Amid the arduous years in the making of Kansas City’s bid to become a 2026 FIFA World Cup host, Kathy Nelson remembered speaking several times with Chiefs president Mark Donovan about what might realistically be hoped.
Maybe the city would get to have one game here, they figured. Perhaps KC might be fortunate enough to host a base camp for one of the nations in the 48-team tournament that’s expected to be viewed by billions worldwide.
“We would say, ‘One or the other is a big win,’” said Nelson, president of the Kansas City Sports Commission and Visit KC. “‘Whether we get a match or we get a base camp, that’s a win.’”
Instead, Kansas City has lured an embarrassment of riches — enough to lend serious currency to its claim to be the “Soccer Capital of America.”
Stunning enough that the smallest of the 16 host cities for 2026 in the U.S., Canada and Mexico has risen up to earn six games, including a quarterfinal, at what will be known to FIFA as “Kansas City Stadium” — GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.
But now that impact has been magnified by confirmation we’ll play host to base camps for three of the world’s most prestigious — and devoutly followed — soccer nations: Argentina, England and The Netherlands.
Seemingly abruptly yet long bubbling behind the scenes, it’s a galaxy away from the days of the Kansas City Wizards, the predecessors of Sporting KC described thusly on the club’s own website:
“The historic impression of the Wizards was one of screaming 12-year-olds with plastic noisemakers in an empty, chasmal Arrowhead Stadium. … A series of silly monikers and an even-sillier rainbow motif and color palette limited the ability to sell merchandise — or even be taken seriously.”
It’s light years from the place longtime Rockhurst University soccer coach Tony Tocco considered a “hick town” for soccer into the 1980s.
A world from where the great Pelé’s appearance in 1968 coincided with a year of The Star writing entire stories explaining the simplest rules of the game.
And another time and place from when and where Cris Medina, the son of a soccer player key to Kansas City’s evolution in the sport, recalled having to drive across state to St. Louis to watch World Cup games on television, since they weren’t even broadcast here.
Thankfully for all of us, that wasn’t the case in Dallas in July 1966 — leading to a moment that became an inflection point along the way to this critical mass.
That day, Lamar Hunt sat in front of his television at home and turned on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” for the World Cup final between England and West Germany.
That unfurled into the most fundamental reason the wide world of sports will be descending on Kansas City this June and July, with 650,000-plus visitors anticipated even before the base camp announcements.
But there were other vital and somewhat uniquely Kansas City elements that had to coalesce, too.
Maps, money and hard work
For context on what this means, consider that no other city has lured more than one of the nations from Pot 1 of the FIFA draw, made up of the three host nations and the nine top-ranked teams.
Another nation, Algeria, is widely anticipated to be choosing Lawrence’s Rock Chalk Park as its base camp. Algeria is scheduled to play two group-stage games in Kansas City, starting with Argentina on June 16.
This fever pitch is the product of countless factors, a harmonic convergence of sorts catalyzed by our central location and abundance of state-of-the-art facilities, underscored by about $700 invested locally in the last 15 years alone.
That includes tens of millions in youth soccer complexes, Sporting KC’s home stadium in Kansas City, Kansas ($240 million) and the KC Current’s $140 million CPKC Stadium — understood to be the world’s first purpose-built for a women’s team.
It’s a reflection, too, of the intense determination of Sporting KC and Chiefs ownership and the tireless work of Nelson and KC2026 World Cup bid director Katherine Holland. Not to mention so many others along the way — including KC2026 CEO Pam Kramer and what she likes to call her team of teams.
How the bid was won and the base camps secured, though, are substantial separate stories in themselves. And Sporting KC’s role in the last 20 years is a chapter of its own in the overdrive to make this feasible — and get it done.
Immigrant influence
Less visible, though, is the sequence of dynamic and independent forces and events that first had to fuse together to even make this possible. The way the roots took, and a foundation morphed into a groundswell.
A montage would feature Latino and European immigrants introducing the game to the region and the indispensable presence of Hunt and, later, son Clark. It would offer a glimpse of Pelé and take a look at the eternal Tocco and his nationally prominent Rockhurst teams at a formative time.
Surely, it would include the original Kansas City Comets of the Major Indoor Soccer League. And the explosion of youth soccer here, including programs for refugees and the melting pot of the East High Bears: The team largely made up of immigrants won the 2023 Missouri Class 3 state title and was highlighted at the announcement of the FIFA Fan Fest (which will be held on the grounds of the National World War I Museum and Memorial).
It would zoom in on the six investors led by Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson who bought the Kansas City Wizards in 2006 and rebranded them as Sporting KC in 2011.
It would highlight Matt Besler, the only Kansas Citian to play in a World Cup, and capture the frenzied scenes of watch parties at Power & Light that have been broadcast globally.
And, of course, the rise of the KC Current, whose training facility will be home to The Netherlands.
Around the world, Current co-owner Chris Long said Thursday, all of this should be “a wakeup call that Kansas City’s where it’s at.”
But none of this “just happened,” Nelson knows.
It’s “taken decades,” she said, “to come to life.”
It’s more than a century in the making.
Early days on the KC soccer scene
Per research from Sporting’s senior director of communications, Kurt Austin, the first local media mentions of soccer — typically referred to as “soccer football” — were in 1906. Scanning archives verified that … and unearthed this twist of those times:
With American football under siege for violence that led to a reported 37 deaths in 1904 and 1905, the newfangled “forward pass” was legalized that year. But with one principal calling football worse than bull fighting, high school games were cancelled in Kansas City in 1906 and 1907 and there was talk of replacing it with soccer football.
It’s unclear to what degree that took in the early days. But by the time Tocco arrived here from St. Louis in 1969, he recalled that the Kansas City area had only four high schools offering soccer.
Meanwhile, also in 1906, according to KCUR research, former St. Louisan J.T. Gallagher was recruiting players to form teams. The game started to percolate here, but only haltingly.
In 1933, The Star wrote about the Kansas City Soccer Association trying to revive interest after the local game seemed to have waned: “A number of years ago soccer was popular in this (sports) section. It was played by the foreign born. Then the youth of Kansas City did not take to the sport and when the old-timers faded out of the picture it lost its popularity.”
But “the foreign born” were just getting started.
The Guadalupe Centers opened in 1919 for thousands of Mexicans, Medina said, who largely either were recruited by railroads to work here or fled to Kansas City after the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
Medina, the longtime former executive director of the organization that serves the local Latino community, said it initially provided a settlement house. They helped with assimilation with English lessons, housing and basic health services.
Trying to fit in, though, meant a lag in those youths playing their favorite sport: Instead, they were soon taught baseball, basketball and even American football.
That seemed to prevail for decades, into the 1940s when Guadalupe formed its own team — one whose presence and significance surged with an addition in 1953 of Medina’s father. Augustin “Chino” Medina was a star professional soccer player in Mexico and two-time scoring champion. At the urging of his wife, a Kansas City native who missed home, he reluctantly moved here despite not knowing the language or the culture.
But he found a home through the game he loved. And having a marquee player here in Kansas City — “like George Brett going to play on your baseball team,” Cris Medina said — helped popularize the game as the team evolved into “Los Latinos.”
Their presence was amplified by a union between Chino Medina and José Portuguez, a Costa Rican immigrant who attended the University of Kansas — where KCUR reported he helped organize intramural soccer.
When the engineering student moved in the 1950s to Kansas City with his wife, whom he met at KU, he formed a friendship with the elder Medina through soccer at small parks with scant amenities.
In the mid to late 1950s, Cris Medina said, his father and Portuguez managed to set up a meeting with then-Kansas City Mayor H. Roe Bartle. They asked for soccer fields in Gilham Park and Swope Park.
Bartle agreed, albeit without initially providing for real goals. In some of the early pictures, Medina said, you can see stray water pipes being used to craft makeshift goals with no frills.
“Netting,” he said with a laugh, “was a luxury.”
Also emerging in those years was a team of European immigrants Medina called “Los Internationales.” Never mind the language gap between them, Medina said with a smile.
The soccer ball effectively was a universal translator in how Medina believes the Latinos of Kansas City laid the groundwork for what was to come, a contribution he likens on a smaller scale to what the Negro Leagues did for the Black community.
Lamar Hunt’s interest in the game
In the days leading up to the 1966 World Cup final, Lamar Hunt had been consumed with the storylines he’d read through the U.S. press about what was being billed as the “biggest sports event in the world,” as my friend Michael MacCambridge detailed in his excellent biography of Hunt.
He became “very fascinated” that day, Hunt would later describe, “especially by the crowd reaction, as indicated by the noise level from the spectators as the game rocked back and forth. I was especially impressed by the internationalism of the game. The nation of England against the nation of (west) Germany. Not the type of thing I was accustomed to seeing in American sports.”
While the visionary Hunt was best-known here as the driving force in the AFL and founder of the Chiefs — he moved the franchise here from Dallas in 1962 — from at least that day forward he also became what MacCambridge described as “captivated with the excitement and pageantry” of soccer. He wondered if the game might also appeal to United States fans in a deeper and broader way.
“The goal would preoccupy him, to a great extent, for the rest of his life,” he wrote.
Indeed, Hunt was seen as a man who “pioneered the sport’s growth in the United States,” as his bio on the Sporting KC website puts it, and he was a pillar of both the ill-fated North American Soccer League and the MLS. He also proved instrumental to bringing the World Cup to the United States in 1994, though Kansas City fell short of being a host site.
As Donovan, the Chiefs’ president, put it the day Kansas City was awarded the bid this time, “none of us are here” without Hunt.
A brief but significant day in that arc was July 4, 1968, when Hunt’s fledgling Spurs of the NASL had an exhibition game against the world-renowned Brazilian star Pelé and his Santos club.
Playing before nearly 20,000 fans at Municipal Stadium, the man The Star called “an acrobat without a trapeze” scored a goal and enraptured about anyone watching.
“For the large crowd composed mostly of first-game or first-season soccer fans,” The Star wrote, “the exhibition that followed the opening whistle was testimony to why the game is played in 137 countries and claims the world’s largest sporting audience.”
Pelé injected broader euphoria into the American version of the game from 1975-1977 with the NASL’s New York Cosmos.
But U.S. interest in the game remained in the embryonic stages, both here and beyond. The Spurs folded in 1971, and the NASL itself did as well after the 1984 season.
The word is out on Kansas City
By then, Tocco had established an NAIA juggernaut at Rockhurst, taking his teams to 17 national tournaments and four national runner-up finishes from 1973-97.
After the program moved to NCAA Division II status in 1998, his teams reached the national semifinals four times between 2013 and 2017.
Along the way, there was a dramatic shift in how Tocco recruited.
As a St. Louis native who was a goalkeeper on St. Louis University’s undefeated 1964 team, Tocco for more than a decade had recruited heavily in St. Louis — where soccer was a much larger part of the local culture. The area produced five players on the 1950 U.S. World Cup team that stunned England.
But as more and more Kansas City-area schools started offering soccer by the mid-1980s and programs started to develop, the pool of local talent grew steadily, and then exponentially.
For years, Tocco said, “the big schools didn’t even think of Kansas City. I had this market to myself, almost. Then the secret started getting out.”
An underappreciated aspect of the synergy, Tocco said, was the first iteration of the Kansas City Comets of the Major Indoor Soccer League from 1981-91.
“The Comets were a conduit to keeping kids playing soccer …” said Tocco, noting that span was before the inaugural MLS (Major League Soccer) season in 1996. “Kids would come to me and say, ‘Coach, my dream is to play for the Comets.’ … That was a reality at the time, so it was a motivating force for them.”
Thanks, in part, to the early days of a different sort of trend: In contrast to the atmosphere for the NBA’s Kansas City Kings at Kemper Arena, the Comets made entertainment a priority. They used then-cutting edge theatrics, such as laser light shows, smoke machines, loud music and animated player introductions.
For years, Comets attendance was remarkable: During the 1983-84 season, The Star reported, the team drew an average of 15,786 fans for 24 home games — more than any NBA team that season.
For a variety of reasons, attendance eventually dwindled. But those Comets became part of the connective tissue of soccer’s growth here.
The interest burgeoned from visibility and opportunity feeding off itself into generational momentum. As much as that might have been driven top-down, Tocco also believes the popularity “drizzled up.”
A case in point is the Heartland Soccer Association, which is considered the largest youth soccer league in the country with some 75,000 players.
One of those alumni is Besler, the former Sporting KC icon who played defense for the U.S. Men’s National Team during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
At the time, Tocco raved about Besler but also called it “a tribute to development over a number of years.”
When I spoke with Besler just before he was to represent Kansas City as no one had before, he put it this way: “We’re kind of grownups now, and we’re that first generation that’s grown up with the game in our lives from the beginning, and I think that has a major effect on the scene in Kansas City.”
All part of the shoulders the city had to stand on before making its World Cup bid a reality that eclipsed what seemed imaginable.