Lately, in the small town of Aviles, Spain, as Kate Price makes her way around the port city where she is studying abroad at Colegio San Fernando, she is stopped by locals who recognize the Baylor School emblem on some of her shirts.
While Baylor has maintained a global reach for decades, one of the country’s most prestigious high schools is now gaining worldwide attention as the Spanish national soccer team trains on its campus for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
On Saturday evening, Spain began the first of 12 training sessions the team has scheduled at Baylor as it hopes to make a memorable run to its second World Cup title, its first since 2010.
“Several times Kate has been told how cool it is that she is from the school where the Spanish national team is training,” said Baylor athletic director Mark Price, whose daughter is a rising junior and plays soccer at Baylor. “Being a World Cup host is the ultimate exposure for our school.”
Price, a former Division I basketball coach with Belmont University, likened the Spanish national team to the 1992 “Dream Team” U.S. Men’s Olympic basketball squad.
“Having Spain train here is a really fascinating way for Baylor’s brand to be distributed all over the world,” he said. “The World Cup carries the most notoriety of any international competition. The magnitude of Spain being here is pretty substantial. Who we are hosting is truly exceptional.”
Spain’s 26-man roster, which is the betting favorite by Draft Kings at +450 to win the World Cup, has a combined transfer market value of $1.47 billion, as reported by Sports Illustrated. That figure means the Spanish national team comes in third behind England ($1.52 billion) and France ($1.78 billion) as the most expensive team in this year’s 48-team field.
Lamine Yamal is the most valuable soccer player in the world, with CIES Football Observatory valuing Spain’s 18-year-old star at $416 million. For comparison, Major League Baseball’s highest-spending team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, has a 2026 payroll of $421 million.
“The World Cup being here on U.S. soil and Spain coming to town with the stars they have has heightened everyone’s awareness of how big soccer truly is around the globe,” Price said. “Soccer and basketball are the two most global games people follow.
“These are the best athletes in Spain training here in Chattanooga. Lamine Yamal is a name that holds weight similar to Steph Curry in our country.”
In Tim Morgan’s 25 years of being in the sports tourism industry, he has never seen anything like the Spain national team coming to town for a near month-long stay, he said.
“We have all worked extremely hard to produce an environment and home where Spain can train and prepare to go out and compete and win the World Cup,” said Morgan, president of the Sports and Events Corp. “We want them to feel like Chattanooga is their home away from home and experience our legitimate Southern hospitality and who we are as a destination.”
The Embassy Suites downtown has been reserved through the end of the month for the team and has been reshaped to look exactly like the headquarters of “La Roja,” as 244 team photos and banners adorn the hotel that opened in September. A poker and game room has been set up for the players, who will also have four espresso machines imported from home and their own team chef and nutritionist.
Every day for the past month, Baylor’s soccer field has been mowed to meet the standards of FIFA’s strict field regulations. No one has been allowed to get on the field and play since the beginning of May, to keep the field immaculate for Spain’s players.
Meanwhile, the Baylor tennis center has been turned into an indoor training facility, complete with a weight room, an artificial grass warm-up station, physical therapy tables, whirlpools and a film room.
“The relationship we have developed with the federation so far has been phenomenal,” Morgan said. “They even made the comment that we (Chattanooga) are the extension of their family. All roads led back to Chattanooga for Spain, and they went to several big cities. The facilities are great here, but how they were treated here really mattered.”
More than 100 international media members are expected to be in Chattanooga to cover Spain throughout the World Cup.
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Bill Nuttall, who was the general manager for the U.S. soccer team for the 1994 World Cup, was instrumental in helping the Scenic City make the connections to become a FIFA host site.
Chattanooga, which is the 135th largest city in the United States, has become renowned for its support of soccer on a big stage before, as Finley Stadium has hosted the largest amateur soccer match in the country’s history and also drew a sellout crowd of 20,535 to watch the U.S. Women’s National Team, both in August 2015.
“The trajectory of ‘how in the world would Spain end up in Chattanooga?’ really can be linked back to 2009 when Chattanooga Football Club started,” said Sean McDaniel, FIFA’s official liaison while Spain trains and resides in Chattanooga for the World Cup. “Now we have arguably the best team in the world here. You can trace the success story from the people we have put in Finley Stadium.”
A World Cup championship run for Spain would create huge visibility for Chattanooga, said McDaniel, who previously worked for both the Chattanooga Football Club and the Chattanooga Red Wolves.
“We are already on the international map,” McDaniel said. “If Spain wins the World Cup, it exponentially puts Chattanooga on a stratosphere in the world of international football that hardly any cities in the universe get to experience.”
Contact Patrick MacCoon at pmaccoon@timesfreepress.com.