Liverpool midfielder Harvey Elliott stood near the halfway line as fans around Williams-Brice Stadium counted down the seconds until kickoff. At approximately 7:42 p.m., the referee blew his whistle, and Elliott passed the ball backward to his teammate.
Elliott’s backward pass officially kicked off the third and final match of the Rivals in Red Tour, which was a match between two English Premier League clubs — Liverpool and Manchester United — and was hosted at Williams-Brice Stadium on Aug. 3.
Two months after the event, personnel from Gamecock Athletics and other sectors of the Columbia community met to discuss the positive and negative aspects of the event and its influence on the city as a whole. The entities revealed the game's economic impact on the city and some areas they aim to approach differently, should more large sporting events come to the area.
Excitement surrounding the match had been brewing for months after tickets for the event were sold out. While some tickets were purchased within a 24-hour pre-sale window, all remaining tickets were bought within six hours of them being made available to the general public.
Tickets went on sale on Feb. 26 at 9 a.m., and a little over a day later, the game was sold out.
The spike in ticket sales led to a subsequent increase in room hotel and flight bookings.
Raven Yonemura, the marketing manager of Hotel Trundle, a boutique hotel in downtown Columbia, said the 41-room property saw all its available rooms booked shortly after Gamecock Athletics announced the match on Feb. 23.
Kim Crafton, the Columbia Metropolitan Airport’s Vice President of Marketing and Air Service Development, said she also saw an uptick in the number of people flying in and out of the airport. While she could not confirm the exact number of bookings directly tied to the soccer match, she said the airport saw around 5,100 more passengers during August 2024 than it did in August 2023.
The increase in traffic benefits both the airport and the city of Columbia, Crafton said.
“We’re such a significant economic engine for the region, so to see an uptick in passenger traffic — may it be for this game, or just in general — it’s always a benefit for the airport from a revenue perspective,” Crafton said. “But we can say that we played a role in such a noteworthy event for the region, and that makes us proud."
Interest leads to engagement, high economic impact
Executive Director of Experience Columbia SC Sports Scott Powers knew expectations for the match were high. Those standards were mirrored by the interest among soccer fans in Columbia and other major markets in the Southeast.
"I knew right from the very beginning with the type of soccer fans that are in the Midlands, and I knew that wasn't enough," Powers said. "Being located halfway between Atlanta and Raleigh, which are two huge soccer bases, and basically just in the backyard of Charlotte — another huge metro population that soccer has a huge following — I knew that ticket sales was not going to be an issue."
More than 77,500 people attended the match — a record for a soccer game held at Williams-Brice Stadium. The game also drew an audience of more than two million viewers and was broadcast in the U.S. on ESPN, ESPN+ and ESPN Deportes, said Megan Kennington, the associate athletics director for event operations for Gamecock Athletics.
"There was just a lot of excitement and people coming into town and seeing the 'welcome soccer fan' signage and bar coasters and things like that," Kennington said. "We couldn't have been more thrilled with the number of people that were committed to being here, and the way that we presented it to those who weren't here in Columbia, and helped kind of open their eyes to who we are and what we can do."
Crowd involvement in the city's match day festivities was not limited to just the game itself though.
Stands selling officially licensed Manchester United and Liverpool merchandise were set up around Williams-Brice Stadium and in the Gamecock Park Fan Zone, where thousands of fans participated in a variety of pregame festivities, Kennington said.
Powers said attendance at the Soda City Market on Main Street, which featured a soccer shootout-themed event, increased from around 7,000 during a regular week to "well over 10,000" on the day of the match.
The Rivals in Red Match generated $13.1 million for Columbia, marking the greatest economic impact a sporting event had on the city in its history, Powers said. He also said the revenue came at a favorable time for Columbia, which typically experiences a lull in business during late August.
"It would have been a huge event for restaurants, our hoteliers (and) our attractions no matter when it came. But because it came that first weekend in August, which is one of the slower weekends in our community — it's the last week before kids go back to middle, elementary or high school, and a couple of weeks before USC students move back in — so it's really a down time," Powers said. "It couldn't have fallen on a more opportune weekend to have the most impact."
Traffic, thunderstorms dampen experience
Leaving the stadium after the game proved difficult for some fans, as they spent over an hour in standstill traffic or took just as long to leave the South Carolina State Fairgrounds.
South Carolina Highway Patrol Master Trooper William Bennett said outbound traffic stemmed from a greater number of fans not leaving Williams-Brice Stadium until the final whistle, rather than leaving early.
"I think everybody stayed in the stadium pretty much the whole game," Bennett said. "With the football games, you kind of get people trickling out maybe at halftime (or the) third quarter, so we did have a lot of people — probably more than we do with the football games — trying to come across those streets to the parking areas at the end of the game, which might have called a little bit of a delay."
He added that a malfunctioning rail-crossing arm located in the Olympia company could have led to even more traffic as attendees left the match.
Weather conditions and the presence of a different crowd from that of Gamecock football games — which made its way to Williams-Brice Stadium at an atypical time — created issues related to transportation to the match.
Kennington said soccer fans typically do not tailgate for hours before matches, which contradicts the tendencies of football fans in the Southeast. Thunderstorms that afternoon also deterred attendees from arriving early at Williams-Brice Stadium and attending fan events at Gamecock Park.
This created traffic congestion in the direction of the stadium, Bennett said.
"With the football crowd, they usually get there kind of early and tailgate. It seemed to me that people coming to the soccer game kind of all waited until closer to game time to show up," Bennett said. "I don't know if it was because of the weather that day, because it was rainy ... (but) there was a lot of people showing up at the last minute."
Kennington said traffic is one specific area Gamecock Athletics and other entities around Columbia will have to reevaluate should the city host another event of that magnitude again.
"Nothing's going to go perfect in any event that we do — there's always going to be something," Kennington said. "So, if nothing else, it was a learning experience of the need of the infrastructure of the traffic plan and really being thoughtful in the way that we're messaging to fans."
Looking forward
Powers, when he first joined Experience Columbia SC in 2004, wanted to bring an NCAA basketball tournament regional — an event he said was "like the Super Bowl for what I saw Columbia could host" — to the city.
And he achieved that goal in 2019, when Columbia hosted four men's basketball teams and had three March Madness games played at Colonial Life Arena. Powers said the tournament generated $11.3 million in economic impact for the city, the previous record for a sporting event before the Rivals in Red game.
Since then, South Carolina's athletics department has held discussions about events outside of Gamecock football games that could be hosted within Williams-Brice Stadium, Powers said.
"There's an innumerable number of events that could potentially be hosted there that's not even football, soccer or lacrosse-related that you would think that an SEC-quality football stadium would be able to host," Powers said. "They're willing to look outside the box as we're going to the future of what could be, between eSports and those types of things. That opens the possibility of what we can do in the future."
A graphic of a quote from Scott Powers, the Executive Director of Experience Columbia SC Sports reads, "They're willing to look outside the box as we're going to the future of what could be, between eSports and those types of things. That opens the possibility of what we can do in the future."
Kennington said she also received positive feedback from both Liverpool and Manchester representatives, whether it be about the makeshift grass pitch and home-like feel at the stadium or fan engagement at outdoor events.
"Working with these big teams who had said, 'Oh, when we went to Abu Dhabi,' and 'We went to Shanghai,' and all these things — how the heck do we compete with that?" Kennington said. "It was really all about being hospitable and friendly and kind to them, and I know that we hit home on that 1,000 times over, and they were just thrilled with the way we could take care of them."
She said both clubs and TEG Sport expressed interest in visiting the city, which could set the stage for more large sporting events in the future.
"We're hoping that word spreads that, while Columbia, South Carolina, maybe sounds small, we can give you this big experience," Kennington said. "We can get a lot of people excited about it and pull off a game of this magnitude."