ATLANTA (WISH) — The city of Atlanta is ready to host the biggest game in football.
The Atlanta host committee headquarters is where all the planning for the biggest night in the NFL comes together for a city that understands it’s an opportunity of a lifetime.
“Almost two years in the making from that time we start this thing up until we get to Super Bowl Sunday on Feburary 3rd,” said Brett Daniels, Chief Operating Officer of the Host Committee. “It’s been 19 years since Atlanta last hosted the Super Bowl so it’s really hard to believe that it’s been that big a gap, but this building behind me is a big reason why we’ve got the game coming back here in February.”
Daniels and his team have been working around the clock making sure Atlanta is ready for the big game, a game that reportedly had a $400 million economic impact in Minneapolis, the home of last year’s Super Bowl.
“They estimate 150,000 or more people will come into the city from out of town, only 70,000 are going to ticket to the game, so that shows you the kind of impact that this can have on the local businesses, ” said Daniels. “We estimate very conservatively our numbers more like $185 to 200 million in impact, but again we want to be very conservative and be something that is very truthful and honest and we think we’ll see after the game has left that the businesses will reap those benefits and be more excited to have this game come back in the future.”
Atlanta is used to hosting big sporting events, including the Super Bowl. This will be the third time the city has held it and all that experience puts them in prime position to be successful.
“The history of Atlanta has really, dating back to the ’96 Olympics and moving forward, is one of coming together,” Daniels said. “We’ve got a great group of volunteers working events like the Olympics, the Peachtree Road Race, The Tour Championships, The Peach Bowl every year, but then we’ve also had the great opportunity to host things like the NCAA Final Four, we hosted in January the College Football Playoff, and so it brings the different groups and agencies together, it brings our volunteers together where they have a camaraderie and a sense of teamwork of bringing these things to life.”
Super Bowl LIII will take place at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a place that seats over 70,000 and has the largest video board in the United states.
But it’s more than just the football game. 10 days of fast-paced action of activities taking place from the stadium, State Farm Arena to even Centennial Park, with most of the action right in the heart of downtown.
“The NFL has 15 key events over the course of Super Bowl week,” said Daniels. “We have 13 of those that will take place in and around the campus right here, the furthest two events we go out is about a half-mile and a mile away from here so that compact nature gets everybody down into the downtown area, hopefully they’ll use the mass transit and walk on foot so the traffic will be much less of an issue than we might see in other cities because people can walk to everything. It’s all right here, we’ve got 15-thousand hotel rooms here in the downtown area that’s a big part of that as well so you get into the downtown Atlanta area, you can just about walk anywhere you need to get.”