The people in charge of the Royal Spanish Football Federation wanted the 26 members of Spain’s national team to thrive while training so far from home between first-round games of the World Cup.
So they bought signs. So many signs. All of them in Spanish. And they installed them across the team’s practice facilities on a quiet campus in Chattanooga, Tenn.
“We want them to feel at home,” Aitor Karanka, the technical director of development for the Spanish team, said in an interview.
Some signs are emblazoned with team mottos like “Vamos España” (“Let’s Go, Spain”). Others are bedecked with motivational messages reaching two stories high. Many feature photos of the players themselves.
The World Cup is hugely important to Spain, whose backers do everything they can to boost the players’ performances. A chef cubes the players’ fruit to exact specifications. Physiotherapists mend their sore muscles. Equipment managers tend to their cleats and kits.
But as warmly as the Spanish players have been received by the Chattanooga community, they still find themselves on foreign soil for an extended period — in a city with only one tapas restaurant.
That is why Spanish officials spent a small fortune on banners, billboards and murals. The team’s base camp at Baylor School, a college preparatory school with pristine playing fields and scenic vistas of the Tennessee River, now has a touch of Madrid.
Visitors are greeted by a large mesh sign with the phrase “Selección Española de Fútbol” in gold letters. Practice fields are fenced in by vinyl banners with phrases including “Somos España, Somos Equipo” (“We are Spain, We are a team”). At the nearby indoor site, which houses high-end fitness equipment, massage tables and meeting rooms, the walls are adorned with team logos.
It’s more of the same at the downtown Embassy Suites, where the squad is staying for the month. Team-branded banners cover an eight-foot-high security fence. Larger-than-life photos of the players line the hotel’s interior. There are Spanish-language signs in the lobby and hallways.
“When you’re spending three weeks in the same room, you need to feel comfortable,” Karanka said.
The task of designing, producing and installing all that signage — a total of 57,000 square feet of material, nearly enough to cover every inch of an American football field — fell to SpeedPro Chattanooga, a family-owned company that specializes in large-format printing projects.
For SpeedPro, the outsize endeavor was a two-month sprint.
It started in early April, when the Spanish federation submitted a query through SpeedPro’s website, said Chad Mize, who owns the business with his wife, Elizabeth, and his brother, Kyle.
Days later, federation representatives paid a visit to the SpeedPro office. On a screen, they presented a 200-page PDF file that included photos of the Baylor campus and the nearby Embassy Suites. It came complete with precise measurements and the types of signage they wanted.
“‘This will be a heavy lift, but we can do it,’” Mize recalled telling the federation.
The job was SpeedPro’s largest undertaking since it opened in 2024. All 10 employees pulled 60-hour weeks for six weeks, Mize said.
“We had our printers basically running 24/7,” Mize said. “It was never, ‘We want less.’ It was always, ‘We want more.’”
They just made the deadline: Mize said he was hanging signs at the hotel at 4 a.m. on the day of the team’s arrival.
He and his wife felt a unique connection to the project. Their two daughters, Zoey and Sophia, played soccer at Baylor School, and their son, Thomas, is a rising sophomore there. All three children helped out, Mize said. The family is now invested in Spain’s success.
“We feel like we played a small part in all this,” Mize said. “We want them to do well.”
Tim Kelly, the mayor of Chattanooga, started working toward bringing a World Cup team to the area as far back as 2023, when he told Chris Angel, Baylor’s head of school, that the campus could serve as a base camp.
Kelly explained that each of the 48 teams in the tournament would need a North American training site for the month of June 2026. Kelly very much wanted Chattanooga to be in the mix, but felt that the only way to make that happen would be to enlist Baylor School, which “offers this incredible, idyllic isolation that teams in training love,” he said in an interview. After touring the campus last year, Spain was sold.
Early on, the team decided to turn it into a home away from home — which, according to Mize, meant spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on the signage.
SpeedPro’s work isn’t finished. Once Spain moves on, Mize and his colleagues will strip the banners and murals from the school and dispose of them.
By the time students arrive in late summer, there may be no sign that a World Cup favorite was ever there.
