19^th March 2025

The thing that first appealed to me about the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup had nothing to do with football itself. Coming from a country where championships are carefully engineered through playoffs, seedings and television schedules, I found the simplicity strangely refreshing. Lose once and your season was over. Win, and somewhere further along the road a bigger club waited for you. I wasn’t yet knowledgeable enough to appreciate where Knoxville stood within the American football pyramid, but I understood knockout sport instinctively. It belonged as much to high-school gymnasiums and dusty baseball diamonds as it did to soccer fields, and there was something wonderfully democratic about the idea that, on the right night, anybody might briefly matter.

The drive from Kansas City was easier than the one that had taken me to Florida a few weeks earlier, though ten hours behind the wheel still has a way of flattening one day into the next. My editor, perhaps deciding I had earned a little comfort after too many nights in roadside Motel 6s, booked me into somewhere considerably nicer for a stop in St. Louis, and for the first time on this assignment I slept beneath crisp white sheets instead of blankets that carried the faint smell of industrial detergent. Before leaving the city I finally tried St. Louis-style pizza, something oddly overdue considering how close Kansas City had always been. The thin crust and processed cheese felt unfamiliar rather than unpleasant, and I found myself wondering how it had taken me so long to eat something that had existed almost in my own backyard.

Tennessee announced itself gradually. Near Cookeville I left the interstate for Cummins Falls State Park, following a trail that descended towards water so clear it seemed almost exaggerated. Families wandered the rocks carrying towels over their shoulders, children ignored every instruction their parents shouted across the river, and the sound of the waterfall drowned out everything else. I’d begun noticing that Tennessee possessed a particular kind of beauty, one that never demanded attention but rewarded anyone willing to pull off the highway for half an hour. It wasn’t dramatic in the way the Rockies were dramatic. It was gentler than that, content simply to exist.

I reached Knoxville the afternoon before the match and did what any visitor probably ought to do at least once: I drove east to Dollywood. It would have been easy to dismiss it as a theme park built around country music and nostalgia, but that would have missed the point. People weren’t there ironically. Grandparents walked hand in hand with grandchildren, teenagers queued for rollercoasters, bluegrass drifted through the air, and everyone seemed perfectly comfortable celebrating a version of Southern culture that outsiders often reduce to caricature. By the time I returned to Knoxville I realised I hadn’t thought about football for several hours, which increasingly seemed to happen on these trips.

The city itself revolved around the University of Tennessee. Students flowed through cafés and bookstores carrying backpacks and orange sweatshirts, giving the whole place a feeling of permanent movement, as though thousands of lives were briefly intersecting before continuing elsewhere. Above the rooftops the Sunsphere still dominated the skyline, a golden reminder of the 1982 World’s Fair that somehow looked both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. Standing beneath it near sunset, I found it difficult to imagine any visitor leaving Knoxville without using it as their point of reference. Cities often reveal themselves through monuments. Knoxville seemed content to let its students do the talking instead.

Over lunch I shared a table with a student who, after hearing my accent, introduced himself before I’d managed to finish my drink. He was from England and had come to Tennessee on a university programme, drawn, he told me, by the promise of Southern hospitality and the chance to experience a version of America that films rarely bothered showing. We spoke for almost an hour about home, though neither of us was talking about the same one. Eventually football surfaced in the conversation. He explained that several players scattered across colleges and lower-division clubs had followed similar paths, crossing an ocean in pursuit of an education while hoping the game might carry them a little further. I wrote almost none of it down. Some conversations belong in notebooks; others simply settle somewhere quieter.

That afternoon I tried Petro, a Knoxville institution born during the World’s Fair, a paper bowl layered with Fritos, chili, cheese, tomatoes, green onions and sour cream that looked less like a recipe than an accident somebody wisely decided to repeat. It wasn’t elegant, but neither was it pretending to be. Football, I was beginning to think, attracted food of exactly this kind: practical, local and unapologetically tied to its surroundings.

Regal Soccer Stadium filled steadily rather than suddenly. The crowd leaned younger than those I’d seen elsewhere, with university students making up much of the noise, and the excitement surrounding the cup tie felt different from an ordinary league fixture. I couldn’t yet explain why. It wasn’t louder, exactly. More hopeful, perhaps. Conversations around me kept drifting towards who Knoxville might face if they won, and although I didn’t yet know enough about the competition to appreciate every possible opponent, I recognised the familiar optimism of people allowing themselves to imagine something just beyond reach. Sports, whatever their shape, are built on that instinct.

The match itself left me with more questions than answers. Knoxville’s wide player kept drifting into the middle of the field, abandoning what seemed to me the obvious space near the touchline, and every time he did so another teammate appeared outside him as though they had rehearsed an exchange I hadn’t been invited to understand. For long stretches I assumed they were simply losing their positions. Gradually it became clear that they were finding different ones. I still lacked the language to describe it, but I had started noticing that football often concealed its intentions until you watched the same movement three or four times.

Knoxville eventually found the only goal of the evening, and with it came a release that surprised me. It wasn’t the celebration itself so much as what followed. People immediately began talking about the next round. About MLS clubs. About possibilities that, an hour earlier, had belonged entirely to imagination. The final whistle didn’t feel like an ending at all. It felt like an invitation.

Driving west as dusk settled over the city, the Sunsphere remained visible in my rear-view mirror far longer than I expected, glowing softly above the trees before finally disappearing behind a bend in the interstate. Three days later I’d be somewhere else, chasing another match in another unfamiliar town, but Knoxville stayed with me. Perhaps it was the students who had travelled halfway across the world hoping to build lives here, or perhaps it was a football club quietly daring to believe it might one day welcome one of the country’s biggest teams to its own ground. Either way, possibility seemed to hang over the city as naturally as the evening light.