As Atlanta prepares to host its 2026 World Cup matches, the world is focused on the spectacle, the economic impacts, and what might happen on the pitch during the tournament’s June and July run.
Amid all the excitement, researchers at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts are also leveraging the "world’s game" as a sophisticated lens for understanding and advancing global development.
In his recent edited book, Soccer, Globalization, and Innovation, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs Professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur Kirk Bowman argues that soccer provides a unique "contested space" to show how communities can use innovation and collective action to achieve unexpected outcomes.
For instance, soccer’s global dominance is often attributed to practices such as the system of promoting and relegating teams to higher or lower leagues based on their performance, its unique way of using single-elimination tournaments to create drama, and the evolution of the fluid and aggressive “total football” style of play.
“Why is football the people’s game with 4 billion fans? It’s because of these and other innovations,” Bowman said.
From the Classroom to the Stadium
This focus on innovation is, of course, at the heart of the Georgia Tech mindset.
The book itself is a product of the Soccer, Community, Innovation, and Politics Vertically Integrated Project (VIP), which engages undergraduate and graduate students from across Georgia Tech — including those studying computing, engineering, and design — to work with faculty on long-term research on soccer. The student group envisioned and planned SoccerCon, a 2023 conference dedicated to the sport’s societal impact.
“The students were incredibly creative and diverse, and we brought a very diverse crowd of academics and practitioners to Georgia Tech,” Bowman said.
This creative and collaborative model mirrors the core philosophy of Georgia Tech’s Global Development program, offered as both a Master of Science and a multidisciplinary minor. A graduate certificate is also available. The program prepares students to be catalysts for sustainable change by combining social sciences with technical competence in data visualization, GIS spatial software, and statistical inference. In the Ivan Allen College, the Nunn School and the School of Economics are key partners in the program.
"The crux of global development is to improve human well-being by addressing the most pressing challenges we face today," said Alberto Fuentes, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairsj, who contributed a chapter in the book on StationSoccer, an Atlanta-based initiative that turns unused MARTA transit hubs into soccer pitches.
By offering free programs accessible through public transit, the initiative "reframes the way people in Atlanta might think about both MARTA and access to recreation activities,” Fuentes said.
“The collaboration between MARTA and StationSoccer offers insight into an unexpected way in which social actors might come together to address some of these pressing challenges. It shows how these actors can draw upon their respective resources and distinctive expertise in an effort to make people’s lives better,” Fuentes said.
Cultivating Nonlinear Thinkers
Whether they are examining how women athletes use digital branding to bypass legacy media or how transit agencies can partner with nonprofits to improve urban well-being, Georgia Tech’s global development students are learning to navigate the same complex institutional partnerships that define our world.
And for those students, Fuentes said real-world examples such as StationSoccer prove that the field is far from a set of "boring formulas."
“Rather, it is an arena bubbling with new ideas and experimentation that should excite future students and practitioners,” he said.
In addition to Bowman and Fuentes, Georgia Tech sports historian Declan Abernethy, and current and former students, including Linda Duong, Brooke Boucher, Joran Artis, Kieran Ferguson, Edouart Goguillon, and Candy Zheng contributed to the book.
This semester, students in Abernethy’s Foundations of Sports Studies class are looking into the impact of “mega events” like the World Cup on Atlanta. To learn more about that class, check out our video on YouTube: