Dutch journalist believes the World Cup in KC could help women’s soccer
Like representatives of the teams themselves, journalists from other countries are visiting Kansas City to get a lay of the land ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
Dutch soccer writer Jaap de Groot, who will be covering the World Cup for the 13th time in his career, was in town Monday. He’ll be covering the Netherlands men’s team, which will have a base camp at the Kansas City Current facilities. The Netherlands also will play a group-stage game at Arrowhead Stadium.
De Groot, who is the editor of Sporting Voetbal, believes the decision to train at the Current’s facilities could have a positive impact in the Netherlands.
The women’s Eredivisie league is planning to cut back from 12 teams to 10 after this season, per reports from the Netherlands.
The Current plays in the first stadium built for a women’s professional soccer team and has a top-notch training facility in Riverside. Fans in the Netherlands will see what it looks like when money is invested in women’s sports.
“This World Cup will put Kansas City on the map, and a very good element of it will be that in Holland, at the moment, the Women’s Soccer League is really struggling,” de Groot told me. “They can’t get it going. A lot of it has to do with mismanagement.
“But if you look how the KC Current is organized, and now your best and well-known men’s team is going to use the facility of a women’s franchise. That will make a lot of people in Holland think, ‘OK, what is this?’ So it could be a good example, and they can learn quite a lot of building up and reorganizing the women’s league.”
Wouldn’t it be really cool if the Netherlands training at the Current facility helped the Dutch women’s league?
This story was originally published March 3, 2026 at 9:58 AM.
