31^st October 2026

By the time October arrived I’d driven Interstate 40 often enough that I no longer thought about directions. Six months earlier every exit sign had been another unknown place name, every fuel stop another guess, every motel another anonymous room somewhere between assignments. Now I found myself measuring distance not by mileage but by habit. Asheville meant coffee. Newport meant the road would begin folding itself into the foothills. Exit 398 meant Knoxville was twenty minutes away and I could almost smell the charcoal before I reached the city.

Editors like to imagine every assignment begins with a dramatic phone call. The truth is usually less cinematic. Mine arrived on a Tuesday afternoon while I was trying to persuade my son Noah that homework should probably come before another hour throwing baseballs into the backyard fence. My editor barely bothered with introductions.

“I need you back in Knoxville.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

He paused just long enough for me to realise there was something different about the request.

“You’re not going because it’s a big game,” he said. “You’re going because I think something’s happening there.”

I knew immediately who he meant.

Tomás Villalba had now been in charge long enough that even people who had never watched Knoxville SC were beginning to argue about him online. His results remained inconsistent enough to satisfy the critics, but every week there seemed to be another clip circulating of a defender standing somewhere unusual, or a full-back wandering into midfield, or a shape that looked completely different depending on whether Knoxville had the ball. Former players called it overthinking. Younger coaches called it brave. Most supporters simply looked confused.

“I don’t need another match report,” my editor continued. “I want to know whether he’s building something or whether he’s completely lost the plot.”

That sentence stayed with me for the entire drive south. Noah asked if Coach Tomás was winning yet.

“I don’t really know,” I admitted.

It surprised me how unsatisfying that answer felt.

The highway was quieter than it had been during the summer. The endless stream of rental cars wearing World Cup parking stickers had disappeared weeks ago, replaced by pickup trucks carrying ladders, church vans and families making ordinary weekend journeys. The trees had begun changing colour somewhere around western North Carolina, the green giving way to rust and amber, and by eastern Tennessee the mountains looked softer somehow, as though the heat had finally agreed to leave them alone for a while. The radio drifted between college football previews and bluegrass without ever quite deciding which audience it preferred.

Somewhere outside Newport I realised I hadn’t opened my satnav once. Knoxville no longer felt like somewhere I visited. It felt like somewhere I knew. That frightened me a little.

Travel writing relies on distance. Journalists are supposed to arrive, observe and leave before affection clouds judgement. Yet there I was looking forward to familiar exits, already wondering whether the woman in the Chick-fil-A near Market Square still worked Saturdays, whether the volunteer with the enormous moustache would still be checking media passes, whether the old couple who always sat three rows behind the dugout would still be arguing politely about referees before kick-off.

The city announced itself without fanfare. Church steeples rose above the trees exactly where I remembered them. Neyland Stadium dominated the skyline like a permanent reminder that American football still owned this town, despite soccer’s increasingly noisy attempts to rent a room in it. Downtown seemed almost unchanged from my previous visits. Brick buildings caught the autumn sunlight, students drifted between coffee shops carrying backpacks heavier than they looked, and Market Square remained one of those rare public spaces where nobody appeared in a particular hurry to be anywhere else.

I parked, stretched my legs and walked towards Chick-fil-A. The student recognised me before I recognised him.

“You came back.”

He laughed as though neither of us had expected that sentence to become true. When we’d first met months earlier he’d been beginning his first year away from home, balancing lectures with dreams of playing football professionally one day. Now he looked older in the way college students often do after a summer. Not physically older, just more settled inside himself.

“Summer was good?” I asked.

“Back home in England for a while,” he said. “Worked construction with my uncle. Thought about transferring.”

“But?”

“But every time I came back here it started feeling like home.”

By late afternoon the light had softened into that golden Tennessee haze that seems to arrive every autumn whether anyone asks for it or not. Regal Soccer Stadium still sat modestly among warehouses and open lots, never pretending to be anything grander than it was, but there was a confidence around the place that hadn’t existed on my first visit. Families arrived carrying folding chairs they no longer needed, children kicked footballs across patches of grass before parents called them back towards the turnstiles, and volunteers greeted familiar faces by name rather than checking tickets with detached efficiency. The club still felt small enough that everyone seemed connected to everyone else, yet large enough to believe it might become something more.

Outside the stadium I found myself paying less attention to shirts and scarves than to conversations. Months earlier supporters had debated effort, commitment and referees in the broad language common to every struggling club. Now they spoke differently. One man insisted Villalba was making football unnecessarily complicated, another argued that nobody had understood what he was trying to build yet, while a third traced invisible lines across the pavement with his boot as he tried to explain why the defenders kept ending up in places defenders were never supposed to stand. None of them sounded particularly certain, but all of them were trying to describe movement rather than simply results. Without anyone really noticing, the vocabulary of the club had begun to change.

I wandered towards the coffee stand before entering the ground and caught sight of Villalba through the windows of a nearby Starbucks. He sat alone, sleeves rolled to his elbows, staring through pages of handwritten notes with a matcha latte cooling beside him. There was nothing theatrical about the scene. No headphones, no assistants, no laptop covered in tactical software. Just a coach reading, scribbling, occasionally rubbing his forehead before writing something else. It struck me that obsessive people rarely look obsessive from the outside. They simply appear calm until you realise they’ve been thinking about the same problem for six straight hours.

Even the warm-up felt unfamiliar. Players drifted into positions that seemed disconnected before suddenly joining together, splitting apart again moments later like magnets being pulled across a table. Mercer from six months earlier would have watched bodies jogging across grass without another thought. Now I caught myself following one player instead of the ball, noticing how a defender stepped into midfield before retreating again, how a winger arrived centrally before another player instinctively replaced him out wide. I couldn’t have explained why any of it mattered, but I could feel there was intention behind every repetition.

Somewhere during the opening twenty minutes I realised I was no longer watching football in the same way. The full-back is going inside again. That thought arrived almost unconsciously. Not, why is he there? Just… he’s doing it again.

The observation surprised me because it belonged to somebody else. It belonged to coaches, not reporters. Yet as Knoxville built attacks I found myself looking away from the player with the ball, watching spaces instead, noticing which ones disappeared and which ones suddenly opened. The game hadn’t changed since my first assignment in Tampa. I had.

Around me the crowd responded with growing confidence rather than confusion. They still celebrated tackles and near misses, still groaned at misplaced passes, but there was another layer beginning to emerge. A successful rotation drew applause from one section of the stand before the attack had even developed. When Knoxville escaped pressure by moving the ball through three short passes rather than launching it long, people clapped as though recognising something they’d been waiting to see. Football knowledge wasn’t replacing Southern football culture. It was quietly weaving itself into it.

After the match the evening settled over Knoxville with remarkable gentleness. The student I’d met months before waved me towards a cookout a few streets away where friends from college had gathered around smokers, folding tables and televisions showing college football highlights with the volume turned almost all the way down. Smoke drifted lazily above gardens while paper plates filled with barbecue, slaw and cornbread passed between people who seemed entirely untroubled by the fact that several conversations were happening simultaneously. Nobody asked why I was there anymore. They simply assumed I belonged.

The discussion inevitably turned towards Villalba.

Later, inside a small neighbourhood diner, the waitress topped up coffee without asking and smiled in quiet recognition.

“How’s Coach Tomás getting on?”

Not Knoxville. Not the league. Coach Tomás.

It was such a small change in language that it would have been easy to miss. Yet it revealed more about the relationship between city and club than any attendance figure or newspaper column ever could. The football team had become attached to a person. His ideas were no longer arriving from somewhere else. They were becoming part of Knoxville itself.

Driving back through the familiar darkness, the motorway felt shorter than it ever had before. The exits appeared exactly where I expected them, the service stations almost comforting in their predictability, and somewhere beyond the Tennessee state line I reached for my phone while stopped at a set of lights. For months that instinct had meant checking league tables, fixtures or the latest tournament schedule. This time I found myself searching for something else entirely.

It was not the match report, nor was it the table. Tomás Villalba’s post-match press conference; and, only after pressing play did I realise what had happened: somewhere between my first uncertain assignment and this quiet drive home, I’d stopped following a football club. I was following a man trying to build one.