The Atlanta Press Club continued its Newsmaker Leadership series with a look at the business of sports in the city, Atlanta’s expanding athletics industry and tangible community impacts at a March 27 panel of sports leaders in the region.
Moderated by longtime Atlanta sports journalist Jeff Schultz, the City of Atlanta’s Chief Operating Officer Lisa Benjamin, Atlanta Sports Council President Dan Corso, Coca-Cola’s Vice President of Global Sports and Entertainment Marketing and Partnerships Brad Ross and AMB Sports and Entertainment President Tim Zulawski, joined the hour-long panel discussion.
Atlanta’s sports identity has expanded recently, after the city was picked as a host city for eight games of the 2026 Fifa World Cup, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium was chosen for the 2025 College Football Playoff National Championship. U.S. Soccer also selected a site in Trilith to host the National Training Center.
But its roster of professional teams is expanding beyond football, soccer and baseball. In 2024 the Pro Volleyball Federation launched as a professional women’s volleyball league aimed at “viability, quality and fairness” for players. One of the first teams for the league is the Atlanta Vibe, based at Gas South Arena in Duluth.
Coca-Cola’s Ross said the growth of women’s sports hasn’t been an overnight development, but it “reached a point now where it’s getting noticed as it should be.”
The 14-person team will play 12 home matches and 12 away matches, fitting into traditional league operations. Ross said prioritizing women’s sports is not only the “right thing to do” but a natural step as the existing professional leagues lose ubiquity in favor of emerging sports and women’s divisions.
But Benjamin said women in professional sports have to “start at a young age” with community opportunities in the city. She said programs like Atlanta’s Midnight Basketball league with seven women’s teams make sports accessible to young people from different background.
“I think it’s very important, but I think it has to start at a young age, and usually a lot of the professional athletes, they started really young, and they had that pedigree and training and coaching,” Benjamin said.
Not every expansion is a guarantee, though. Plans to bring a National Hockey League team to Atlanta for a third time are unlikely, according to Atlanta Sports Council leader Dan Corso. The city hasn’t had an NHL team since the Atlanta Thrashers were relocated to Canada in 2011. Prior to the Thrashers, the Atlanta Flames were also relocated to Canada in 1980.
The Alpharetta Sports and Entertainment Group formally requested in March that the league start with an expansion process to bring a new franchise to Metro Atlanta, but the NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said he has no plan to expand the league.
“It’s going to come down to getting someone to build an arena for a billion dollars,” Corso said. “And it’s going to come down to getting someone to build a team for a billion dollars. Those are some massive obstacles.”
Atlanta sports leaders are looking at the impacts of existing franchises, too. The Falcons football team has recruited veteran quarterback Kirk Cousins for a four-year contract worth $180 million in a move to add stability to the team.
As head of AMB Sports and Entertainment, the company that owns the NFL Falcons, Atlanta United and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Zulawski said his priority is “listening and responding to fans” when making decisions for the team and venue.
That also reverberates through the economic and social impacts sports have on the community. While private entities, stadiums and sports teams function heavily in the public space through various partnerships.
“Partnerships, especially public and private partnerships, are about economic development and an investment in your city and infrastructure that has an economic benefit beyond that initial investment,” Benjamin said.
The Atlanta operations officer said stadium visitors bring a “significant amount of economic development to the city” and that leadership is actively looking at infrastructure.
Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, Atlanta will see major developments to prepare for an influx of tourists and attendees. On March 25, project leaders of Centennial Yards in downtown Atlanta announced plans for an eight-acre mixed-use entertainment hub with a hotel, retail, food and entertainment space.
The project is in its first phase now, and developers hope to complete two-thirds of the major hub in time for the 2026 World Cup matches. Improvements to Northside Drive, the street alongside Mercedes-Benz Stadium with faded crosswalk markers and flooding issues were not mentioned.
Benjamin said that while economic development is important, she wants to ensure that the opportunities reach the community and local businesses.
“We are hosting the event, the event’s not happening to us, it’s happening with us and for us,” Benjamin said.
As a stadium and sports team head, Zulawski said he will work with state and Metro Atlanta chambers of commerce to “show off this great state” so people return home knowing why they should do business in Georgia.
Corso said major sporting events and developments like the World Cup bring economic benefit, but that the mix of financial and social impacts are what “become the fabric of the community.”
“You get tourism, you get visitation and you get media exposure and the broadcast exposure for the region,” Corso said. “There’s a way to tell the story of Metro Atlanta, and in some cases, depending on the event, the story of the state of Georgia.”
Informative and well written.