"They wanted it so bad to be a success that they were kinda on pins and needles right until the first people got here, and then, after that, it just took care of itself." That's Joe Drape — Kansas City native, New York Times veteran — summing up what might be the most unlikely World Cup host story in the tournament's history.
It starts in Dublin. 1962. Lamar Hunt — the man who built the AFL and forced a merger that created the NFL as we know it — sits in the stands at Glenmalure Park watching Shamrock Rovers and gets hooked on football. The other kind. Four years later he watches the 1966 World Cup on television and the obsession hardens into a mission.
A dream deferred, then inherited
Hunt spent the rest of his life trying to drag the world's game into American living rooms. He co-founded the North American Soccer League. He personally lobbied to bring the 1994 World Cup to the United States — and succeeded. He helped launch Major League Soccer in 1996. The one thing he couldn't pull off before his death in 2006: convincing FIFA to stage matches at Arrowhead Stadium.
His son Clark picked up where he left off. So did Kansas City Sports Commission President Kathy Nelson. The problem was that FIFA simply didn't see Kansas City — metro population 2.3 million — as viable. Too small. Infrastructure too limited. Not New York. Not Los Angeles.
What changed the calculation? A combination of things: the KC Streetcar expansion, a growing metro, and — not insignificantly — the Kansas City Chiefs becoming a global brand with A-list celebrity attention. In 2022, FIFA named KC one of 16 host cities across North America. Lamar Hunt's dream, fulfilled sixteen years after he died.
What the city actually delivered
The opening days had real problems. Transportation to and from Arrowhead and the FIFA Fan Festival was messy. Nobody's pretending otherwise. But it got fixed, and what followed was exactly what Drape had hoped to see when he started covering the tournament months in advance.
"It's just far more joyful than any sporting event I've been to," Drape told FOX4. "Maybe I should put it this way: They all worship the game more than they do their teams. The game is the common denominator."
That's the thing about hosting a World Cup that no infrastructure plan can fully account for — the fans bring the atmosphere, and the atmosphere does the work. Kansas City gave them somewhere to put it.
For the city's long-term profile, the exposure matters. Millions of visitors. Global broadcast reach. The question now is whether local leaders can convert a tournament into lasting economic and cultural momentum — the same challenge every host city faces once the cameras leave.
"Somebody's gonna write a book about the World Cup," Drape said, "and Kansas City should be a chapter of it."
Given where this story started — a businessman in Dublin in 1962, watching a team called the Shamrock Rovers — that chapter was always going to be worth reading.
