Bill Nuttall is 78 years old and works every day at a training facility five miles outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, watching one of the world's best soccer teams prepare for the 2026 World Cup. He has nothing else to do, he says, and he means it as a compliment to himself.
The facility sits at the foot of Signal Mountain along the Tennessee River, past a sheriff's gate and through a corridor of pines, home now to Lamine Yamal, Rodri, and the Spanish national team. Nuttall, standing 6 feet 3 inches tall, arrives daily. He's been doing this kind of work his whole life, and he has stories that could fill a season.
In 1976, he was a goalkeeper for the Miami Toros when Pele came to North America to play for the New York Cosmos. The ball reached the soccer legend at the edge of the penalty area during an NASL match, and Nuttall made a decision. "I flatten him," he says, cracking up at the memory. "Today, you're gone. I didn't even get a yellow, but it was a penalty. Pele looks at me, walks up and I push it wide."
That collision became one of hundreds of moments that shaped Nuttall's career in soccer. He played, he coached, and he managed. When the United States won the right to host the 1994 World Cup, the country had barely a national team to speak of. It was Nuttall's assignment to build one from scratch.
The federation brought in Bora Milutinovic as coach. Nuttall handled the rest. He signed players, mostly college kids willing to chase a dream. He found a facility in Mission Viejo, outside Los Angeles. He scheduled matches against teams around the world when the federation had nearly no money, taking advantage of the Soviet Union's collapse to book games with newly independent nations. For three years, the American squad played somewhere on the planet every ten days.
The 1994 team made history by reaching the round of 16 before Brazil knocked them out. "Brazil toyed with us, but that's not the point," Nuttall says. "We lost only 1-0 to Brazil, world champions."
He left US Soccer that summer. Decades passed. Nuttall eventually moved to Chattanooga to be closer to his granddaughters, and an idea took shape. The city could serve as a World Cup base camp. The grounds at Baylor School, where his granddaughters attended, sat five miles from downtown. Nuttall called someone at FIFA and asked about the process.
It was long. A host committee formed. An inspection came. Chattanooga made the first list of potential venues. New York, Philadelphia, Washington appeared on the roster alongside the small Tennessee city. People questioned it. "What the hell are they doing there?" skeptics asked.
Spain's representatives came to scout the location. They returned with more staff, more coaches. Within days, they had fallen in love. The privacy, the size of the city, the feel of the place. They wanted it.
The Spanish federation and Chattanooga's leaders coordinated the details. A hotel went up downtown. Work was done on the Baylor facilities. Spain even paid for improvements to make the base camp perfect. When everything was ready, the team moved in for three weeks of preparation.
Nuttall watched them arrive and work, just as he watches them depart. He's the connector, the bridge between Chattanooga and Spain, the man who once flattened Pele and then spent a career building the infrastructure of soccer in America. Now, in his eighth decade, he opens his adopted city to the world's best.
"The whole thing is surreal," Nuttall says. "You're going at 100 miles per hour and suddenly, screech, it stops." He knows that rhythm well. He's lived it for fifty years.
Author James Rodriguez: "Nuttall's the rarest kind of sports figure, one whose fingerprints are all over the game's architecture but who never needed the spotlight to do his job."
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