How Atlanta Unexpectedly Became the Epicenter of U.S. Soccer

In 2015, Sarah Kate Noftsinger considered a marketing job with Major League Soccer’s planned expansion team in Atlanta. She’ll never forget a mentor’s reaction when she told him about the opportunity.

“He literally looked at me and goes, ‘It’s career suicide that you’re going to go work, or even thinking about going to work, in soccer in Atlanta, Georgia,’” Noftsinger tells Front Office Sports. “‘What are you doing?’”

Georgia has always been a storied and active sports market, underscored by the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, frequent college championships at the Georgia Dome, and passionate SEC and ACC fandom for the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. But a decade ago, Atlanta sports were struggling at the pro level.

The city lost the Thrashers to Winnipeg in 2011, which marked the second failure for the NHL in Atlanta after the Flames moved to Calgary in 1980. In 2013, the Braves admitted they faced “real challenges” that they “didn’t believe could be overcome” at their stadium, and announced they would move out of downtown Atlanta. In June 2015, The New York Times ranked Atlanta No. 2 on its list of “The Most Cursed Sports Cities in America.” Nelson Rodríguez, MLS EVP of sporting and matchday, tells FOS he was originally a “hard no” on the idea of MLS in Atlanta because of “what pro sports wasn’t doing” there.

Noftsinger, despite her mentor’s uncertainty, still flew down for the interview. While getting lost on her way back to the airport, she drove past soccer fields with players from “every walk of life.” She says the moment inspired her to take the job with Atlanta United.

Ten years later, Noftsinger is now the club’s chief business officer, and in that time, she’s seen the striking evolution of Atlanta soccer. The city went from a total risk for pro soccer to housing one of the biggest fan bases in MLS. And the growth isn’t done. Opening the Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center in May, hosting FIFA World Cup matches this summer, and adding an NWSL team in 2028, Atlanta is now the once-unlikely heartbeat of soccer in the U.S.

Early Magic

Before Atlanta United, professional and international soccer in Atlanta consisted of friendlies at the Georgia Dome, lower-tier men’s and women’s teams called the Atlanta Silverbacks, and two stabs at a women’s team called the Atlanta Beat.

U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone played on the first iteration of the Beat in the early 2000s as part of the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association.

“I just loved everything about it,” Parlow Cone tells FOS of her time in Atlanta. “I loved that the community, and the media in the area, and the corporate community just kind of rallied around our team and made us their team, which was really special. And all the other professional teams that were in the city at the time—they’re all still there—just wrapped us in their arms and took care of us, which was uncommon at that time.”

The WUSA folded in 2003, as did the resurrected Beat’s next home in Women’s Professional Soccer, which shut down in 2012. But Atlanta was hungry for professional soccer and finally found its team in Atlanta United.

Before the franchise even launched, Noftsinger recalls in 2016 running out of T-shirts for eager fans walking with the team in local parades. She saw more than 55,000 people come to the first match in 2017 at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium, standing for the entire game. She remembers how fans stuck out long weather delays that season. “It was magic,” she says.

The sparkle has sustained: Atlanta United has led MLS in attendance in every season except 2020 since it joined the league. The team moved late in its first season to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a venue Rodríguez says “puts the ‘major’ in ‘Major League.’”

The soccer world took note and has since descended on Atlanta, which is also flush with Fortune 500 companies and has the world’s busiest airport as a gateway to the city. FIFA gave Atlanta six matches in 2025’s Club World Cup, and this summer it will host eight FIFA World Cup matches, including a semifinal. The NWSL’s impending entry is another exclamation point on Atlanta’s essential place in soccer.

Yet nothing may be more emblematic of Atlanta as the locus of American soccer than its brand-new U.S. Soccer headquarters and training center. The federation previously had offices in Chicago, while teams trained at facilities around the country. The new training center, located in the suburb of Fayetteville, brings the business and soccer side of the federation onto one campus for the first time. The 200-acre site includes 17 outdoor and two indoor fields, and a 200,000-square-foot building for the headquarters, gym, and locker rooms.

“We know, and Atlanta United has proven this, and I think it’s going to be the same with the NWSL team that comes to Atlanta—soccer just connects with so many different communities, cultures, and backgrounds, and you really feel that in Atlanta,” Parlow Cone says.

‘People Thought He Was Nuts’

Arthur Blank—the new facility’s namesake—is the godfather of the new era of Atlanta soccer.

“It all comes back to Mr. Arthur Blank,” MLS’s Rodríguez says.

The mustachioed hardware magnate from Queens, N.Y., is known for cofounding Home Depot and owning the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. But the billionaire is also a titan in the soccer world.

He brought MLS to Atlanta and soon afterward opened the widely touted Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which houses his soccer team and FIFA matches alike. He’s also behind the new NWSL franchise launching in 2028. For the training center that bears his name, Blank gave $50 million to the $250 million project and rallied Atlanta’s public and private sectors behind U.S. Soccer.

“I don’t think people would originally think of Atlanta as being a major soccer city before,” Parlow Cone says. “He’s really brought the community together, and the support of soccer in the city has just grown exponentially since I was there in the early 2000s.”

Blank wasn’t originally a big soccer guy. That all changed when his son fell in love with the sport. Josh Blank, 29, tells FOS he remembers his dad being the “pseudo-team photographer” at his own games growing up, and waking up on Saturday mornings to watch Premier League matches together.

Blank caught the bug, seeing the same opportunity as his son.

“You saw what the sport had the chance to be from a grassroots, youth-playing perspective, and really, you just needed that local team that could come and capture all of these people who loved the sport and played the sport, but they were fans of teams that were thousands of miles away,” says Josh, who played college soccer at Elon, and is now VP of executive strategy for Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment.

Blank’s vision went even wider. He said in March at the Sports Business Journal Business of Soccer conference, held at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, that “we designed this building to accommodate all FIFA standards,” and that he always wanted to own a women’s team, too.

“He wanted Atlanta to be the epicenter of soccer in North America,” Noftsinger says. “People thought he was nuts.”

Peachy Keen

Atlanta’s soccer transformation is a freight train. Before U.S. Soccer’s training center opened, another facility was already in motion.

Construction began last month to prepare for the city’s NWSL franchise, awarded to AMBSE last year. NWSL COO Sarah Jones Simmer tells FOS the league’s 2026 wave of expansion with Boston and Denver focused on bringing more team-specific stadiums into the fold, while the next one for 2028 with Atlanta and Columbus prioritized “the type of owners that are building for the future.”

An early proof of concept: In February, the still unnamed team made a seven-year, $28 million front-of-jersey deal with Aflac, touted as the highest of its kind in women’s sports history. “That’s one of those examples of the rising tide lifting all boats,” Simmer says. “They just helped to re-value that asset in the eyes of any other partner who wants to be on front-of-kit in the league.”

Atlanta is also eyeing a spot in the U.S.-led bid for the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

The city does have competition when it comes to claiming the title of the country’s preeminent soccer market. MLS club Sporting Kansas City trademarked the phrase “Soccer Capital of America,” and the Midwestern city is high on itself having built two soccer-specific stadiums, securing World Cup matches, and attracting top tournament contenders to set up World Cup base camps.

Either way, soccer is booming in Georgia’s capital, and as the sport gets engulfed by the men’s World Cup this summer, Atlanta is right in the middle of that action. The city’s eight matches mark the second-highest tally of any host city in the tournament, including two group-stage fixtures featuring tournament favorite Spain and a consequential semifinal.

“We are incredibly excited about the summer, but more so just incredibly excited about the direction of soccer for us,” Josh Blank says. “The next five years, it’s pretty incredible how much soccer we’ll have going on and how many big moments, and we’re excited to be part of the continued transformation of soccer in the United States, and are here to do whatever we can to continue elevating the sport.”