World Cup bid an investment in Atlanta sports future

By Leon Stafford and Doug Roberson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Now comes the hard part.

In the quest to bring the World Cup to Atlanta in 2018 or 2022, city, sports and hospitality officials have made their arguments to FIFA -- the Cup's organizing body -- loud and clear.

Georgia's capital would be the perfect host to pull off  the world's biggest sporting event because it has the infrastructure, the experience and the audience.

If a part of the games are held here, visitors could fly in to Hartsfield-Jackson International -- the world's busiest airport -- from anywhere on the globe. They would have thousands of hotel rooms to choose from. And because Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, the city has the know-how to broadcast to a worldwide audience.

And as icing on the cake, the city is hosting an exhibition soccer game at the Georgia Dome on July 28 between Manchester City and Club America, the third game in the past year at the Dome. If all goes as planned, the match could be part of an annual event dubbed the Atlanta International Soccer Challenge.

"The World Cup provides Atlanta an excellent opportunity to showcase our city to the world," says William Pate, president of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.

And it will have a significant economic impact. Leaders anticipate the event could bring in between $300 million and $600 million. Millions more could be earned if the city is chosen to be the International Broadcasting Center for the event.

But now the city must wait. And wait for a while.

Atlanta's pitch is part of a larger bid by the United States to host the 2018 or 2022 Cup. The nation will find out if it gets either on Dec. 2.

If it does, Atlanta will be one of 18 U.S. cities competing for a maximum of 12 slots. The winners will be chosen by FIFA and announced in 2013 or 2017.

But Gary Hopkins, author of the forthcoming  "Star-Spangled Soccer," which takes a look at the growth of the game in the U.S. over the past 25 years, said the wait will be worthwhile.

The audience for the sport will increase by leaps and bounds in the decades to come as America's demographics change, he said. Cities that build a solid soccer infrastructure today will reap the benefits tomorrow when it becomes a bigger piece of the nation's sports pie.

"Over the next 20 years, (soccer) is poised for exponential growth," he said. "You underestimate soccer at your own peril over the next 20 years."

Atlanta leaders are not worried. They point to the thousands of Georgians who play soccer every day in the state. They argue that the success of two sold-out exhibition matches at the Dome last summer is indicative of the strength of the game's following here.

But the city has had a checkered history with the sport.

From the Chiefs in the National Professional Soccer League in 1967 to the Atlanta Beat in Women's Professional Soccer today, many teams and leagues (remember the indoor team, the Atlanta Ruckus?) have made a go of it in the city, only to fail.

To be fair, in some cases the leagues folded before the teams did.

But there was some success. The Chiefs were actually the first to win a national league championship for the city in 1968, 27 years before the Braves won the World Series.

Now, Atlanta has been targeted as a potential expansion site for Major League Soccer.

The metro area is the largest TV market in the United States that doesn't have a team in the 17-year-old league. Falcons owner Arthur Blank had expressed interested in starting a MLS team in Atlanta, but his interest cooled as the economy soured and the need to build a new stadium for the football team increased.

However, Rich McKay, president of the Falcons, said Wednesday that the hunt for the World Cup could be enhanced if the new stadium is open-air, the team's preference.

"It will help us to attract World Cup games either in 2018 or 2022," McKay said. "The economic impact to the area would be pretty dramatic. We think open air definitely helps that bid process."

Gary Stokan, head of the Chick-fil-A Bowl and chairman of the local organizing committee, said we have the ingredients needed to field a team: a population of more than 5 million in addition to over 100,000 people playing in leagues run by the Georgia State Soccer Association.

"The demographics are here, they will continue to grow. The media is here, The sponsorship is here, the volunteers are here, the leadership is here," Stokan said. "I don't see a lot of weaknesses with Atlanta hosting the World Cup or becoming a soccer hotbed in the next 10 years."

Unlike the previous soccer leagues that went belly up, MLS seems to have a bright future. The MLS uses a unique single-entity ownership system in which the league owns the rights to all the players, therefore it reaps most of the benefits when players are sold to leagues at a profit to teams in Europe.

Some teams in the league, specifically those that play in soccer-specific stadiums, have started to turn a corner financially. Attendance has also increased, averaging 16,200 fans in 56 matches this season. The NHL averaged 17,475 fans in 1,230 games during the 2008-09 season, and the NBA averaged 17,520 for the same amount of games during the same season.

But having an MLS team isn't one of the necessary ingredients to hosting any part of the World Cup. Atlanta's past experience may be the biggest key. Luring the World Cup is different than previous events Atlanta has hosted, including the Super Bowl in 1994 and 2000, the Final Four in 2007 and again 2013, and All-Star games for Major League Baseball (2000), the NBA (2003) and NHL (2008).

Atlanta has bid on three separate components of the World Cup: a venue site for between 4-6 games, the International Broadcast Center, and the FIFA Congress. Should FIFA select any or all three, it requires a month-long commitment. Super Bowls and All-Star games require no more than a week in most cases. In that respect, Stokan said the closest equivalent that Atlanta has experienced would be the 1996 Summer Olympics, which lasted for a month.

The economic impact would be significantly more than anything other than the Olympics. Should Atlanta be selected to host all three of its bid, it could mean more than $600 million to the city. The Olympics had an economic impact of $5.1 billion in 1996 dollars, which, includes the multipliers that factor into the equation.

But it goes beyond dollars, it goes to reputation. As Stokan points out, in the U.S. only Los Angeles has hosted the same marquee sporting events as Atlanta.

"Securing the FIFA World Cup would be an enormous and significant win for this city," Atlanta Sports Council Executive Director Dan Corso said. "For one, we've been fortunate to have hosted every other major sporting event, beginning with the Centennial Olympic Games in 1996. And beyond the economic impact, the national and international visibility for Atlanta would be hard to match."

D. Orlando Ledbetter contributed to this story.