Where does World Cup quarterfinal rank among Kansas City’s biggest sports events?
There hasn’t been a Super Bowl or Olympic Games in Kansas City, but the Heart of America has served as the host for many other major sporting events. And with a new stadium on the way, the Super Bowl box may one day be checked.
Six AFC Championship Games, four World Series, three baseball All-Star games, 10 Final Fours ... plenty of sports history has been written here.
How does a FIFA World Cup quarterfinal contest compare?
More worldwide attention will be focused on FIFA’s last match of the quarterfinal round, a match between Argentina and Switzerland at Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday, than anything that has involved the Chiefs, Royals or the colleges.
Television audience numbers support this. The Chiefs played in the most-watched sporting event ever in the U.S., when some 128 million viewers tuned in for their Super Bowl LIX loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, according to Nielsen.
Audience figures for this year’s World Cup aren’t available, but for the 2022 event in Qatar, FIFA reported the average global audience for a game was 175 million and the France-Argentina title match was viewed by 1.42 billion.
Saturday’s game will be huge. Kansas City has been there before with its sporting events, and instead of a stab at ranking the most significant sports moments, let’s break it down by sport:
Chiefs/NFL
Take your pick of the AFC Championship Game six-pack, played over a seven-year span.
Mine is the triumph over the Cincinnati Bengals for the 2022 title, ending a three-game series losing streak and avenging the loss in the previous year’s AFC title game. The Chiefs went on to defeat the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII.
Royals/MLB
Two of the Royals’ four World Series appearances reached a Game 7, both in Kansas City: the victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in 1985 and loss to San Francisco Giants in 2014.
How much has the audience for baseball changed? In 1985, some 42 million watched the Royals put away the Cards. In 2014, it was 23.5 million.
College basketball
Kansas City is where Bill Russell won the first of his 13 college/NBA championship when the San Francisco Dons defeated La Salle in 1955. Also at Municipal Auditorium, John Wooden won the first of his 10 titles at UCLA, and North Carolina’s 1957 triple-overtime victory over Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain was the first title game to attract significant media attention.
But for sheer drama, no game among the 10 Final Fours in KC tops the most recent one. In 1988, Danny Manning and the Miracles from Kansas, a No. 6 seed, shocked top-seeded Oklahoma at Kemper Arena.
College football
An easy call. Missouri’s 36-28 victory over Kansas in the 2007 regular-season finale, a game in which the winner would be ranked No. 1, was the first Border War played at Arrowhead Stadium.
The second-largest crowd in stadium history (80,357) and most-watched regular-season game that year made Kansas City the center of the college football universe.
Auto racing/NASCAR
This one grew in significance because of the ending. The 2024 AdventHealth 400 at Kansas Speedway went 268 laps, an extra one because of overtime, and pit crew members for Chris Buescher’s No. 17 Ford team leaped the wall in a victory celebration. The scoreboard had flashed victory.
But after a photo finish, it was determined Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet had crossed the line first, by .001 second, the closest finish in NASCAR history. (Hat tip, Randy Covitz.)
Golf
Kansas City hasn’t played host to a major, but fields for Tom Watson’s Children’s Mercy Classic charity events, played for a quarter-century until 2004, were star-studded. None brighter than 2002. That’s when Watson joined Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino and Gary Player — 48 majors among them — at Blue Hills County Club for an 18-hole skins game.
Attendance was capped at 4,200 and tickets went for $1,500 on the secondary market.
Tennis
In 1991, Kemper was the site of a Davis Cup semifinal, matching the United States against Germany. Andre Agassi led the way with two victories as the U.S. prevailed 3-2.
This was the second visit to Kansas City for the “World Cup of tennis.” In 1928, Bill Tilden helped the U.S. defeat China 5-0 in a semifinal played at the Rockhill Tennis Club.