From Tennessee boarding schools to rural West Virginia: The unlikely homes of World Cup teams

Perched precariously on a fence for over three hours, eight-year-old Beckham clutched a handwritten note, his gaze fixed on the horizon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, awaiting the arrival of Spain’s national football team. Addressed to stars Pedri and Lamine Yamal, his message read: "I love you and I look up to you. Thanks for coming to my city.

I hope you win the World Cup." As the players finally emerged onto the field, his eyes grew wide. "Dad," he whispered to his father, "they’re real."

This profound moment was equally moving for his father, Jaxon McClure, a Marine Corps veteran. Mr. McClure, who grew up in Chattanooga playing soccer with makeshift goalposts fashioned from trash cans, now dedicates his time to coaching hundreds of local children.

He even named his first son after the legendary David Beckham, underscoring the sport's deep roots in their family.Around 25,000 people entered a lottery for 1,000 tickets to watch Spain practice at Baylor School (AP Photo/George Walker IV)This summer — 32 years since the United States first hosted the world's biggest sporting competition — Chattanooga is among several cities established as World Cup 2026 base camps, where visiting teams live and train between matches. Spain, which is among the favorites to win the tournament, has set up camp at a boarding school on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga; Iraq is in a mountain resort town in West Virginia with fewer than 3,000 residents; and Germany is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where cobblestone streets and tobacco warehouses share space with German flags and television crews.

Southern hospitality on displayA 144-foot (44-meter) underground waterfall beneath Lookout Mountain is lit up red and the Embassy Suites in downtown Chattanooga, where the Spanish team is staying, is adorned with Spain's red and yellow flag, known as la Rojigualda. Giant banners featuring Spanish players and declaring, “Bienvenidos a Chattanooga” greeted La Roja as the teamarrived at Chattanooga Airport.Native Chattanoogan Skip Schwartz said so many people are wearing Spanish jerseys that “you don't know if they’re from Spain, hoping to get a glimpse, or they are locals who have bought into the La Roja bandwagon.”

Around 25,000 people entered a lottery for 1,000 tickets to watch Spain practice at Baylor School, a 600-acre (240-hectare) private academy for students grade 6 through 12. Meanwhile, tickets to watch Germany practice at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem sold out in four minutes.“It’s just fun to see everyone start to care about something they didn’t care about before,” said Savannah Lahey, who manages soccer bar Small Batch Beer Co.

in downtown Winston-Salem. The bar has extended its hours for watch parties and created a German-inspired menu featuring schnitzel sandwiches and sauerbraten for Germany’s opening match.“It’s getting to make people feel at home, even when they’re not at home,” Lahey said.

At the Greenbrier in West Virginia, a historic resort that has hosted presidents and foreign leaders, Iraqi flags flew alongside the Stars and Stripes as the national team arrived for its World Cup training camp.Baylor provides outstanding soccer facilitiesTeams chose from FIFA-approved base camps across North America, with higher-ranked nations getting the earliest picks. Spain selected Chattanooga over larger cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, then worked with Baylor to create an expansive headquarters around its training fields and media facilities.

FIFA inspectors graded Baylor's facilities, including the condition of the grass and its drainage and irrigation systems, the school's operations and systems director Sam Green said. To preserve the pitches for Spain, Baylor’s players trained this spring on artificial turf, a sacrifice Green said seniors accepted without complaint.Hidden behind a tree line, two grass pitches form the center of Spain's daily training.

The airport and their downtown hotel are minutes away and Atlanta, where Spain will play two group-stage matches, is within easy reach. After Spain’s first official practice, players headed straight to the campus pool, where they reportedly swam and laid out and had a good time before returning to training.For Schwartz, who now serves on Baylor's board of trustees, Spain's choice is meaningful because he and his teammates helped to lay Bermuda sod for their new soccer field when he played soccer at Baylor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That field has since been replaced by an indoor tennis facility, which serves as Spain’s media center, but the school now has three soccer pitches and one of the region’s premier soccer programs.“If somebody had told me then that 40 years later Spain would be using this campus as the foundation for a World Cup, I wouldn’t even have tried to fathom it,” he said.‘Without a doubt, I’m cheering for Spain'Tina Ankar, a first-generation Palestinian American, said she became a soccer fan because of the World Cup and her boyfriend,