On March 13, 2026, with the FIFA World Cup less than 100 days from kickoff, leaders from the Atlanta World Cup Host Committee, MARTA, GDOT, and regional business organizations gathered to present their preparation plans for a tournament that will bring an estimated 500,000 visitors to Georgia.
Atlanta will host eight World Cup matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium beginning June 15, including a semifinal. The logistics of moving that many people into, through, and out of downtown Atlanta — on match days and between them — requires coordination at a scale the city has not attempted since the 1996 Olympics.
Traffic and Transit
Atlanta will implement a month-long traffic management plan developed in partnership with the Georgia Department of Transportation and MARTA. The plan includes traffic signal management, ground-level officers directing drivers, and a fully staffed GDOT transportation management center.
"We'll be full of engineers, operations to execute on this playbook that we have specifically developed to handle ingress and egress," said GDOT Deputy Commissioner Andrew Heath. "Whether you're driving, walking, biking, taking MARTA, we want to make sure that you can get where you need to go in a timely way and that you do it safely."
MARTA will run additional trains during the tournament to reduce wait times. Interim CEO Jonathan Hunt also revealed a contingency plan: "We're going to be staging well over two dozen buses throughout the region. In case there's a rail event, we're able to get folks out of the train station, on a bus and on their way very, very quickly."
MARTA will also release limited-run commemorative World Cup fare cards at station ticket machines — echoing the commemorative coins the agency produced for the 1996 Olympics.
Downtown Business and Workers
Metro Atlanta Chamber CEO Katie Kirkpatrick made a point that often gets lost in major-event planning: the tournament is not just for visitors. "If anything, we're enhancing the experience for the employees, and we want that message to be received. This should be an exciting time for employers in this region to engage with their employees and find ways to bring the World Cup into their daily lives."
The emphasis on service workers and local small businesses reflects a lesson Atlanta learned during previous large-scale events: if the people who run downtown feel excluded from the event, the visitor experience suffers too.
The Fan Festival
Centennial Olympic Park will host the official FIFA Fan Festival Atlanta — a free public event featuring 40 screens showing matches, playgrounds, and food vendors. For visitors who don't have match tickets, and for locals who want to experience the World Cup atmosphere without entering Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Fan Festival will be the center of gravity in downtown Atlanta throughout the tournament.
Original reporting by Amanda Andrews, Georgia Public Broadcasting, March 13, 2026.