Spain at a Tennessee boarding school, Iraq in a rural West Virginia town: Where World Cup teams live

In the shadow of Tennessee’s Signal and Lookout mountains, 8-year-old Beckham has been balancing on a fence for more than three hours, gripping a handwritten note and waiting for Spain’s national team to emerge.

“I love you and I look up to you,” the note reads, addressed to Pedri and Lamine Yamal. “Thanks for coming to my city. I hope you win the World Cup.”

As the players run onto the field, his eyes grow wide.

“Dad,” he whispers, “they’re real.”

The scene was equally incredible to his father, Jaxon McClure, a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in Chattanooga playing soccer with trash cans for goalposts, now coaches hundreds of local children and named his first child after one of the sport’s greatest stars.

This summer — 32 years since the United States first hosted the world’s biggest sporting competition — Chattanooga is among several cities established as World Cup base camps, where visiting teams live and train between matches.

Spain — among the favourites to win the tournament — has set up camp at a boarding school on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga; Iraq is in a mountain resort town in West Virginia with fewer than 3,000 residents; and Germany is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where cobblestone streets and tobacco warehouses share space with German flags and television crews.

Southern hospitality on display

A 144-foot (44-metre) underground waterfall beneath Lookout Mountain is lit up red and the Embassy Suites in downtown Chattanooga, where the Spanish team is staying, is adorned with la Rojigualda — Spain’s red and yellow flag. Giant banners featuring Spanish players and declaring, “Bienvenidos a Chattanooga” greeted La Roja as the team arrived at Chattanooga Airport.

Native Chattanoogan Skip Schwartz said so many people are wearing Spanish jerseys that “you don’t know if they’re from Spain, hoping to get a glimpse, or they are locals who have bought into the La Roja bandwagon.”

Around 25,000 people entered a lottery for 1,000 tickets to watch Spain practice at Baylor School, a 600-acre (240-hectare) private academy for students grade 6 through 12.

Meanwhile, tickets to watch Germany practice at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem sold out in four minutes.

“It’s just fun to see everyone start to care about something they didn’t care about before,” said Savannah Lahey, who manages soccer bar Small Batch Beer Co. in downtown Winston-Salem. The bar has extended its hours for watch parties and created a German-inspired menu featuring schnitzel sandwiches and sauerbraten for Germany’s opening match.

“It’s getting to make people feel at home, even when they’re not at home,” Lahey said.

At the Greenbrier in West Virginia, a historic resort that has hosted presidents and foreign leaders, Iraqi flags flew alongside the Stars and Stripes as the national team arrived for its World Cup training camp.

Baylor provides outstanding soccer facilities

Teams chose from FIFA-approved base camps across North America, with higher-ranked nations getting the earliest picks. Spain selected Chattanooga over larger cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, then worked with Baylor to create an expansive headquarters around its training fields and media facilities.

FIFA inspectors graded Baylor’s facilities, including the condition of the grass and its drainage and irrigation systems, the school’s operations and systems director Sam Green said. To preserve the pitches for Spain, Baylor’s players trained this spring on artificial turf, a sacrifice Green said seniors accepted without complaint.

Hidden behind a tree line, two grass pitches form the centre of Spain’s daily training. The airport and their downtown hotel are minutes away and Atlanta — where Spain will play two group-stage matches — is within easy reach. After Spain’s first official practice, players headed straight to the campus pool, where they “swam and laid out and had a good time” before returning to training.

For Schwartz, who now serves on Baylor’s board of trustees, Spain’s choice is meaningful because he and his teammates helped to lay Bermuda sod for their new soccer field when he played soccer at Baylor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That field has since been replaced by an indoor tennis facility — which serves as Spain’s media center — but the school now has three soccer pitches and one of the region’s premier soccer programs.

“If somebody had told me then that 40 years later Spain would be using this campus as the foundation for a World Cup, I wouldn’t even have tried to fathom it,” he said.

‘Without a doubt, I’m cheering for Spain’

Tina Ankar, a first generation Palestinian American, said she became a soccer fan because of the World Cup and her boyfriend, who grew up watching games with his Mexican family. At Spain’s open practice, hundreds of fans shouted ”¡Vamos, España!” after nearly every touch. Ankar found herself swept up in the energy.

“I’ve got to watch these guys all the way to the end,” she said. “Now we really have someone to cheer on besides America.”

Before Spain’s first public practice, Baylor students slipped into the locker room and snapped photos of stalls freshly labeled with the names of Spain’s stars, debating which player had inherited “their” locker.

“I sat in that locker room almost every single day this spring,” said 17-year-old midfielder and graduating senior Heath Techasiriwan.

Techasiriwan, a Filipino American and lifelong Lionel Messi fan who rooted for Argentina in 2022, said there was no question who he will support this summer.

“Without a doubt, I’m cheering for Spain,” he said. “I can’t see players like Pedri, Gavi and Lamine Yamal literally right in front of me and not cheer for them.”

Goalkeeper Mathew Ramirez commutes an hour each way to Baylor from Calhoun, Georgia. He grew up watching Barcelona with his father, who immigrated from Guatemala, and plans to watch Spain’s World Cup matches over carne asada with family and friends.

After practice, Yamal, who is 18, signed the 16-year-old goalie’s custom Barcelona jersey. Ramirez told the star in Spanish: “Watching you play gives me happiness.”

A young fan takes selfies and dreams of superheroes

Back in Chattanooga, Beckham collects signatures and takes selfies with players before heading home in the Spain jersey his father says he slept in the night before.

His father says Beckham kept repeating: “Wait, Dad. They’re real. Lamine Yamal is a real person. I just thought they were like superheroes. They’re on TV.”

Chattanooga has come a long way since the neighborhood games McClure remembers. He is now a soccer coach to about 850 children, and the city has professional men’s and women’s teams.

“They could have gone anywhere in this country,” McClure says of Spain, “and they chose us.”

Leah Willingham, The Associated Press