The Man Who Saw It Coming: Ted Turner and the Soccer Story Nobody Is Telling Today
- Jason Longshore
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
Ted Turner died today at 87, and the obituaries are writing themselves. CNN founder. Braves owner. Superstation pioneer. America's Cup winner. The man who put Atlanta on the world map before Atlanta knew it belonged there. All of it is true, and all of it deserves to be said.
But there is a chapter in Turner's relationship with this city and with this sport that is not making it into those obituaries, and it is one that soccer people in Atlanta should know. Because before Arthur Blank, before Mercedes-Benz Stadium, before the Five Stripes turned this city into one of the great soccer markets in the world, Ted Turner wrote a check for $1.5 million to bring professional soccer back to Atlanta. He did it quietly, he did it strategically, and he did it because he understood something about soccer as a television property that the rest of American sports media would not catch up to for another four decades.
He was not a soccer romantic. He was something more useful than that. He was right.
To understand why Turner invested in soccer, you have to understand how Turner thought about sports. He did not buy the Atlanta Braves in 1976 because he loved baseball, though he came to love it. He bought the Braves because he needed programming for his fledgling UHF television station, WTCG Channel 17, and live sports was the most reliable content a local station could put on the air. He bought the Atlanta Hawks the following year for the same reason. Sports were not a hobby for Turner. They were inventory.
By 1978, WTCG had become a superstation, its signal beamed via satellite into cable homes across the country. The Braves were on television in Nebraska, in Montana, in places that had never had a reason to care about an Atlanta baseball team before Turner gave them one. He had proven, more convincingly than anyone in American media at the time, that sports plus cable plus satellite equaled national reach. The only question was which sports, and how many.
That same year, one of Turner's advisors, Michael Gearon, recommended soccer to him. Gearon's pitch was direct: soccer was a great television property, especially internationally. Turner had already begun thinking about what his superstation could become on a global stage. A sport that the entire world already watched, available for a fraction of what baseball and football rights cost, was exactly the kind of underleveraged asset Turner had built his career identifying. He and his associates quietly began inquiring about NASL franchises. They looked at Memphis. They looked at Toronto and Buffalo. Then they found the Colorado Caribous.
The Caribous were a mess. They had finished last in their division in their only NASL season in Denver, drawing fewer than 5,000 fans per game in a 40,000-seat stadium. Their ownership group, split between Washington State businessman Booth Gardner and rock music impresario Jim Guercio, had fractured. The franchise was available, and it was cheap relative to what NASL teams were fetching at the peak of the league's boom years.
Turner's associates, Dick Cecil and Al Thornwell, both connected to the Braves organization, moved quickly. By early August 1978, they were in Denver meeting with Caribous officials. Cecil confirmed preliminary discussions. Turner, when asked by the Atlanta Constitution whether he was involved, offered a response that was pure deflection: "Don't I have enough trouble with ownership of two teams? Soccer? Why would I want a soccer team? My best answer is from that song 'Old Man River': I don't hear nothing, I don't see nothing, I just keep on rolling along."
He was already writing the check.
On August 28, 1978, the NASL Board of Directors voted 22-2 to block the sale. The reason had nothing to do with Cecil or Thornwell's fitness as owners. The league had discovered that the new Atlanta franchise intended to broadcast its games on Turner's superstation, which reached cable homes across the country. The NASL was in the middle of negotiating a deal with ABC worth $1.5 million in rights fees. They were terrified that Turner's cable footprint would undermine their leverage with the broadcast networks. One owner reportedly jumped to his feet at the meeting and shouted, "You mean the Atlanta team will be telecast to Lincoln, Nebraska?"
The irony is almost too neat. The same owners who were desperate for their sport to reach a national audience voted nearly unanimously to block the one man in American media who had actually figured out how to build a national audience for a sports property nobody else cared about.
Thornwell and Cecil went back to work. They brought a Turner Communications cable expert to Chicago to explain to the other NASL owners how satellite television actually worked and why it was an asset rather than a threat to their broadcast ambitions. Meanwhile, their attorneys at Troutman, Sanders, Lockerman & Ashmore were drafting the paperwork that made Turner's role entirely explicit. A letter sent to the NASL Executive Committee on September 27, 1978, one week before the second vote, laid out the legal structure without ambiguity. The franchise would be held by "Atlanta Professional Soccer, Ltd., a partnership composed of Atlanta Professional Soccer, Inc., General Partner, and Turner Communications Corporation, Limited Partner." Thornwell held 80% of the general partner entity. Cecil held 20%. Turner Communications, the letter noted, "is publicly held and is controlled by R.E. Turner." And then, in plain legal language, the letter committed Turner's company to funding the partnership's losses on a current basis for three years.
The letter exists today in Dick Cecil's business papers, archived at Emory University. It is not ambiguous about what the Chiefs were or who was behind them.
On October 3, 1978, the NASL Board voted again. This time the approval was unanimous. The Colorado Caribous were coming to Atlanta to become the second incarnation of the Atlanta Chiefs, with Cecil as president and Thornwell as chairman.
The stadium arrangement itself was already being formalized at the same moment. Four days before the first NASL vote, Cecil had written to the league's own general counsel, Steve Brenner, explaining the lease terms: the Chiefs would pay $3,000 per game or 10% of gate receipts, whichever was greater, with all operational costs on top. Cecil signed the letter as President of Braves Productions, Inc., the Braves subsidiary that controlled the stadium's non-baseball bookings. A $2 million letter of credit had been issued in Thornwell's name the following day. The machinery of the deal was fully in motion before the league cast a single vote against it.
Publicly, Thornwell described Turner as nothing more than "our landlord," the man who controlled Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium through his ownership of the Braves. That characterization lasted exactly six weeks. On November 7, 1978, Turner Communications Corporation released its financial report. Buried in the document was a paragraph confirming that the company had advanced $1.5 million to assist with the acquisition and had received a limited partnership interest in the renamed Atlanta Chiefs in return. The stated reason was explicit: the investment would provide "additional live professional sports programming for WTCG."
Thornwell's response when reporters called was almost breezy. "Turner is our limited, and the only, partner in the arrangement. We just didn't feel that it was newsworthy or pertinent."
Of course, the lawyers had already told the NASL the whole story five weeks earlier. Turner had been the architect of the deal from the beginning. He had simply chosen, in the most Turner fashion imaginable, to let everyone else announce it for him.
Terry Hanson was hired to be the television voice of the new Chiefs, working alongside play-by-play man Bob Neal, who was already a familiar presence on Turner's broadcasts. Hanson recalled the arrangement plainly in a 2018 podcast conversation on the Soccer Down Here network. "I was smart enough to figure out then, as the Braves have been, that they're part of a television company," Hanson said. "And even though we had a sports team, it was a television company that was writing the checks, and it was Ted's idea to get soccer for programming purposes."
Hanson had also taken on a front office role, serving first as director of operations and eventually as general manager, a dual responsibility that created obvious tensions when the team struggled on the field. But he understood the hierarchy clearly. The broadcast came first. "Ted never really cared about the attendance," Hanson said. "He was more worried about what the TV numbers were."
Cecil had secured a five-year deal with WTCG for television rights. Road games aired on the superstation, reaching cable subscribers across the country who may never have watched a soccer match before. The Chiefs drew modestly, averaging around 7,350 per game in 1979 in a stadium built for baseball, with all the atmosphere that implied. The indoor version of the team, playing at the Omni during the NASL's experimental winter season, was a genuine success, leading the league in attendance and posting the best record in the NASL indoors in the 1979-80 season. But the outdoor television numbers were not moving.
By 1981, with the Chiefs enjoying their best outdoor season, winning their division and reaching the playoffs, Turner was already signaling that the experiment was ending. His quote to a UPI reporter that summer, that the club had "one foot on the expressway and the other on a banana peel," carried the tone of a man preparing an exit. When Hanson pushed internally for the team to move to a smaller stadium, where a crowd of 13,000 would feel like a sellout rather than a footnote in a 60,000-seat bowl, Turner's response was telling. "He just wanted television, brother," Hanson recalled. "He just wanted television."
One of the last home matches of the franchise's existence, played at DeKalb Memorial Stadium in the last weeks of the 1981 season, drew over 14,000 people and provided exactly the atmosphere Hanson had been arguing for all along. It was too late. The television numbers had never justified the investment, and Turner's cable empire had more urgent claims on its capital. CNN had launched in 1980. CNN Headline News was coming. The Chiefs folded on August 28, 1981, three years to the day after the NASL had first voted to block their existence. Total losses over three seasons came to somewhere between $5.5 and $7 million.
It is worth noting that Turner's exit, while painful, was also well-timed in ways that only became clear in hindsight. The NASL itself was already in serious trouble by 1981, hemorrhaging franchises and money across the league. Cecil and Robert Wussler, who had become chairman of the board, attended NASL meetings that year and came away frustrated that other owners refused to address runaway spending. The league that had voted 22-2 against Turner's cable vision in 1978 folded entirely in 1984, just three years after the Chiefs played their last match. Turner did not walk away from a thriving enterprise. He read a sinking ship correctly, at the same moment his cable investments were demanding everything he had. The capital that might have kept the Chiefs alive went instead toward building the most significant news organization in television history. It is difficult, in retrospect, to argue he made the wrong call.
Here is the thing about Ted Turner being wrong about the Chiefs: he was not wrong about soccer.
In 1990, Turner Broadcasting paid $7.5 million for the exclusive U.S. rights to the World Cup in Italy. TNT carried 24 telecasts. Bob Neal, the same broadcaster Hanson had taught the game of soccer while calling Chiefs matches on WTCG eleven years earlier, was on the call. The rights fee Turner paid for that single tournament was roughly equal to the total losses on the Chiefs over three seasons.
In the mid-1990s, after the 1994 World Cup had shown American audiences what the sport could look like at full scale, Turner Sports president Harvey Schiller pitched Turner on buying Arsenal FC using TBS stock. Dick Cheatham, the former group controller of TBS, recalled the episode on a podcast years later. The deal did not happen, undone by questions about the liquidity of TBS stock ahead of the Time Warner merger. But the instinct was the same one Turner had acted on in 1978. Soccer was a global content asset, and the man who owned the platform should own the sport.
Turner kept coming back to soccer because his original read of it was correct. The sport he invested in before the market was ready is now one of the most competed-over rights packages in global media. Premier League rights, Champions League rights, World Cup rights, MLS rights: the property Turner tried to put on a superstation in 1979 has become exactly what Gearon told him it would be when he first made the pitch.
There is one more thread worth pulling, and it is less about soccer specifically than about what Turner built in Atlanta and what that made possible. CNN did not just create a 24-hour news network. It made Atlanta a dateline. It turned a Southern regional city into a place the world looked at every day. When Billy Payne and Andrew Young went to the IOC to make the case for Atlanta hosting the 1996 Olympic Games, they were making a case for a city that Ted Turner had spent two decades making legible to the world. The line from CNN to the Olympics to the international city that could support a world-class soccer club is not straight, but it is real.
The Atlanta that fell in love with Atlanta United in 2017 was not the same Atlanta that rattled around in a half-empty stadium watching the Chiefs in 1979. Turner was one of the people who changed it.
Terry Hanson, reflecting on all of it in that 2018 conversation, laughed about what the Chiefs had actually accomplished. "I like to tell people that was part of our thirty-seven year plan," he said, "to have it be as successful as it is now."
The thirty-seven year plan has kept paying out since Hanson said that.
Ted Turner understood sport in the way that only people who have genuinely competed understand it. He raced sailboats at the highest level and won the America's Cup. He created the Goodwill Games not just as a programming vehicle but because he believed in the power of athletic competition to bridge things that politics could not. He bought the Braves and the Hawks and sat in the stands and felt what a crowd felt. He was not a man who saw sports as product alone. He saw them as one of the few forces in human life capable of making strangers feel like they belong to something together.
Soccer, to Turner, carried all of that potential and more. It was the one sport the entire world already shared. He saw its value as a television property, yes, but that was inseparable from his understanding of what the sport meant to the people who loved it. You do not write a $1.5 million check in 1978, navigate a hostile league vote, absorb three years of losses, and pay $7.5 million for World Cup rights twelve years later purely out of cold programming logic. You do those things because you believe the sport is worth it.
This summer, the FIFA World Cup comes to Atlanta. Matches will be played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in a city the world now knows in large part because of what Ted Turner built here. The broadcasts will reach a global audience measured in the billions. The rights fees paid for this tournament dwarf anything Turner spent on soccer in his lifetime. And the Atlanta that will host those matches, international, ambitious, soccer-mad in a way that would have seemed like fantasy when the Chiefs were rattling around in a half-empty stadium in 1979, is a city that Turner did as much as anyone to create.
Atlanta's soccer story did not start with Arthur Blank's checkbook or the announcement of an MLS expansion team or a sold-out night at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. It started in a lot of places, over a lot of years, with a lot of people who planted seeds in ground they would never see bloom. Ted Turner was one of them, and today, as the tributes pour in for everything he built, it is worth knowing that soccer was part of what he was reaching for too.
He would have loved this summer. He would have loved every minute of it.