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I am very big on WordPress, after reading the title I was hoping I would be able to just hand you an answer after I read the full details of your requirements... But as it turns out, in all my years of playing around with WordPress I am yet to see a plugin that will optimize your tag pages that way. My suggestion would be that you hire a decent WordPress dev from codecanyon to help you with a custom plugin for this. Other than that, this plugin is not currently available on the market in either paid or open source version. You have to make your own. PS- I am guessing you saw something similar on a bigger soccer website somewhere? Goodluck getting your plugin!

It sounds like you may already know this, but other people reading this post for advice may not.  Don't forget to make sure Google didn't take any manual actions against the website when it was compromised. You can do by checking Google WMT under "Search Traffic" -> "Manual Actions". If Google did impose a manual action you will need to submit a reconsideration request to Google. These requests can take 2-3 weeks to process. I hope that helps!

One other thing I would say is we have a managed server which was getting a little long in the tooth (old) so we upgraded to a new server. The Speed of delivery went up 10 fold and so did the Google rankings.

Which I totally knew the entire time, I just wanted to show off their awesome website. (Runs and hides in corner) That makes sense, we'll implement the 301 redirect. We imported over 2500 pages for this project and we did a 310 redirect for each one. I guess one more won't hurt

You can pull the meta descriptions with Screaming Frog from the Wayback Machine if your site is archived. If you want to do this, let me know and I'll help you with the settings.

At this point we have discontinued all content marketing programs, at least the kind you are talking about.  We still create squidoo lenses, do social bookmarking, etc. but even those practices are becoming more obsolete. The best link building blogs in my opinion belong to Ross Hudgens and Jon Cooper (PointBlankSEO). Read their posts, use what you can, and I wish you the best of luck!