ATLANTA — While fans experience the music, matches and excitement at Atlanta’s FIFA Fan Festival, a massive operation is working around the clock behind the scenes to keep everything running safely and smoothly.
Channel 2 Action News’s Brittany Kleinpeter was given rare access inside the festival’s operations center, where organizers monitor every aspect of the event in real time.
From the control room, operators track crowd movement throughout the day, watching how many people enter and exit the festival, and identifying where fans are gathering inside the park.
Executive Producer at Solomon Group and Festival Producer Stephen Fink described the operation as “a city operating inside this park.”
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He says keeping the festival running requires a large workforce.
“An average show day, there’s over 1,500 credentialed people working... between concessions, production crews, people maintaining the gates... and that doesn’t even include police,” Fink said.
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Organizers say managing the festival is a constant balancing act, creating an energetic atmosphere while ensuring the venue remains safe for everyone attending.
In addition to monitoring attendance, crews continuously watch weather conditions and other factors that could impact operations. Attendance is tracked using the festival’s wristband system, allowing organizers to monitor crowd levels throughout the day.
Fink said the work extends far beyond the hour’s fans are inside the festival.
“This site always operates 24 hours a day in some way, and when you have multiple days back-to-back, it never stops,” he said.
Although the festival appears seamless to visitors, organizers say it took approximately three weeks to build the temporary venue before the tournament began.
Once the tournament wraps up, crews expect it will take about one week to dismantle the entire site.
For organizers, months of planning and nonstop coordination have gone into creating what many fans simply experience as a day of World Cup excitement.
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