Kansas City ramps up bid to host games at Arrowhead during 2026 World Cup
The quest to bring a World Cup to Kansas City secured the alignment of prominent local sports and government figures.
Nearly a dozen of them have formed an executive committee as the bid for the 2026 World Cup reaches its final stage.
Kansas City is one of 17 finalist cities in the United States to host 2026 World Cup matches. If KC is awarded games, they would played at Arrowhead Stadium. Ten cities will be picked for selection, an announcement expected to arrive in late 2020. Each site will likely host between 5-7 matches.
The 11-person executive bid committee is Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt; Sporting KC principal owner Cliff Illig; Doug Bach, Unified Government and Kansas City, Kanas county administrator; Lynn Berling-Manuel, United Soccer Coaches CEO; Jason Fulvi, VisitKC president and CEO; Shane Hackett, Heartland Soccer Association executive director; Matt Kenny, Chiefs vice president of stadium services and events; Donna Maize, Kansas City, Missouri assistant city manager; Kathy Nelson, Kansas City Sports Commission and Foundation president and CEO; Joe Reardon, Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce president and CEO; and Jake Reid, Sporting KC president and CEO.
The 2026 World Cup will be played across North America, including Canada and Mexico. Sixty of the 80 games will be played in the United States, including every match from the quarterfinals onward. Kansas City is not in the running to host the championship or semifinal matches.
Its Midwest location could play in Kansas City’s favor. No other finalist is within a seven-hour drive of Arrowhead Stadium. Absent its selection, a noticeable hole would remain in the heart of the country.
“When you start to compile all these aspects of Kansas City, I think we feel very bullish about the opportunity,” Reid said during a news conference last year.
The newly formed committee named David Ficklin the executive director for the bid. Ficklin spent 11 years as vice president of development for Sporting Kansas City, placed in charge of the construction of Children’s Mercy Park and Pinnacle, the club’s new training facility that opened last year. Even though games would be contested at Arrowhead, the committee will use Sporting’s facilities as marketing tools in its bid.
“The Kansas City metropolitan area has built over $400 million in soccer facilities over the past decade, but more importantly, we have really been the thought leaders in innovative ways to grow the game of soccer,” Ficklin said in a news release. “With that background, we look forward to using the excitement of our bid to continue to implement new and creative ways to bring the sport to thousands of new players and fans of all ages.”
All of the potential landing spots have been approved by FIFA, though Arrowhead Stadium would likely need some adjustments to host the 2026 tournament, which will be the first World Cup to expand to 48 teams. Ficklin said Arrowhead Stadium would likely need to be trimmed to a rectangle shape rather than the existing curvature along the corners, requiring the temporary removal of some of the football stadium’s seats.
“That’s absolutely in consideration,” Chiefs president Mark Donovan said last year. “This isn’t about changing the stadium for a match. It’s about changing the stadium and then changing it back. Clearly, in 2026, we’re going to have some preparation discussions with our season-ticket members who are in those seats that may be affected by it. There are a lot of discussions about stadium renovations as a whole. So all that will factor into it.”
The other American sites still on the short list are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York/New Jersey, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
This story was originally published March 7, 2019 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Kansas City ramps up bid to host games at Arrowhead during 2026 World Cup."