Let’s unpack Kansas City’s World Cup visitor projections | Opinion
The big number is 650,000.
That’s the figure attached to Kansas City’s World Cup: 650,000 visitors. It comes from FIFA and Visit KC, and it’s being repeated in just about every piece of media attached to this event.
But there’s an asterisk attached to that number. Literally.
Scan the fine print on the KC2026 website, and it’s characterized this way: “Visit KC estimates 650,000 unique visits based on total visitor days during the duration of the event in the KC area. A ‘visitor day’ is defined as one visitor spending one day (day/overnight) in the destination.”
I had to make some calls and send some emails to figure out what exactly that means. I think I get it now.
The 650,000 “unique visits” is derived from a projected 2.1 million visitor days across the Kansas City region during the tournament window.
If you fly in from Argentina and stay for nine days, that’s nine visitor days. If you drive in from Omaha and spend three nights here, that counts as three visitor days. If you go back to Omaha but return a few weeks later for another game and stay for a night, your total count of visitor days would bump up to four. And so on.
Based on Visit KC’s projections, that will add up to 2.1 million visitor days.
We get to 650,000 unique visits by dividing those 2.1 million visitor days by an assumed length of stay. The math implies Visit KC believes that average to be a little over three days: 2.1 million visitor days divided by 650,000 visits comes out to roughly 3.2 days per person.
Both the people who make these projections and the people who critique them seem to agree this is standard practice. “Visitor days” are used because they give planners a better sense of demand on transit, public safety, hotel rooms, logistics and other city services — the daily volume of people moving through a place.
The 650,000 figure is the public-facing version of that number — a translation of those visitor days into something that sounds like a headcount. It’s technically a pretty hinky number, but then again, so are projections in general.
Behind the assumptions
But what about all those underlying assumptions? What are they actually based on?
“This projection was developed by Visit KC, informed by FIFA host-city planning materials, international benchmarks from past large-scale sporting events, Kansas City-specific travel & lodging trends, and KC’s hotel and transportation capacity,” Visit KC spokesperson Devin Aaron told me.
I asked Visit KC how they arrived at the average length of stay being about three days. I was told it is a “blended average” based on three types of visitor profiles:
1. People who drive in from around the region (Omaha, Tulsa, small towns in neighboring states and so on). These visitors are presumed to have shorter stays centered around match days. They are expected to be the largest share of visitors. “If you’re in the U.S. and want to see a World Cup match and you’re not on the coast, you’re coming to KC,” KC2026 CEO Pam Kramer told The Star’s editorial board last year. “Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Tulsa. Those fans are coming here.” (I might quibble about Tulsa, which is roughly the same distance from KC as Dallas, which is a major host city, and which has more in common culturally with Tulsa than KC.)
2. People who fly in from other parts of the country. These visitors are presumed to be “extending their stays slightly beyond a single match.”
3. International visitors, a “smaller, but high-impact share who typically stay longer and spend more per day,” according to Aaron. They are more likely to attend multiple matches and the Fan Fest events put on by FIFA.
Beyond that, details are limited.
Visit KC did not provide a breakdown of how many visitors fall into each category or how those groups are weighted. It also does not have access to FIFA ticketing data, which makes it difficult to estimate how many visitors will attend matches versus those coming for surrounding events.
“We expect a meaningful share of visitors will not attend a match during their time here, instead participating in FIFA Fan Fest, watch parties, and other citywide activations,” Aaron said.
They would have to, in order to justify these numbers.
Kansas City will host six matches at Arrowhead Stadium, which will have a slightly diminished capacity during the World Cup of about 67,000 seats. Six matches multiplied by 67,000 seats puts us at right around 400,000 tickets.
Even in the most generous scenario, where every ticket belongs to a different out-of-town visitor, that leaves about 250,000 additional visits needed to reach the 650,000 figure. In reality, some fans will attend multiple matches, and some ticket holders will be local, which means the number of non-stadium visits required is likely higher.
In other words, Visit KC is betting heavily on people choosing to come to Kansas City for everything happening around the matches — Fan Fest, watch parties and the broader atmosphere — not just the games themselves.
Skeptics have their say
That seems unlikely, according to Victor Matheson, a professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies the economics of major sporting events.
“There is an extraordinarily small number of people who will spend $500 for a plane ticket and $300 or more per night for a hotel stay just to go to a watch party in Kansas City,” Matheson said. “And they certainly won’t spend an average of three days doing that.”
He said he expects the June 16 Argentina-Algeria match at Arrowhead to be a big draw.
“Argentina has probably the greatest player of all time on their team — it’ll attract Argentinians and a lot of general soccer fans,” Matheson said. “But four days later it’s Ecuador versus Curacao. Do we really think that 40,000 people are going to come to Kansas City just to be here at the same time a match is being played that they’re not even attending?”
Matheson said the projections would make more sense if they included locals — the kind of people who might drive in from Overland Park for a Fan Fest or watch party. But Visit KC says its estimates exclude residents.
He also cast doubt on the idea that teams with base camps in the region — there are four — will meaningfully boost tourism.
“It’s not like you can watch them practice in these facilities,” Matheson said. “It’s hard to believe a significant amount of fans will show up and stay here just because their favorite team happens to be training and working out in the area.”
‘Complicated calculus’ of fans, travel
Also, World Cup travel tends to move in waves. In the group stage, teams play every three to four days in different cities, and many fans follow that schedule — arriving shortly before a match and leaving soon after for the next stop.
While Kansas City will draw large crowds on match days, Matheson said it’s unlikely to serve as a multi-day home base for many international visitors.
“I love KC, it’s a fine city,” he said. “But if you’re from Europe and following your team around, and you don’t get to the U.S. very often, are you going to spend your off days in Kansas City when you could be traveling to a bigger tourism destination?”
Neil deMause, who writes the Field of Schemes blog, which is reliably skeptical of public subsidies for sports teams and events, said projections like this often miss a more basic question: How many of these visitors are actually new?
Some would have come anyway — they’re just choosing to visit during the World Cup instead of another time.. Others may stay away entirely, either to avoid crowds or because hotels and prices spike during the event.
“You wind up with this complicated calculus,” deMause said. “It’s not just how many people are coming for the World Cup. It’s how many people aren’t coming because of it.”
That substitution effect has shown up in past mega-events. During the 2012 London Olympics, major museums lost more than a million visitors because fears of crowds and higher travel costs kept typical summer tourists from coming. Retail declined, too. “The feel good factor from the Olympics failed to inspire spending,” the British Retail Consortium reported at the time.
Without a clear view into the assumptions behind the projections, deMause said, it’s difficult to know what to make of the final number.
“These numbers could be based on something real, or they could be based on some garbage algorithm,” he said. “We just don’t know.”
The Trump factor
The larger geopolitical climate must also be weighed.
“I think these numbers are too optimistic in general,” Matheson said, “but they’re even more optimistic given the fact that the Trump administration is making the U.S. as unfriendly as it can to as many countries as possible.”
Two countries scheduled to play matches in Kansas City — Algeria and Tunisia — are among those whose citizens could be subject to a U.S. “repatriation bond” of up to $15,000. The policy, revived and expanded under President Donald Trump, allows the government to require financial guarantees from travelers deemed likely to overstay visas. With the tournament less than two months away, there’s still no clear indication whether it will be waived for teams, staff, or fans. If not, it would certainly dissuade fans from those countries from coming.
The war in Iran, instigated by Trump, has spiked jet fuel prices, increasing the cost of summer vacation flights, which could stifle. And there is unquestionably also just a general sense that the U.S. is not a hospitable place for foreigners under this president. Take your pick as to the reasons why: Trump’s past travel bans on several Muslim-majority countries, his description of some nations as “shithole countries,” his increasingly frequent public clashes with allied governments, and more recently the unhinged and at times violent actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement against immigrants — including fatal shootings during enforcement operations that sparked protests across the country.
“I think you have to wonder whether the World Cup is going to run into real issues with overseas visitors,” said deMause. “There are a lot of people who either don’t want to come to the U.S. right now or are afraid to.”
I asked Visit KC about this, twice. Both times, the response was the same: Yes, these factors are being considered. “We continue to monitor all elements and travel data to inform our estimates.”
But those estimates have not changed. They remain 650,000 visitors.
Pardon me — “unique visits.”
