When FIFA handed Atlanta eight 2026 World Cup matches including a semifinal, the decision looked from the outside like a reward for having a big new building. It was really a reward for a decade of groundwork, most of it financed by one man.
Arthur Blank, who co-founded The Home Depot before building AMB Sports and Entertainment, put roughly $1.6 billion into Mercedes-Benz Stadium and built it to FIFA specifications rather than retrofitting later. That decision, made years before a bid existed, is the reason downtown's stadium needed almost nothing done to it to host the world's tournament.
The second half of the bet was demand. Blank, whose interest in the sport was sharpened by his son Josh's involvement in it, brought Major League Soccer to Atlanta in 2017 with Atlanta United. The club now averages about 44,000 fans a match — close to double the MLS average of 22,519. That number is the argument. FIFA does not award semifinals to cities that merely have room; it awards them to cities that reliably fill the room.
Blank has described soccer as the world's "beautiful sport," and said he has watched it pull people of every background into the same space. Downtown spent the past month as the literal test of that claim, with Centennial Olympic Park's Fan Fest and the bars of South Downtown absorbing the overflow from a stadium that could only hold so many.
The investment did not stop at the stadium's edge. A $228 million U.S. Soccer National Training Center opened in Fayette County this spring, and an NWSL expansion team begins play in 2028. Outside sport, Blank has committed $200 million to establish the Arthur M. Blank Hospital and $50 million to historically Black colleges and universities over ten years, and he has signed the Giving Pledge to direct half of his roughly $11.2 billion in wealth through his family foundation.
The compounding effect for downtown is easy to miss because it happened slowly. The same building drew the 2019 Super Bowl, putting Atlanta in the small group of American cities to land both that game and a World Cup semifinal. Each event makes the next one easier to win, and each one lands on the same twelve or so blocks west of Centennial Olympic Park.
Original reporting: Atlanta Magazine (July 10, 2026)