May 28, 2025 – When fans attend a sporting event, they hope that the experience will be memorable. Lately, the memories that fans have enjoyed have increasingly extended in venues outside the field or arena. One such venue sits just 240 miles southeast of our office, with an otherwise unassuming name were it not for its daily popularity throughout the year: The Battery.
Home to four Fortune 500 companies, The Battery Atlanta is a mixed-use development featuring retail, restaurants, apartments, corporate offices and more in a town square-esque neighborhood surrounding Truist Park, home to the Atlanta Braves. The development garnered further attention this week as Sports Business Journal reported that The Battery Atlanta’s revenue during the first quarter of 2025 increased by 23% over the same period in 2024, an impressive sign of continued growth.
This design attracts not only the millions of fans attending Braves games, but also millions more who don’t. In a 2024 report from Cobb County officials, The Battery welcomed approximately 10.3 million visitors in 2023 – 78% from outside the county, and 27% from outside the state. The Braves’ total attendance across 81 home games? 3.2 million.
According to the Sports Business Journal, during the 2021 World Series, the three home games brought a combined total of 333,000 fans to The Battery; the total attendance inside Truist Park — 129,145 — represented less than half of that total.
The Battery Atlanta’s appeal remains strong throughout the season, whether or not the Braves are in town, because the neighborhood offers something to do every day of the year. The Battery Atlanta hosted 367 on-site events in 2023, including 144 events at the Coca-Cola Roxy concert hall and 83 Braves games inside Truist Park.
Cities and local governments are seeing the benefit of these developments, even when financed in partnership with public funding — and are gaining interest in them with the success of each new project. Lexicon Strategies partner Malaika Rivers, who worked on behalf of the city of Cumberland (Georgia) to attract the Braves and The Battery Atlanta, told the Sports Business Journal: “It spurs economic development, it helps with the tax base, quality of life, it puts them on the map in many cases.”
The value of such a neighborhood to the broader community extends far beyond the scoreboard at the end of the game. Thanks to the millions of fans welcomed throughout the year, Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta combined to generate $40.3 million in 2023 tax revenue for Cobb County and the State of Georgia, which included $9.9 million to the Cobb County Board of Education. The revenue generated by the Braves’ rental of Truist Park, meanwhile, amounted to $6.1 million – no small figure, but just 15.1% of the total tax revenue generated.
A thoughtfully built neighborhood such as The Battery Atlanta is an attractive site for sports fans, corporations, small businesses, restaurants and even residents. As the Stars chart the course to bring Major League Baseball (MLB) to Nashville, we keep in mind the value of welcoming a franchise to our community: both the excitement on the field and the surrounding impact of such an addition — as seen in The Battery Atlanta — in the years and decades to come.