EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsTHE DINNER STARTED out innocently enough, with some steaks, wine and casual conversation.Now, two of the people who brought the World Cup to Kansas City, Missouri, might have to get tattoos.Last summer, Jake Reid, the president and CEO of Sporting Kansas City, and Alan Dietrich, a former Sporting KC exec, met with a contingent from England as part of an ongoing pitch for the Three Lions to make Kansas City their summer home during the World Cup.After a whirlwind day of touring the city, they dined at Eddie V's, an elegant restaurant on the Plaza. It all went so well that England CEO Mark Bullingham told Reid and Dietrich that if England wins the World Cup, they're all getting tattoos."Are you in?" Bullingham asked them.They didn't hesitate."I was like, 'This would be the coolest thing that I could think of,'" Dietrich said.Fast forward a year and four teams will call the Kansas City area home during the tournament, including three top-10 teams with huge fanbases: England, Argentina and the Netherlands. Algeria will be in nearby Lawrence, Kansas, a college town with a population of under 100,000.In many ways, Kansas City is an unlikely choice. It's the least populous of the 11 U.S. cities staging the World Cup, and it has never hosted the Olympics or a Super Bowl. The site England settled on wasn't even in FIFA's catalog of training sites when the team visited. But the city harnessed its longtime investment in soccer, its location in the middle of the country and a thick layer of Midwestern hospitality and hustle to become the base-camp capital of the World Cup.Holding the base camps and pulling off six matches and a FIFA Fan Festival in the heart of the city is a tantalizing and daunting proposition for Kansas City. Dietrich concedes that the city has never hosted anything close to this scale nor had teams with such rabid fanbases in town for such a sustained amount of time.But he and other local organizers have no doubt they can pull it off."I tell people all the time that at the end of this, we're all going to get to say we were part of the biggest thing that ever happened here," said Pam Kramer, CEO of KC2026.IN THE MONTHS before FIFA went on its 23-city tour in 2021 to decide on the 16 World Cup hosts, a group of people from Sporting KC and the Kansas City Sports Commission gathered weekly to brainstorm how to make that quick but infinitely important visit special.They had no mountains, ocean or previous experience. Their airport, a nearly half-century-old drab, drive-to-your-gate relic, was two years away from being replaced by its sparkling successor. The city also was two years away from hosting the 2023 NFL draft, which drew more than 300,000 people and offered proof it could successfully handle a larger event.So, they got creative.They calculated routes for the FIFA contingent that were devoid of blight and traffic jams and planted friendly volunteers around the airport to make it look busier. They gave nearly two-dozen children from Kansas City's Guadalupe Centers a pass out of school to perform the sacred civic duty of playing a scrimmage outside the downtown Loews Kansas City Hotel, at around 11 a.m., just so the FIFA delegation could see, as they walked to their SUVs, that soccer is that serious in the heartland."We talked through all of these details," Dietrich said. "Every sight, smell and touch -- just every sense, we wanted to appeal to them the fact that we are the Soccer Capital of America. We can handle this, and we really want this."Kansas City calls itself the Soccer Capital of America because of its longtime investment in the sport. That moniker appears on the city's World Cup website, and it even has a registered symbol next to it. City officials said that since 2009, nearly $700 million has been invested in soccer infrastructure in the K.C. metro area. That investment helped lure the three top-10 teams, which will train on those fields.Kansas City's fascination with soccer stretches back to the 1960s, when the late Lamar Hunt, owner and founder of the NFL's Chiefs, helped start the United Soccer Association. Three decades later, with the inception of the MLS, he founded the Kansas City Wiz, who were quickly renamed the Wizards and eventually became Sporting KC. In 2000, the franchise won an MLS Cup.In 2011, Sporting KC achieved Hunt's long-held dream of a soccer-specific stadium when it opened Sporting Park just over the state line in Kansas. Six years later, the club opened the Compass Minerals National Performance Center, which is situated on 52 acres of synthetic and grass fields. Dietrich said David Beckham has raved about the facility, which features hyperbaric chambers, a cryotherapy lab, a zero gravity room and two stocked ponds in case anyone wants to fish during their downtime. It's clear why England wanted first dibs on the facility during its visit last summer.But a few months later, FIFA released new base-camp criteria stipulating preference to teams with group stage matches near the site. Rankings also would weigh into the mix. That put England, which is not playing in Kansas City, at a disadvantage.After Argentina learned in December it would play its opener in Kansas City, the team flew a contingent to Kansas City. The reigning World Cup champions had long been rumored to favor Miami, in part because it's the MLS home of their star, Lionel Messi, Dietrich said. But as soon as team officials saw Sporting KC's massive gym, Dietrich knew they were intrigued. Argentina quickly scooped up the facility.Luis Martin, the team's fitness coach, recently told Argentine journalist Juan Pablo Varsky that the team visited Kansas City after not finding what it wanted in Dallas. "They're accommodating us in an incredible way," Martin said.The Netherlands then picked the new training facility for the Kansas City Current. And England, which had bonded so deeply with the locals, appeared headed elsewhere. But the Three Lions came back to check out Swope Soccer Village, located in the city's largest municipal park. Dietrich said they loved it. Algeria chose Lawrence, located about 40 miles west of the city, in part because it provided a "tranquil environment," he said.Kramer said the geographic location in the middle of the United States and halfway to the coasts, also factored in to why so many teams chose to call Kansas City home. Because the tournament has 48 teams spread out across three large countries, teams will have to travel further and wait longer between matches. England, for instance, will cover nearly 9,000 miles while playing in Dallas, Boston and New York, and it will not play until almost a week after the tournament starts.England manager Thomas Tuchel said in March that the team will return to its base camp whenever it can. "Maybe the headline is, 'We try to be as often in Kansas as possible,'" he said.But logistics and facilities weren't the only things that attracted the teams."Our appeal is the Midwestern way," Kramer said, "which is that people generally are respectful. They leave you alone. You can go out in public and you can have dinner and nobody's going to interrupt your dinner. There's an appeal about Kansas City that we heard from the teams, that we grew on them as they went through the process."THE WORLD CUP will be by far the biggest event in the history of a city of 511,000 people (2.3 million for the Kansas City metro area). City officials expect 650,000 visitors during the tournament, though a month away from the first game, bookings for hotels and flights are slower than expected.Jenny Wilson, vice president of tourism development at Visit KC, is optimistic those anticipated visitor numbers will hold, with a large assist from the knockout stages."I think what you're seeing," she said, "especially from an international perspective, the bookings are coming in later than what people would have originally predicted. ... Domestically, they tend to book a little closer in anyway."But over those later dates that we've got the games, we're trending very high."To handle the massive security challenge of six matches and 18 days of the FIFA Fan Festival, Kansas City Police Capt. Jake Becchina said the department has enlisted the help of law enforcement in jurisdictions throughout Missouri and Kansas. These partnerships were forged after the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 2015, when the highly attended parade exposed the need for more manpower and planning in large-scale sports celebrations and events.Since then, the various law enforcement entities have worked together through three Super Bowl parades in the 2020s, including the 2024 celebration that ended in a shooting. Becchina said they have a positive relationship."What you see on cop shows," Becchina said, "where the FBI shows up and the county sheriff is doing an investigation and the FBI tells them to kick rocks and get out of there, that doesn't happen here."I think that if you got a hold of any federal entity ... if you got them or gave them some truth serum, they would tell you that the operating environment here in Kansas City is uniquely collaborative."He said law enforcement entities in Nebraska and Wisconsin also will help, along with private security.Becchina, who like many people in Kansas City is an avid NFL fan, has versed himself in soccer over the past few years, most notably in fan behavior. Every member of the KCPD's command staff was given a homework assignment to watch "Attack on Wembley," a Netflix documentary about a July 2021 match between England and Italy that resulted in violence when about 2,000 fans forced their way into the stadium."I think just the level of -- I don't want to use the word fanatic," Becchina said, "just the level of some of these fanbases ... I mean, their entire life revolves around it. And yeah, you do see that in the NFL ... [But] the emotions carry on until Monday, usually around lunchtime."A group from Visit KC traveled to the Netherlands and Argentina to introduce fans to Kansas City and build excitement for potential tourists. Visit KC also recently coordinated cultural training for the area's restaurants and hotels.Jason Booker, a deputy athletic director at Kansas University, will work closely with the Algerian team and has researched countless minutia on the country, including how Algerians prefer to be greeted. He said people in these parts are "huggers," but they don't want to presume.He has learned that many Algerians are Muslim and require halal meat, which has to be blessed. Booker said Algeria's chef has connected with a butcher who specializes in halal meat in Lenexa, Kansas, about 30 minutes from Lawrence, and halal-friendly restaurants in the town are putting up window stickers for the team.It's all part of an effort that spans more than five years of painstaking detail, touching nearly every industry in a two-state area, and Booker said that for KU's part, it won't be making money off hosting a World Cup. None of that matters."We're not salespeople that are like, 'Hey, you're here; I don't really care,'" Booker said. "We want them walking away from here saying, 'Holy cow, what an awesome experience in Lawrence.'"It's what Midwesterners do."If all goes well this summer, especially for England, at least two locals will be permanently changed. Neither Reid nor Dietrich has ever had a tattoo, and England has mulled an elaborate -- and probably large -- inking."I'm not sure my wife is on board with this," Reid said. "But it makes for a good story."ESPN researcher Gueorgui Milkov contributed to this story.
