ATLANTA — What goes up, must come down. But what went down in downtown Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park will be long remembered.
For more than a month, the FIFA Fan Fest was the place to be for the World Cup in Atlanta.
“I think we have to give ourselves an ‘A Plus!’ We are so thrilled and excited with the outcome!” Chincie Mouton, Director of Sports Engagement and Community Impact at George World Congress Center, told Channel 2’S Berndt Petersen, adding that the FIFA Fan Festival in Atlanta broke several records for attendance.
While the hosts say events at Centennial Olympic Park were among the most successful in the park’s history, 19 days of fan festivals and hundreds of thousands visiting means it’ll take a lot of work to reset and clean up after.
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Inside the Gates, crews are still taking apart and packing up the operation’s equipment and more.
The Georgia World Congress Center has already crunched the numbers and said the total Fan Fest attendance was more than 500,000 people.
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On Thursday, crews worked to take apart and remove all of the buildings and attractions put up in the park for Atlanta’s FIFA Fan Festival.
Mouton says this Fan Festival broke all the records. Over the course of the last month of televised soccer matches and live concerts, there was a grand total attendance of more than half-a-million.
Fans who attended the matches said the Atlanta festivities were “off the charts.”
Many of them came all the way from Argentina.
“We don’t have anything like that!” Diego Glikman, visiting from Argentina, told Channel 2 Action News. “The World Cup should be in the coming years in the U.S. again.”
As for what it was like in Atlanta?
FIFA leaders said the way everything went was strongly positive.
“FIFA has let us know that they are so thrilled with our attendance,” Mouton said. “The strongest attendance out of all the host cities in America. So we’re excited and happy to brag on that.”
Organizers told Petersen that it’s going to take between five and seven days to finish breaking everything down, then another round of replacing sod with flowers and other restoration work to put Centennial Olympic Park back to normal.
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