Few people are better positioned to grade Atlanta's World Cup than AJ Robinson. As president of Downtown Atlanta Inc. — the organization formerly known as Central Atlanta Progress — he has spent decades stewarding the neighborhood that just hosted the world. Writing in the AJC's opinion pages, he laid out six reasons the tournament succeeded, viewed from the sidewalks of downtown.
His first three are about identity and hardware. The diversity of visitors settled any argument about whether Atlanta is a genuinely international city, with Southern hospitality proving very real to people experiencing it for the first time. Big events, he notes, generate a civic pride that radiated far beyond downtown — watch parties bloomed across the entire metro. And Mercedes-Benz Stadium, still under 10 years old, drew rave reviews from players and ticket buyers alike.
The next three are about geography and muscle memory. Atlanta's big-event infrastructure — hotels, parks, attractions, venues and the airport, all stitched together by MARTA — is more walkable and compact than competing cities, an advantage Robinson argues is chronically underrated. The tournament introduced visitors to brand-new downtown assets like Cosm at Centennial Yards and Founders Green in South Downtown while sending them back through rediscovered ones: Centennial Olympic Park, The CTR and Underground Atlanta. He also notes a distinction no other host city could claim — a soccer exhibit paired with a human rights exhibition at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Finally, there is the track record itself: Atlanta knows how to collaborate its way through events of this scale, and just added the biggest line yet to its resume.
The heart of the piece, though, is its candor about what downtown has been through. The district was hit hard by the COVID years and is still dusting itself off, Robinson writes — it needed this boost. His bet is that the World Cup will launch a generation of downtown growth the way the 1996 Olympics once did, and his invitation to residents is simple: do not wait for the next mega-event to come downtown and feel proud of it.
Original reporting: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2026-07-26)