Mercer Athletics and Macon-Bibb County announced on Tuesday that the Major League Soccer club Los Angeles FC will use Macon as its base camp leading up to the 2025 Club World Cup, which starts in mid-June.
Macon-Bibb County Mayor Lester Miller heralded the news as a boon for the county and highlighted different sports and recreational outlets that Macon-Bibb has added over the years, including a minor league baseball team and the country's largest indoor pickleball venue.
After holding up a No. 9 jersey of Olivier Giroud, the all-time leading scorer for the French national soccer team and current LA FC center forward, Miller explained that "after an exciting win this past Saturday night, they will be playing against Chelsea. You may have heard of them."
Gary Wheat, CEO of Visit Macon, touted the potential economic boost that hosting the club may have for Macon. Since the start of the year, Wheat said, Macon has reaped more than $11 million from sports tourism. According to Jay Markwalter, the director of statewide tourism for the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the state expects to bring in $500 million from the Club World Cup.
In order to attract the interest of Club World Cup officials, Mercer's Athletic Director, Jim Cole, said that the playing surface in Betts Stadium had to be brought up to rigorous FIFA regulations. The field has been renovated since early spring. Mercer coughed up "seven figures" for the changes, Cole told The Macon Melody. In March, Brian Magnus, assistant director of media relations for Mercer Athletics, told The Mercer Cluster that financial details for the project were still in the works.
The Club World Cup, which is modeled after the FIFA World Cup and has a field of 32 clubs from around the world, is being hosted in the United States for the first time in the tournament's history. Among the sporting venues around the country, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta will host LA FC's first match on June 16, where LA FC will take on Chelsea FC. The Premier League team won the competition in 2021, and most recently finished fourth in their domestic league.
LA FC will be joined by fellow MLS outfits Inter Miami CF and Seattle Sounders FC as the California club competes in its first-ever Club World Cup. Since arriving in the MLS in 2018, LA FC has become a perennial title favorite and collected multiple trophies as a nascent club. The attack-minded club currently sits in sixth place in the MLS' Western Conference, but the team has gone undefeated since April 10, when it lost to Lionel Messi and Inter Miami in the Concacaf Champions Cup quarter-finals.
Gabriel Kopp '26 is double majoring in Journalism and Law and Public Policy at Mercer University. He has written for The Cluster since he started at Mercer, and currently works as Editor-in-Chief. When he isn't working on a Washington Post crossword, he enjoys going for runs around Macon and reading The New York Times or the AJC while sipping coffee.
