"I think he would be over the moon." That's Dan Hunt, talking about his late father Lamar — the oil heir, NFL co-founder, and quiet architect of American soccer — as the World Cup returns to US soil in 2025. And it's hard to argue with the assessment. Without Lamar Hunt, there's a reasonable case that neither the 1994 nor the 2026 tournament ends up on American turf.
It started, of all places, at a Shamrock Rovers match in Dublin in the early 1960s. Hunt had crossed the Atlantic to visit his future wife Norma, who was studying at University College Dublin on a Rotary scholarship. They ended up on a standing-room-only terrace watching Irish football, and something clicked. "That may have been my dad's first professional soccer game," Clark Hunt said.
From the NASL's Collapse to MLS's Foundation
Hunt channeled that love into the United Soccer Association, later folded into the North American Soccer League — a league that, for a stretch, was genuinely exciting. Pelé. Beckenbauer. Carlos Alberto. The NASL pulled genuine stars to America during the 1970s. Then it overexpanded, ran out of money, and died after the 1984 season.
Most people would have walked away. Hunt went back to his notes.
When FIFA set a condition for awarding the 1994 World Cup to the US — the country had to have a functioning top-tier domestic league — Hunt used everything the NASL's failure had taught him to help establish Major League Soccer. He didn't just help found it. He owned three of its first franchises. The family still holds FC Dallas. MLS now has 30 clubs, Lionel Messi on its roster, and a footprint that simply wouldn't exist without one man's refusal to treat collapse as a conclusion.
"You knew that if Lamar Hunt was part of it," said longtime associate Thom Meredith, "it meant something."
Kansas City, Dallas, and a Legacy Playing Out in Real Time
Hunt called Arrowhead Stadium his favorite place on earth. In 1994, Kansas City missed out on hosting World Cup matches after FIFA ruled the stadium couldn't accommodate a full-size pitch. Nearly $20 million and several years of renovations later, that problem is fixed. Arrowhead hosts six matches in 2026, including a quarterfinal. Argentina and Algeria kick things off there on June 16.
Five group-stage games will be played at AT&T Stadium in Dallas — Hunt's hometown — with four more knockout-round matches to follow, including a semifinal on July 14.
The family anecdotes are worth knowing, because they tell you who this man actually was. At the 1986 World Cup final in Mexico City, when the Hunt family found other people in their seats and security refused to act, Lamar Hunt's solution was simple: he bought more tickets. At the 2002 tournament in Asia — which he attended alone at 74 — his briefcase was stolen, he panicked at an ATM and shredded his card, and his family started wiring him cash. Then South Korean customs confiscated it when he was carrying over the legal limit crossing back into Japan.
"I just remember thinking, 'My dad is totally going to get kidnapped,'" Dan Hunt said.
He wasn't. He made it home. And the tournament he helped bring to America is about to kick off in the two stadiums he cared about most.
