Will KC really see 650,000 fans for the World Cup? One KCI stakeholder is not so sure

At Kansas City International Airport, signs, banners and slogans welcoming soccer fans to the 2026 FIFA World Cup — whose opening in mid-June is only weeks away — hang from the ceiling and are posted on every wall.

That fans will be heartily greeted is hardly in doubt.

What remains unclear, however, is how many of the oft-touted 650,000 will actually show.

One man who is beginning to worry is Richard Chinsammy, the vice president of the St. Louis-based OHM Concession Group, who on Tuesday moved about KCI as the prime subcontractor for the Vantage Airport Group and which operates the airport’s nearly 50 food concessions.

OHM also runs the concessions at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, with Atlanta being another World Cup city.

“Apprehensive,” Chinsammy said, summing up his feelings Wednesday, later altering them to “cautiously optimistic.”

“Concerns are: Are we going to get the traffic flow that we anticipated a year and a half ago?” Chinsammy said, as he enumerated and echoed multiple reasons being heard nationwide for why crowd may not rise to expectations.

Tickets, hotels, exorbitant costs

Chief among them: The price of World Cup match tickets and the price of housing, meaning hotels and short-term rentals — all of which have skyrocketed to multiples of what fans in 2022 paid for tickets and lodging at the last World Cup held in Qatar.

“Tickets are insane. Have you looked online?” Chinsammy said.

Complaints about tickets for month-long tournament being held in the United States, Canada and Mexico have become so fierce that in March, they became the subject of an 18-page complaint filed with the European Commission.

In Kansas City, remaining first-round match tickets on StubHub for the Argentina v. Algeria match on June 16 range from $1,000 to $33,000. Tickets for the quarterfinal match on July 11 are currently listed at between $2,000 and $90,000.

In Kansas City, hotel rooms that would normally go for $200 to $250 a night were, as early as December, being priced between $500 to $700 a night. At that time, major hotels in the city said they were booked for nearly the entire tournament run.

But a search of booking sites shows that rooms are still available — a sign that the fans are either waiting for prices to drop or may not be amassing on Kansas City in the number first projected. And prices have, indeed, dropped.

Rooms surrounding the first match day, on June 16, were still available at the La Quinta Inn & Suites in Olathe for $220 a night. Great Wolf Lodge was booking at $322 nightly during the first round. The Kansas City Marriott Downtown was at $413.

Trump and $15,000 bonds

Chinsammy wonders if geopolitics tensions may also lower fan turnout.

In August 2025, the Trump administration, as part of its broad crackdown on illegal immigration, announced the start of a ”Visa Bond Pilot Program” — effective Aug. 20, 2025 to Aug. 5, 2026 — that would require residents of 50 foreign countries to post bonds of between $5,000 to $15,000 to enter to the United States. The money is to be returned once the visa holder departs the U.S..

The list of 50 includes five countries set to play in the World Cup: Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and Algeria, whose team the chose Lawrence, Kansas., to be its home base during the tournament. The list also includes Venezuela and Nicaragua.

“I’m not trying to be political,” Chinsammy said. “But the simple fact that travelers are going to have to pay a bond to come into the U.S.: That’s challenging, right? You think about Latin American countries. They can’t put $15,000 down and then hope to get it back.”

Jackson Overstreet, the public information officer the Kansas City Aviation Department, said that the city is anticipating that June and July will rank as the busiest time in the history of the airport.

Chinsammy, however, noted that Kansas City is not a one-stop destination for international travelers. KCI added non-stop flights from Buenos Aires, Curacao and Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic during the tournament.

But, otherwise, no international flights fly direct to Kansas City, a fact that could make other World Cup cities — such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Seattle — easier and more accessible to fans.

‘The worst perfect storm’

For his own part, Chinsammy was at KCI Wednesday to consider logistics including staffing. Word that massive crowds are coming, he said, has prompted more than a few of the airport’s food service employees to quit their jobs, at least temporarily.

Airport food employees, he said, earn union wages, more than $15 an hour. But the demand for workers during the World Cup at bars and restaurants in and around Kansas City has grown so great that some workers are being offered premium pay.

“Staffing is becoming a major challenge,” he said. “We’re hearing that outside vendors” — meaning outside the airport — “are paying in the high twenties per hour for food service workers. We’re not getting people and we’re losing some people. I think some people are saying, ‘Let me go on the street and get a job, because I can come back after the summer and get my job back.”

Chinsammy said he wants the predictions to be correct, and for fans to swarm to Kansas City just as expected.

Still, he wonders.

“It’s almost like the worst perfect storm you can think of,” he said. “Gas prices are going up. You got people who cannot afford the niceties of life anymore. Are they going to go spend the exorbitant ticket prices to go see a match? Will they? Can they? Should they?

“ I don’t know.”