Spain’s national soccer team picked a Tennessee boarding school as its base for the 2026 World Cup — and the community around it’s getting a crash course in hosting one of the sport’s biggest programs.
ABC News reported Sunday, June 15, that World Cup teams across the board are setting up training operations in communities well outside the tournament’s official host cities, with Spain landing at a Tennessee boarding school and Iraq operating out of a rural West Virginia town. The report didn’t name the specific school or town, but the pattern is clear: the tournament is spreading its footprint far beyond the arenas.
It’s an unusual arrangement for a boarding school campus. Spain’s squad brings an international media contingent, security demands, and logistical needs that most small institutions aren’t built for — yet the school apparently made it work. Tennessee isn’t among the states hosting World Cup matches this summer, which makes the selection a purely practical one: proximity to decent training facilities, turf, housing, and enough separation from the crowds.
The setup mirrors what FIFA and U.S. Soccer have encouraged since the tournament’s host-city selection process wrapped up. Rather than cramming teams into the same metropolitan corridors as the stadiums, squads are fanning out to college campuses, prep schools, and training complexes in quieter corners of the country. Spain isn’t alone in going rural — Iraq’s choice of a West Virginia town is arguably more striking, given how little infrastructure those communities typically have for elite international sport.
For Tennessee, it’s a different kind of visibility than the state usually draws from a major soccer tournament. No World Cup matches are scheduled here, so the boarding school arrangement is the state’s main connection to the 2026 event. Whether local residents get any meaningful access to training sessions — or whether the campus is locked down entirely — hasn’t been reported.
The names of the Tennessee school and the specific Spanish federation officials who arranged the deal weren’t included in ABC News’s report.
Reported by ABC News on June 15, 2026. Read the original report.
