The stadium will be located at the old Atlanta Fulton County Stadium site.
Stadiums and arenas are just pitstops for sports teams. After the Eisenhower Administration decided to expand the Atlanta airport and make it a transit hub in 1957, Atlanta elected officials and business leaders decided to go big league. How did they do that? Simple plan a stadium and go after a baseball team. Baseball was still the most popular sport in America in the late 1950s and while the National Football League existed, there were college football programs that were bigger and more “major league”. But if Atlanta could get a football franchise, that team could play in the baseball stadium. During his 1961 campaign for mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen Jr. promised to build a sports facility to attract a Major League Baseball team.
Allen did get the funding to build a stadium with groundbreaking taking place in 1964. Allen went after Major League Baseball’s Kansas City A’s owner Charlie Finley and got a deal done with Finley to move the team to Atlanta but American League owners said no to the deal. Eventually the Milwaukee Braves ownership took the Atlanta deal and moved into the stadium in 1966. Allen also reached out to both the American Football League and National Football League and landed a 1966 NFL expansion franchise. But the brand-new stadium got old in a hurry. Ther football team owners moved to a new football-only downtown stadium in 1992. The baseball team moved into the 1996 Summer Olympics stadium in 1997 and left for a suburban stadium in 2017. The old stadium was razed and became a parking lot, the Olympic stadium was downsized for Georgia State University football games. The university is now putting up a small baseball field at the old stadium site. Atlanta taxpayers have built two baseball venues, two football venues and two arenas in a pursuit to remain a major league city.
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