While recently discussing promotion and relegation, I made some inappropriate comments about Chattanooga. I commend all of the soccer fans in Tennessee and the Southeast for their record-breaking support of Chattanooga FC, and apologize to the passionate supporters of the club.
Don Garber, commissioner of Major League Soccer, spent 16 years with the National Football League before being named to the top job in soccer on Aug. 4, 1999. Garber has been listed among the most influential people in American sports by Times Magazine and Businessweek. 
CFC players react on the bench to Chattanooga FC’s NPSL national championship loss to the New York Cosmos at Finley Stadium on Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Referees perform the coin toss before Chattanooga FC’s NPSL national championship match against the New York Cosmos at Finley Stadium on Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn.Don Garber still may not be eager to introduce relegation to American soccer, but the MLS commissioner apparently had second thoughts about his earlier assessment of the soccer scene in Chattanooga.
While speaking last weekend at BlazerCon, a two-day convention for soccer fans in Brooklyn, N.Y., Garber slammed Chattanooga with what some analysts called a “cheap shot” that he later apologized for.
In the course of a conversation about the structure of the league that included unprintable language, Garber invoked Chattanooga in a manner that drew the ire of the Scenic City’s soccer faithful and supporters of its team, the Chattanooga Football Club.
“If you’re investing billions and billions of dollars, which we are now at about $3.5 billion invested in 20 years, to build something in Kansas City and they have a (bad) season, to think they might be playing in Chattanooga in a stadium of 4,000 people on a crappy field with no fans, makes no sense,” Garber said.