"We try to be as often in Kansas as possible." That's Thomas Tuchel's vision for England's World Cup summer, and it's less eccentric than it sounds.
The FA has set up camp at the Inn at Meadowbrook — a 54-room, five-star boutique hotel on the Kansas side of the state line — with training at Swope Soccer Village in Missouri, roughly 20 minutes away. Kansas City sits near the geographic centre of the United States, which is the whole point. England can fly in, fly out to their group games, and fly back without the kind of cross-country travel that quietly destroys tournament campaigns.
Why the base camp choice actually matters
Tuchel is unusually specific about what he wants from an environment, and that specificity is worth taking seriously. "A hotel where you can open the window" sounds trivial until you've watched squads dissolve in sterile 500-room convention-centre hotels where players barely see each other. He wants chemistry. He wants routine. He wants a mattress players recognise after a long flight back from Arlington or Massachusetts.
The FA's first choice of training ground — Sporting Kansas City's performance centre — was taken by Argentina. They've settled for the club's academy facility at Swope Soccer Village instead. That's a marginal step down, not a catastrophe. The Netherlands and Algeria are also based in the region, so England won't be operating in total isolation.
On the pitch, England open against Croatia in Arlington on 17 June — the latest possible start among the group-stage fixtures — before facing Ghana in Massachusetts on 23 June. A late start followed by a congested schedule is exactly what Tuchel says the players want. "They like that it then becomes condensed so you have no chance to get bored," he said. There's something to that. Waiting around is where tournament squads go flat.
England's World Cup odds hinge on more than logistics
A settled base won't win England the World Cup. But disrupted preparation has derailed better squads than this one. The FA has clearly done the unglamorous work — scouting hotels, negotiating training access, calculating flight paths. That's the kind of detail that separates organised campaigns from ones that unravel quietly by the second group game.
Pre-tournament, England head to Florida first for warm-up matches against New Zealand and Costa Rica. The real test of the Kansas City plan comes once the knockout rounds arrive and the fixtures start stacking up fast. "There will be a lot of flights. There will be a lot of time at airports," Tuchel admitted. "We have to get our chemistry right. This is the most important."
He's not wrong. And right now, that's all this is — a plan. Whether the squad actually gels inside a 54-room hotel in the middle of America is a different question entirely.
