KC 2026 World Cup organizers say ‘we’ve got some work to do’ | Opinion

It takes a lot to bring an Olympics-size event to town. That’s what World Cup 2026 will be to Kansas City when potentially six matches and a huge fan festival touch down here next June.

But will Kansas City be ready? The members of KC2026 must answer this before fans — local, national and international — swarm the metropolitan area. To find out, The Kansas City Star Editorial Board sat down with KC2026 CEO Pam Kramer, Chief Operating Officer Lindsey Douglas and their communication team.

“We’ll be ready, but we’ve got some work to do between now and (June 2026). I think it’s important because every single day matters, right?” Kramer said, adding that soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and the World Cup is the largest sporting competition in the world.

“It really dwarfs the Olympics and the Super Bowl in terms of viewership and popularity.”

With this in mind, one thing we must consider is how Kansas City will accommodate the 650,000 people KC2026 expects to come over the course of the World Cup — from June 16 to July 11. This includes ticketed and nonticketed fans, but also officials, guests, sponsors, dignitaries and celebrities.

Six hundred fifty thousand. That’s three times the equivalent of the maximum capacities of many of our stadiums and open spaces: GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium (76,014), Kaufmann Stadium (37.903), Children’s Mercy Park (25,000), T-Mobile Arena (20,000), the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s north and southeast lawns (20,000) and CPKC Stadium (11,500).

Kansas City is known for showing out and showing off — rightly so with our championship Chiefs — but we have to get this one right. And so, we will continue to follow this important event all the way up to the opening in roughly 450 days. For now, we’ll focus on three areas of concern that we believe rise to the top: public safety and crowd management, transportation and legacy.

Public safety and crowds

Before we get into this, let’s see where the crowds will be. Matches will be played at Arrowhead. The fan festival will be at the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s lawns. Team base camps are still to be determined but likely will use existing soccer training facilities.

We as a board are not trying to paint international soccer fans with broad strokes, but we do believe there should be a conversation on crowd behavior expectations. Kansas City’s memory of a fatal shooting at last year’s celebration of the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win is still fresh. And sadly, World Cup fans have gotten wildly and violently out of control in recent history.

COO Douglas agreed, and said KC2026 is looking at public safety and crowd control. She said the group is sending law enforcement experts in the region to a European soccer match to look at crowd behavior.

“Our law enforcement community as well as the federal agencies are trying to build what that fan profile is, what is their behavior?” Douglas said.

Some behaviors they are looking at, for example, is whether they march to the match.

“If we have a team whose fan base is used to marching to the match, that’s going to be very difficult with the way that our stadium is situated. People aren’t going to be able to march down I-70, right? And so, how can we prepare law enforcement, prepare operationally for what those fan needs are?”

Douglas said they are trying to think about alternatives, for example, having a march from the stadium bus mall to inside the stadium. “Maybe that’ll be a good accommodation there, but we’re just trying to think of preparing law enforcement for those actions, for that fan behavior. It is something that we are very aggressive and already starting to do and really working with those other countries.”

We’re told KC2026 is working with consulates from some of the countries that are likely to qualify for the World Cup. “They want to make sure that their citizens are known and understood as well. And so they’re providing us information. FIFA has a lot of information that they’ve provided as well,” Douglas said.

We won’t know exactly who the teams are and who will play whom until December. Both Kramer and Douglas said that information is important for planning purposes.

“We’re thinking about it from a small business perspective as well. How are we going to communicate to restaurants that people have a tipping culture or don’t have a tipping culture so that the industries can kind of accommodate some of those cultural differences as well,” Douglas said.

Kramer agreed. “We can really start to focus in on what are their fan customs, what is the culture. … How do we make sure people know who’s coming and what their customs and expressions look like?

Transportation

Getting people to where they want or need to be is a part of crowd management and public safety, with more than a half-million people expected over the course of the monthlong World Cup. KC2026 is excited about one important part: buses.

Kansas City was the first host city to secure leases for 200 buses for use during the World Cup here, Kramer said. When KCATA Vice-Chair Jason Sims was appointed as Director of Transportation of KC2026 last year, he told The Star the buses were a priority.

“We need a minimum of 200 buses, and we’ll have the ability to surge in either direction,” Sims said. “We’re going to be moving spectators from a lot of different places and different types of buses will be more economical and efficient depending on where we’re moving people.”

The bus dream came through, and being first was cost-effective for Kansas City and for KC2026, who is paying for them, Douglas said.

Cost effective for whom? Will riders have to pay a fee? Kramer said they are looking at several different models, including a World Cup transportation pass.

“You’re coming to visit and you pay a fee and you can use the park and ride, you can use our service, you can use ATA and perhaps we can help offset some of their incremental operating needs because of World Cup. So the team is looking at different models around that and how we balance all of it.”

Another important aspect is parking. There is no scenario where there will be enough parking for everyone who wants to drive to matches or the fan festival. Douglas told us to think of park-and-ride.

“We really want to get folks comfortable with the idea of a park-and-ride system and a network of moving people in and out of the stadium. For KC 2026, we really need to build out a system that’s going to move folks again from downtown to the stadium. And then we’re also looking at how can this network serve for regional connectivity related to moving people to points of interest in and around the region,” she said.

Legacy

What lasting impact will hosting the World Cup 2026 leave on our city? During our talk, Kramer said the committee was about six months away from announcing its legacy pillar. While encouraging, we cannot ignore that Kansas City is behind the eight ball compared to some other host cities and their legacy initiatives.

For example, next month, Los Angeles will announce the recipients of its host committee’s 26 Champions grant program. There, 26 nonprofit organizations will receive $26,000 grants to further their mission to improve physical, mental and emotional health for young people through soccer.

Farther north in California, the Bay Area Host Committee plans to transform access to sports across that region through its Sports for All initiative. According to the BAHC’s website, “this community-focused program will support nine interconnected sports hubs, one in each Bay Area County, that will become venues for year-round programming, leadership training, and enhanced connectivity to major sporting events coming to the region.”

And in Seattle, its nonprofit organizing committee has identified six legacy pillars that would impact that city long after World Cup ‘26 has ended. Those pillars are:

• accessibility
• human rights
• sustainability
• children
• community
• culture

“We are designing a FWC26 experience that is rooted not only in the values we share — reflected in the 6 Legacy Pillars that drive our work — but in how we will present the games with an inclusive, celebratory energy that captures our spirit and creates lasting memories,” the host committee’s website reads.

Visit the Kansas City committee’s website, and you will not find a legacy plan — yet.

“So, how do we make sure that after the World Cup is gone that what’s left here in the community, not just infrastructure, but way of working, way of thinking about transportation, way of regionally operating is changed,” Kramer said.

In thinking about legacy, there are two conversations happening — one is a “sticks and bricks” idea and one that surrounds transportation. Kramer has a lofty goal: changing mass transit use.

“We don’t have time to build another street car route between now and the World Cup, but can we get more people to use mass transit during the World Cup? And then can we increase the likelihood that they would use it moving forward?

“There are some cities who are focused on soccer pitches,” Kramer said. “What we hear from jurisdictions in the soccer community is we have plenty of pitch space in Kansas City. Maintaining those is really expensive. We don’t need to build new pitches. Perhaps we talk about access to play, and play equity and some of those ideas. So, those are the conversations that our board is having right now.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2025 at 1:16 PM.