From the 912 to the World Stage: Clay Cribbs shares World Cup social media experience

The 2026 FIFA World Cup was one of the most impactful sporting events of this year, if not the most. Atlanta, Georgia, was fortunate to be one of the host cities, bringing significant economic growth to our state capital. One man, a Statesboro local, stayed behind the lens, working to capture some of the greatest moments of the tournament.

Clay Cribbs grew up in Statesboro, Georgia, before moving to Athens to complete his digital marketing degree at the University of Georgia. Now, he works as the Social Media Manager for the Metro Atlanta Chamber.

“My entire career has been in the content creation space, including roles at sports organizations like the LPGA, USGA, U.S. Kids Golf, and Turner Sports, so I’m quite experienced when it comes to the intersection of sports and social media,” Cribbs explained when asked about his experience. “The ability to not only put my own skills to the test, but also be able to work with, teach, and learn from so many talented SCAD students this summer was really unique and helped me grow a lot.”

Cribbs landed the role working with the World Cup due to the Chamber’s work with the Atlanta Sports Council. “The Sports Council oversees the Atlanta World Cup Host Committee, which asked me to serve as the Social Media Director for the FIFA Atlanta platforms,” he explained. “I ended up working closely with designers, video editors, photographers, and more to get the job done.”

Although the Chamber and Sports Council have been preparing for the tournament for a couple of years, Cribbs didn’t know about his upcoming role until April of this year, just a couple of months before the initial kickoff.

Before he got started, there was already a plan to help cover the FIFA Fan Festival events that took place in Centennial Olympic Park. His job was to help create a coverage plan to showcase the matches and the energy of the city.

“There wasn’t a lot of time to prepare, but we began building out a social media calendar early in the process of what would be needed for each day of the tournament,” Cribbs explained. “Things would continue to change as we learned more and more about what events were happening across the summer, but it was a great baseline to get us started.”

While the tournament lasted just over a month, Atlanta only hosted eight matches and 19 days of the fan festival. But this didn’t result in any downtime for Cribbs.

“I was essentially on call from 8 a.m. to midnight most days from roughly June 1 through the end of the tournament on July 19,” he said. “Making sure that Atlanta and Georgia shined really well in this tournament was important to me, so that meant pushing for almost 50 days straight.”

There’s a lot that people may not know about this experience, but something that Cribbs noted is the feeling of home.

“There was a large piece of the 912 in this project!” he shared. “We were lucky enough to work closely with about 20-25 students from the Savannah College of Art and Design (from both the Atlanta and Savannah campuses) who helped us execute on the hundreds of posts that went out during the tournament.”

The day-to-day throughout the tournament was a team effort. There were groups of content creators, photographers, videographers, and more capturing the action at all angles. On match days, the team would arrive at the office, located in the CTR (the old CNN Center), 4-5 hours before the game began.

As the day continued, the team would periodically meet up to make sure all content was getting posted and to make sure they were prepared for any upcoming events.

Looking back after the conclusion of the tournament, there are a lot of memorable moments for Cribbs.

“There are so many, but the coolest moment of my tournament had to be the first match in Atlanta. Obviously 1996 was huge for Atlanta, but this felt like another step in our city’s history and sports legacy,” he said. “To not only see that match, but also be able to see Cabo Verde make their FIFA World Cup debut and get an upset draw against Spain was something I’ll never forget.”

As Cribbs moves on to his next adventure with the Metro Atlanta Chamber, he will remember the unity that the tournament brought to the city.

“There’s so much division right now, and it was really cool to see people rally together, not only around their countries, but around each other,” he said. “People from every nation that came to Atlanta were amazing, welcoming, and just so happy to be here. It was really neat to be able to welcome people to a once-in-a-lifetime type of experience.”

The FIFA World Cup ran from June 11 to July 19, hosting games in 10 U.S. cities, two in Canada and three in Mexico.