Ian Ayre’s journey from Liverpool CEO to running Nashville SC in MLS

I an Ayre, Nashville SC’s CEO, had never given much thought to working in the US, let alone Tennessee. In fact, after his 2017 departure from the same role at Liverpool, he wasn’t really thinking about soccer very much at all: a decade at his boyhood club had proved as grueling as it was exhilarating. A visit to Nashville and a meeting with the club’s owners changed his mind. Back then, the club was a concept rather than a reality. For Ayre, it was a chance he knew he had to take. “How often,” he asked himself, “do you get a chance to work with a blank canvas?”

In December 2017, MLS confirmed Nashville would be awarded an expansion team, who would join the league in 2020 (Ayre joined the team in May 2018). The club’s birth would have seemed almost fanciful a decade prior. But the ambition, and investment, spearheaded by owner John Ingram, an avuncular local industrialist was crucial.

When the club played its first MLS game against Atlanta United to an almost 60,000-strong crowd in February 2020, it was at the home of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. But the club’s ambitions went beyond mere participation. Instead, it wanted to achieve something unique: the construction of the largest purpose-built soccer stadium in the US. Geodis Park, Nashville SC’s 30,000-capacity stadium, was opened on 1 May 2022 after two years of rapidfire construction. Eyebrows had been raised. Was there really enough demand in a city where soccer was often seen as a niche sport?

Certainly, there are US cities that spring more readily to mind when it comes to soccer. Though the sport in Nashville can’t claim the same lore as it does in New York, Philadelphia or Portland, it has its own distinct history. The game carved its niche in the city from