Less than a week before opening their new stadium, the Nashville Soccer Club announced that Titans star Derrick Henry has joined their ownership group.
Henry, along with actress and Tennessee native Reese Witherspoon, are now minority owners of the MLS club, and Henry becomes the fourth NFL player to serve as an owner of an MLS franchise.
“As a kid growing up in Florida, I imagined being a professional sports owner and the opportunity to do that with a Major League Soccer club is truly a dream come true,” said Henry in a statement. “My investment in Nashville SC is way more than financial, it’s truly an investment in the city of Nashville. The chance to be part of a club like Nashville SC, especially after seeing what they are accomplishing in the community, was an opportunity I did not want to miss.”
In five days, the team will open GEODIS Park. It’s the largest soccer specific stadium in the U.S. and Canada according to the team and is equipped with many features and attributes not seen at other stadiums. It holds 30,000 fans and, even more impressively, 49% of the more than 6,000 constructive team members were women or people of color.
“We meant it when we said we were doing this in Nashville, with Nashville and for Nashville,” said principal owner John Ingram. “Having Derrick, Reese and Jim [Toth, a media and tech investor] join our group signals our commitment to being a club that is going to do things at the highest level and with the best Nashville has to offer.”
The team takes the pitch at GEODIS Park on May 1st against the Philadelphia Union in an already sold-out inaugural match.
