BY DANIEL SCHMIDT
THE OBSERVER
AUBURN — The June 9 international soccer friendly between Argentina and Iceland generated an estimated $27.2 million in total economic impact for Lee County, according to an Auburn University Athletic Department report released on Sept. 10.
That same report also claimed the event placed the city of Auburn in front of a worldwide audience valued at roughly $80 million in media exposure.
Collegiate Consulting, a national firm focused on the collegiate marketplace that has worked with more than 750 universities, colleges, conferences and associations since its founding in 2005, prepared the analysis using visitor and lodging data provided by Auburn-Opelika Tourism.
Collegiate Consulting began work on the report after the match ended and drew on event financial data, ticket-buyer information, visitation data from analytics firm Placer.ai and lodging and visitor trends tracked by Auburn-Opelika Tourism to measure the event’s economic and community impact.
According to that report, the match was arguably the most consequential single-day event the community has ever hosted. It is a lofty claim for a college town whose economic prospects typically revolve around college football Saturdays.
A summertime cash cow
The match drew an announced crowd of 88,043 and sold about 91% of Jordan-Hare Stadium’s 82,750 sellable seats, a configuration built specifically for the event. Roughly 75,390 tickets were sold, with the remaining inventory distributed in advance to local military members.
Using cellphone-location data from Placer.ai, Auburn-Opelika Tourism estimated 100,691 people were in the broader stadium district on game day.
However, the most striking finding may be what happened in area hotels.
Event-night occupancy in Lee County reached 92.4%, which was higher than the average home football weekend in both 2024 (79.6%) and 2025 (83.1%), and higher than any individual football weekend across those two seasons. The previous high, Auburn’s 2025 game against Missouri, topped out at 90.1%.
The contrast was sharpest against the university’s summer orientation sessions. The match coincided with the second night of a Camp War Eagle session, and occupancy climbed from 75.9% the night before to 92.4% on game night — a 16.5% increase.
During other June orientation sessions, hotel demand fell from the first night to the second.
In all, the report counted 6,633 hotel and short-term-rental room nights in Lee County tied to the event — producing about $1.37 million in direct lodging revenue — and an estimated 8,600 room nights across the broader region.
Visitor activity was the single largest piece of the economic estimate.
Of the $27.2 million total, roughly $17.2 million came from visitor spending and lodging, $8.2 million from primary ticket revenue and the remaining $1.8 million from concessions, premium seating, sponsorships and other related revenue.
According to Auburn Mayor Ron Anders, the international friendly provided a range of benefits to the city of Auburn.
“To host an international soccer match that included the best player in the world and the defending World Cup champions was a blessing for the city,” Anders said in a press release issued by the university Sept. 10. “That soccer match infused our city with a level of excitement we normally do not have in the summertime, benefiting our local businesses and restaurants.”
Anders added he believes the effects could be far-reaching as attendees could have left the match thinking about attending Auburn, moving to and working in the city or starting a business in the area due to its proximity to Interstate 85 and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
“You never know what comes from exposing our community to new people. I believe long-term that will be one of the greatest benefits of the soccer match,” Anders said.
To gauge the event’s true scale, the report ran the same model against a recent nonconference home football weekend — Auburn’s Sept. 6-7, 2024, game against the University of California-Berkeley — and estimated that weekend’s economic impact at $16.3 million.
If compared directly, the analysis concluded the soccer match generated about 1.7 times the economic activity of the comparable football weekend.
Actual on-site figures point in the same direction. Concessions sales came in around $911,000 for the soccer match versus about $886,000 for the Cal game, and lodging revenue ran $1.37 million versus $1.23 million.
Ithaka Hospitality Partners founder and CEO Hans van der Reijden said he agreed with the report’s assertion that the match was equivalent to a college football Saturday.
“The international soccer match brought the kind of energy and economic impact to Auburn we typically only experience on a major home football game weekend,” van der Reijden said in the press release. “Our hotels were sold out, our restaurants had long waitlists and Hey Day Market experienced one of its top-10 days since opening in 2022.”
A national and international ticket footprint
Ticket-buyer data also underscored how far the event’s pull extended outside of Lee County and Alabama as a whole.
Purchasers came from 47 states, 12 countries and more than 2,200 ZIP codes, with at least 17% of tickets traced to buyers located 150 or more miles away. International markets included Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Iceland and Spain.
Beyond the financial ledger, the report’s largest single figure is not dollars spent in Auburn, but the media value generated around the world. Collegiate Consulting estimated a combined reach of 871.6 million views and impressions across broadcast, social, online and print, translating to about $79.7 million in “media-equivalent exposure.”
Much of that hinged on star power.
The match featured Lionel Messi and then-reigning World Cup champions Argentina, and Auburn traditions proved unexpectedly ready for the camera.
A video of Messi walking off Pat Dye Field with post-match fireworks behind him drew more than 35 million views and became the most-viewed clip across ESPN’s Facebook accounts in five years, according to the report.
Auburn’s pregame eagle flight went viral through German soccer influencer @FreddyLA7, who called it the most “European mind can’t comprehend this” moment of his life, on X.com. Related Auburn University Raptor Center content topped 2 million views, with much of that audience coming from Argentina.
The report also pointed to institutional ripple effects.
Auburn’s admissions website saw about 4,000 views the day the match was announced — its second-busiest day that month — and nearly 6,000 across the June 8-9 match window, with the admissions homepage and virtual tour among the most-visited pages.
“By any measurement, the Argentina-Iceland soccer match exceeded all expectations,” Auburn athletic director John Cohen said in the press release. “Auburn Athletics was thrilled to partner with our community to create this lifelong memory for fans while benefiting Auburn and our local businesses.”
Considerations for readers
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind, as the report itself flagged several.
Auburn Athletics commissioned the analysis, and a consultant produced it using tourism-bureau data, not an independent auditor.
The economic-impact figures also rest on modeling assumptions. Those assumptions include a $68 per-day spending estimate for nonlocal visitors, a $34 figure for locals and a standard federal RIMS II multiplier of 1.994 that credits nearly a dollar of indirect activity for every direct dollar spent.
The $79.7 million media figure represents estimated advertising value, not cash that changed hands, a point the report explicitly made.
The report also cautioned the admissions-traffic bump reflects event-aligned engagement and “should not be interpreted as direct attribution to the match.”
Even with those qualifiers, the picture the data paints is consistent: the friendly turned Jordan-Hare into a global stage, and by the community’s own accounting left a football-weekend-sized mark on the local economy.
“The Argentina-Iceland match was an extraordinary success for Auburn-Opelika and an incredible example of what’s possible when our community and university work together,” Auburn-Opelika Tourism President and CEO Robyn Bridges said in the press release. “An event of this scale and international significance stands on its own as a remarkable economic and tourism win for our community, and we were thrilled to play a role in making it happen.”
