MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, carried 4.7 million rail passenger trips across the 35-day tournament window, interim general manager Jonathan Hunt told its board on 18 July, with 1.7 million of those attributed to World Cup fans1. The busiest single day was Morocco against Haiti on 24 June, when 240,000 riders used the system, 2.6 times normal volume. Hunt reported no major crimes across the tournament.
Then the cost side, briefed to the same board in the same session. MARTA's FY2026 police expenditure forecast is $58.7 million, up 22% on the prior year, with the force expanded from 230 to 268 officers. Federal grants for World Cup safety and operations covered $11 million of that.
A transit police budget behaves differently from a hotel-tax month. Officers recruited this year hold warrant cards next year; their salaries, pensions and training obligations sit in MARTA's operating budget after the visitors have gone. The federal grant covered roughly a fifth of the forecast and was tied to the event. MARTA carries the remaining four fifths on its own books, and carries them again in 2027.
The ridership figure also cuts against a pattern this briefing set out on 10 July, when host cities were recording weaker hotel occupancy than they had forecast. Trains full, rooms not: on the numbers Hunt gave his board, a large share of Atlanta's tournament traffic came from people who travelled to a match and slept somewhere else, or at home. That is a different economic footprint from the one host committees model, and it is the kind of visitor a transit authority pays to police without a hotelier paying tax on.
