It’s been three years since the United Soccer League announced it would be bringing a team to Chattanooga, a third-division professional club under the ownership of a Utah businessman named Bob Martino.
Considering the city really hadn’t shown it would consistently get behind one program – save for a two-year stretch when the Chattanooga Football Club made national waves as an amateur organization in the mid-2010s – it was a move that left many people wondering, some in private and some out loud, whether the town could somehow support two soccer teams.
It’s Chattanooga. The home of tons of ardent supporters of Southeastern Conference football. Chattanooga FC had excelled in drawing fans to Finley Stadium with a schedule that filled Saturday nights in the summer but ended by August, before college football season began and Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama and other teams would steal people’s attention from noon until late night from September to early December.
With the arrival of the Chattanooga Red Wolves, who have competed in USL League One since debuting in 2019, and the move of CFC to the professional ranks in 2020 as part of the National Independent Soccer Association, soccer season in the Chattanooga area has become months longer.
Despite plenty of friction between CFC and the Red Wolves over the years, it appears possible the two may be able to coexist – and their differences could be among the reasons why.