KC Current breaks ground on new downtown-area stadium and dreams big about the future
With the Kansas City skyline before them and the Missouri River to their backs, KC Current owners Angie and Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes turned ceremonial shovels of groundbreaking dirt.
Construction of the new 11,500-seat stadium for the second-year NWSL team is officially underway with an expected completion in time for the 2024 season.
“This is real. This is happening,” Chris Long said Thursday. “We saw them moving dirt, the signage. Everything all the sudden was tangible.”
The stadium will be built in Berkley Riverfont Park, once a landfill for construction debris, and next to the Heart of America Bridge. The area was cleaned up, dedicated as a 17-acre park in 1998 and opened to the public in 1999.
Development had been slow in the area, but an apartment complex opened about four years ago, and coming soon ... a professional soccer team’s sparkling stadium, with an open end facing the river.
“This is really the bookend of transforming the riverfront for the next 50 plus years,” said PortKC president and CEO Jon Stephens.
The Longs had this area in mind nearly from the time they bought the team in late 2020.
“All it took was coming down here and walking around,” Angie Long said. “Don’t you feel it, how special and amazing this location is? It’s hard to imagine another spot when you’ve stood right here.”
On a day of looking at an empty space and seeing a stadium, the Longs envisioned more possibilities for the club’s new home: concerts, other sports events, like lacrosse and rugby, NCAA events and FIFA youth events. The complex will also include a pavilion area with restaurants that can remain open when events aren’t being held.
Want to boat to a game? The Longs have thought about that. They even arrived at the ceremony via a boat. A rope guided them up the rocky bank.
A streetcar’s arrival might come first. A Riverfront extension of existing line, to run off the City Market, is planned for 2025.
The stadium is the first to be constructed specifically for a women’s professional soccer team, and that has significance beyond the fact that the club will control the venue’s scheduling, branding and revenue from concessions. The Current, who have been playing at Sporting KC’s Children’s Mercy Park until their new home is open, see the forthcoming stadium as a recruiting tool.
“If you want to compete on a global basis for these incredible athletes you’re going to have to have something of this magnitude for them to want to come and be part of your team,” Chris Long said.
The same sentiment was expressed earlier this year when the Current dedicated their training facility in Riverside, just a few miles away from the new stadium site.
That facility and the new stadium could be used by another team — a national team when the World Cup comes to Kansas City in 2026. The Longs could see their structures activated if Kansas City becomes a base camp. FIFA officials were in Kansas City last weekend and visited the Current’s new training facility.
“Probably for events leading up to that, to really build momentum in Kansas City for the matches that will take place,” Chris Long said. “From our vantage point we want to do whatever we can to make it attractive to FIFA.”
Thursday, everything seemed possible for the Current and Kansas City.
This story was originally published October 6, 2022 at 8:16 PM with the headline "KC Current breaks ground on new downtown-area stadium and dreams big about the future."