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If you’ve ever hosted a house party, you know all the planning involved to make it a success, and the emotional cocktail of excitement and exhaustion that comes with it.
Many Kansas City residents already have a World Cup hangover — and the games haven’t even started yet.
“I don’t think we’ll ever truly be ready,” says Daniel Sperry, who covers soccer for The Kansas City Star. “We’re about as ready as we can be, though.”
Sperry is a lifelong lover of the game, and admits it’s been a whirlwind of emotions to see his home of Kansas City step into the international spotlight for the largest sporting event in the world.
“To have it all right here is mind-blowing to think about,” Sperry says.
After the tournament kicks off on June 11, Kansas City will host six games, including a quarterfinal match. And the national teams of four different countries will stay and train in the area: Algeria, Argentina, England and the Netherlands. The city expects to welcome a large wave of international travelers, many coming to the Midwest for the very first time.
As the smallest of the 16 cities hosting, Kansas City had the most to do to prepare, and in very little time.
“The window was very tight,” says Kathy Nelson, head of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC.
Not only is Nelson at the forefront of Kansas City’s tournament preparations, she was also a core part of the original team that worked behind the scenes to help win this honor in the first place. It’s a process that’s taken more than a decade, and then some.
"You know, when you get an opportunity to put your city on a global stage, you can't just rest and check the box and say, that's good," says Nelson.
Kansas City’s first attempt at a World Cup bid
For the last year, KCUR’s podcast A People’s History of Kansas City has been reporting a miniseries on how Kansas City became a soccer city. It’s a story of underdogs — not only this city, but also the sport itself.
Like many cities in America, soccer first began in Kansas City as a game of immigrant communities, who spent decades advocating for attention, field space and funding.
It was Lamar Hunt who actually helped launch soccer into the mainstream. Hunt is well known for his accomplishments with the American Football League, bringing the Chiefs to Kansas City, and even naming the “Super Bowl.”
But he was also soccer-obsessed, and led repeated efforts to establish professional soccer leagues in the U.S. And Hunt loved the World Cup specifically.
“It’s really a huge credit to the Hunt family. They had a vision and a passion to bring the World Cup to Kansas City and actually play it in Arrowhead,” says Nelson.
In 1988, FIFA announced that the United States would host the World Cup for the very first time. And Hunt, being the sports business man that he was, wanted his city and his stadium to be a part of the 1994 tournament.
In 1991, Hunt put out a full page ad in The Kansas City Star, declaring, “Sports fans, you can make it happen! Help bring World Cup 94 soccer to Kansas City!”
The ad encouraged fans to call a local hotline number pledging support for a World Cup seat: “Send no money now! Just tell us you’ll attend.” If Kansas City was picked as one of the host cities, readers who RSVP’d would get top priority for a ticket.
Hunt used this creative marketing push to show the World Cup organizing Committee that 20,000 people promised to fill his stadium in just 16 days.
Kansas City didn’t make the cut back then. Although we did benefit from the World Cup all the same — because the tournament resulted in the creation of Major League Soccer, of which Kansas City was a founding member.
The next generation
Lamar Hunt died in 2006, and in time his son Clark Hunt took over as CEO of the Chiefs.
Like his dad, Clark Hunt is also World Cup obsessed. And in the 2010s, Hunt learned about a new bid for the U.S. to host the World Cup.
“Kansas City had a lot of things going for it,” Hunt recently told the Kansas City Star’s Blair Kerkhoff on the KCUR podcast SportsBeat KC.
Not only had Hunt learned a few things from helping his father on that past failed bid, but the city had grown and changed a lot in two decades. By that point, the city boasted its own pro team in Sporting KC, and had won two MLS Cups. The Royals just conquered the World Series in 2015.
“So there was, you know, very much of a soccer DNA and a history of success here,” he said.
Clark Hunt got a team of people together that included Cliff Illig, who owned Sporting KC, and Kathy Nelson.
“ We sat with our team, sometimes at midnight for multiple nights in a row, where we would look at the material that we were going to present to U.S. soccer at the time to be a host city,” recalls Nelson.
The process of selecting what country and cities will host the World Cup is complicated, long, and rife with controversy. In short, interested countries submit bids with detailed information on how they could logistically handle such a tournament, and members of FIFA — the international organizing body of association football — votes to decide.
As you might imagine, this intersects heavily with big business and politics. This selection process has been widely criticized for its lack of transparency, money laundering and fraud.
The United States led a major corruption investigation in 2015 against FIFA, alleging hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, that led to dozens of indictments. The two most recent World Cup tournaments in Russia and Qatar were highly criticized for human rights violations, and FIFA remains under fire for its questionable executive pay, ongoing ticket pricing scandals, and the cozy relationship between its leader Gianni Infantino and President Donald Trump.
Despite FIFA’s poor reputation, many countries see hosting this tournament as a big opportunity, a chance to attract international tourism and attention.
In 2018, FIFA made the big announcement that, for the first time, three countries would host the 2026 tournament together: the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Which began a whole other phase of competition: Which cities would actually participate in the matches?
Securing the win
With the 2026 World Cup spanning an entire continent, rather than a single country, the hope was to spread out both the stress and the benefits. And there were 23 hopeful cities that wanted a bite of the pie.
Nelson says that, by this point, Kansas City had made the cut a few times already, “each time needing to rebid and prove ourselves as to why they should look at us.”
Then, FIFA representatives came here to see the city for themselves.
“They've of course been to New York, they've been to Miami, they've been out to L.A., but really had never been to the Midwest part of the country,” Nelson says. “So for us, not only did we need to prove that we could host this, we had to prove what was happening in the city so they could really see it.”
This was in 2021, a year after the pandemic shutdown. It was also two years before Kansas City got its new airport, so anyone who flew into town arrived at the old horseshoe terminal, something akin to a glorified bus station.
Nelson and the bid team used some inventive strategies to help make a better first impression, such as staging friends and family at the airport.
“We put everybody out there in soccer jerseys or just people that looked vibrant,” says Nelson. “And we weren't trying to trick them by any means, but we knew we had to prove that our city was passionate and capable of doing this.”
Organizers also hung a 90-foot-long banner on the side of a building downtown that read, “We want the World Cup.” And it was no mistake that the FIFA representatives had a good view of the sign from their hotel rooms.
The U.S. women’s national team happened to be in Kansas City around that same time, and they also clocked the sign.
“And then they actually organically tweeted about, ‘Hey, Kansas City really wants the World Cup.’ So all of that helped and helped create that story and that image and that feeling as they were here,” Nelson remembers.
FIFA planned to announce their final host city picks on June 16, 2022 — almost exactly four years before the tournament’s kickoff. By this point, Kansas City was still in competition with bigger metro areas like Denver, Baltimore, Orlando, Cincinnati, and Nashville.
Nobody knew which would be picked, as FIFA keeps their info under tight wraps. Still, in what some might consider a risky move, Kansas City organizers decided to put on a huge watch party in the Power & Light District, inviting the whole metro to come out and watch the announcement live.
“I'm a huge believer in that we win together and we lose together,” Nelson says. “The city had worked so hard to get us to that point in June that there was a reason to celebrate, whether we were selected or not. I told our staff and I told friends and family, I may need a high five, or I may need a hug that day.”
The very first host to be announced: Kansas City. The crowd erupted with cheers.
WE GOT THE WORLD CUP! #KC2026 pic.twitter.com/rU6quCzaF4
— Mayor Quinton Lucas (@MayorLucasKC) June 16, 2022
"The city is going to show out in 2026," Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said in a pre-recorded message accompanying the announcement. "We can’t wait to welcome fans from across the globe to the heart of America and to the world’s loudest stadium."
Kansas City’s party planning headaches
Then it was time to get to work.
“Now that it's been awarded, we don't just pause for a year. It's, hurry, hurry, because the window was very tight to get us prepared,” says Nelson.
That meant forming the group KC2026, the nonprofit handling logistics like transportation and the FIFA Fan Festival, a five-weekend-long music festival and watch party in front of the National WWI Museum and Memorial.
Kansas City has high expectations for this event. The sports commission estimated that the matches and surrounding festivities will attract some 650,000 visitors to Kansas City this summer. That’s about 150,000 more people than normally live in the city total — but but many are skeptical about this projection.
Flight reservations and hotel bookings show that Kansas City is running behind projections, even more so than other host cities, and ticket values have taken a tumble.
In just the last year and a half, a lot of things have happened on the national level that Kansas City organizers couldn’t have predicted, and can’t do much about. Such as the Trump administration’s heavy restrictions on travel from certain countries, and its violent mass deportation campaign against immigrants. Not to mention FIFA’s record-high ticket prices and confusing lottery system.
All of these elements appear to have pushed people away from the tournament and undercut sales.
“We can't control everything,” says Nelson, who remains optimistic. “We can't control the weather. We can't control what's happening at a federal level with politics.”
Nelson is sticking with those ambitious projections. And her focus now is encouraging as much of the city to participate as possible.
“What we can control, it's how we show up as a city and how welcoming we are,” Nelson says. “And I do think that number is probably still pretty close.”
Not to mention, Nelson is already planning for the next big things — like Kansas City’s bids to host the men’s Rugby World Cup and the women’s soccer World Cup in 2031. So the party’s not over just yet.
No matter what happens, the World Cup has already cemented Kansas City as a legitimate soccer city. The city is already claiming its distinction as “Soccer Capital of America” — now it has to live up to the name.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Suzanne Hogan with editing by Mackenzie Martin and Gabe Rosenberg.
This is the final installment of a series leading up to the 2026 World Cup in collaboration with the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, which explores how sport connects the us to the rest of the world, and the Us@250 Initiative at New America.
Read and listen to the first episode, "The immigrants who made us a soccer city," the second episode, "Lamar Hunt and the dream of U.S. soccer," and the third episode, "How women made the U.S. a soccer powerhouse."
