Atlanta brings a key advantage to the bidding to host the Super Bowl in 2019 or 2020 — a new stadium — but will have to stave off three competitors that have hosted the NFL’s prized event a combined 24 times.
The NFL, at league meetings in San Francisco this week, named Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans and Tampa, Fla., the “finalists” to bid for the next two available Super Bowls. A year-long bid process is expected to culminate in May 2016 with the NFL’s 32 owners voting on which two cities will get the games.
The league also left open the option of adding Los Angeles to the mix for the 2020 game if the city regains an NFL team, an increasingly likely prospect.
Many observers consider Atlanta a favorite for the 2019 game because of NFL owners’ track record of awarding Super Bowls to new stadiums built in part with taxpayer money. But Miami, New Orleans and Tampa historically have been among the league’s favorite Super Bowl sites, largely because of their January and February weather and tourism appeal.
Miami and New Orleans have hosted the Super Bowl more often than any other city, 10 times apiece, while Tampa has hosted it four times. Those three cities have hosted almost half of the 49 Super Bowls played to date.
Atlanta has hosted the event twice: 1994 and 2000 in the Georgia Dome.
“Atlanta is one of the most vibrant and progressive cities in America,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank said in a statement kicking off the 2019-20 bid process. “We are thrilled to once again be part of the process to potentially show off our great city and host the world’s greatest sporting event.”
The 2000 event here was marred by an ice storm, which contributed to Atlanta failing in subsequent bids for the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowls. Atlanta lost those bids to Tampa and Miami, respectively.
However, new stadiums have seemed to trump all other factors in NFL owners’ recent votes on Super Bowl sites.
The league will play the 2016 game in the San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., and the 2018 game in the Minnesota Vikings’ stadium now under construction in Minneapolis. In both cases, the games were awarded to the stadiums the first season they were eligible.
The February 2019 game is the first Super Bowl that the new Falcons stadium — slated to open in 2017 — would be eligible to host because of an NFL requirement that a venue be operational for two regular seasons before staging the mega-event.
Blank has long made it known that he wants to bring the 2019 game to the retractable-roof stadium, and that year remains the city’s preference. But Atlanta will bid for both 2019 and 2020, Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay said, hoping to land either one.
Atlanta is the only bidder that will have a new stadium as part of its pitch, at least for the 2019 game. (For Los Angeles to join the 2020 bidding, it would need firm plans in place to have a new stadium open by the 2018 season.) The Miami Dolphins will build their bid around a $400 million renovation of 28-year-old Sun Life Stadium. New Orleans’ Superdome and Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium are 40 and 17 years old, respectively.
New Orleans is well aware of the difficulty of bidding against a new stadium, having lost an owners’ vote last year to Minneapolis for the 2018 Super Bowl.
“The NFL has told us it’s an open and competitive process,” Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation CEO Jay Cicero told The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune this week. “But given what happened last year, you have to feel Atlanta certainly has an advantage for 2019. So we are taking everything into account so hopefully we will be in position to win one of the two years.”
About the Author
