Is the Club World Cup a dry run for World Cup? Sort of.

“It’s going to be a little bit of a test case for the World Cup, and it’s honestly not really a great comparison, because there’s nothing like the World Cup,” Atlanta Sports Council President Dan Corso said Wednesday at an event to note that the 48-team tournament would start in one year.

Hosting important sports events is the city’s forte.

Atlanta and the metro area have hosted an Olympics; Super Bowls; college football national championship games; SEC championship games; HBCU national football championship games; an NBA All-Star game; World Series games; an MLS Cup game; a U.S. Open Cups; Final Fours; and later this summer will host the MLB All-Star game.

So hosting World Cup matches isn’t been there, done that but city of Atlanta, Metro Atlanta Chamber, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta Police Department, MARTA, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the Atlanta Sports Council aren’t rookies, either.

“We are a big event city,” Corso said.

The closest comparison the city and stadium will have for the Club World Cup, and the World Cup, might be when it hosts a slate of football games in December, starting with the SEC championship and then continuing with the Celebration Bowl, Peach Bowl and College Football Playoff.

The Club World Cup will feature six matches from Monday until it hosts a quarterfinal July 5. Next year’s eight World Cup matches will start June 15 and end with a semifinal July 15.

“Having that cadence of match day and then kind of resetting over the next two days, match-day resetting. We’re pretty good at that here,” said Adam Fullerton, the stadium’s vice president of operations. “That’s what we do.”

The scale of hosting the Club World Cup will be smaller than the World Cup, but because it is the same sport — and should feature a cosmopolitan group of ticket-buyers and curious watchers — it will offer some good tests for the stakeholders.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium, for example, installed grass, using a different process than it has used in past matches. The process was a collaborative effort between the stadium and FIFA to find the smoothest, cleanest surface to have the best playability.

But it also exemplifies the difference between hosting the Club World Cup and World Cup.

There will be the standard corporate logos around Mercedes-Benz Stadium during the Club World Cup. Next summer, there will be no logos. More than 2,000 pieces of signage will be covered. It will be a “clean” building, as described by Dietmar Exler, chief operating officer of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Even the logo on the roof will be covered. A film will be placed on top the three-pointed logo. It might look like a soccer ball.

And, depending upon how it plays and looks, the grass might be the same next year as this year, but the process will be much more intensive. All of the floor at the stadium, even the asphalt subfloor, will be ripped out so there will be a true root system for the grass in the stadium. That destruction/construction will start as soon as the Falcons’ season ends.

Ironically, it can be argued that the quality of the soccer during the Club World Cup, at least in the early matches, might be better than in the early stages of the World Cup. Most of the club teams participating are either in their seasons or just finished their season. They have chemistry. They have confidence. They are in shape.

The World Cup will feature teams whose players who might not know each other as well because they don’t play together as frequently. The U.S. recent results are an example of what can happen.

So, while it won’t be the same as the World Cup, hosting the Club World Cup will offer a glimpse of what will come next summer.

Sort of.

“It is international soccer,” Fullerton said. “Anytime we do an international soccer event here at the stadium, we get good reps, and we learn, we learn quite a bit about that crowd and that dynamic of play. So from that regard, from a true soccer perspective, it is a good test for us.

“We’ll get to do this on the same kind of cadence, a match every three days on natural grass in the building. That’s something we’ll do next summer. So you can’t say that we’re not getting good reps out of this one this summer, but they are two very different events.”