head against college football. For one thing, he pointed out, the University of Tennessee is a statewide institution, and while the football team is closely identified with Knoxville, the branding is a statewide endeavor.
Not so for this new team.
“We’re trying to create something that doesn’t represent the whole state of Tennessee, but that uniquely represents Knoxville, and we’re also trying to create something that doesn’t have to be an either/or,” he said. “I love football. It’s a great game, and UT is unbelievable. All five of us are huge alums or huge fans, and we’ll continue to go to the games at Neyland, for sure. But I think soccer is a unique sport, especially in that games are only two hours long, every time, and there’s a great level of physicality without some of the head-injury types of issues that you see in football and hockey.
“It just seems like a great opportunity to bring a new product to Knoxville, to be part of the civic landscape and to be part of the support for youth soccer culture here. And we want folks to feel like they have a voice in that process. To the extent that we can, it’s going to be community-led. That’s what’s most important to us.”
wildsmith@blanknews.com
