KC can expect another passionate World Cup fan base in the city this week
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- Esteban Suárez predicts his restaurant will be very crowded with Colombia playing in KC.
- Many Colombian fans planned to visit Kansas City for Colombia’s match.
- Tartaretas Burger extended closing times for late games and staff wore jerseys.
Esteban Suárez, the manager at Tartaretas Burger in Lenexa, offered a prediction for his restaurant and Friday night’s World Cup Round of 32 match at Kansas City Stadium (aka Arrowhead).
Those locations are in different states and located 20 miles apart, but there is a connection.
“It’s going to be very crowded here,” Suárez said Sunday night in the Colombian restaurant. “There are a lot of people coming from Colombia and there are a lot of people from Colombia in the United States.”
And many of them are planning to visit KC to attend Colombia’s match against Ghana in the knockout stages — or just be around the fun.
I bumped into Francisco Trujillo of Dallas ahead of Saturday’s Algeria-Austria match at Arrowhead, and he wore his yellow Colombia soccer jersey despite green and red being the prevalent colors of the night. He echoed Suárez’s prediction.
“We’re coming,” Trujillo said. “We are coming.”
There were huge Colombia crowds at Guadalajara, Mexico City and Miami for the team’s group-stage matches. And, if you’ve walked around Kansas City’s Fan Festival, you’ve likely seen some Colombian fans as I have.
They will bring one trait to KC.
“Passion. We’re all passionate,” Trujillo said. “We love Colombia, like it unites us. We just had like a pretty divided election last week, and this just squashes all that and brings everybody together.”
Abelardo “El Tigre” De La Espriella won the country’s presidential election a few weeks ago over Iván Cepeda, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security said. It noted there was a deep polarization and violence in Colombia around the election result, which was razor-thin.
But no one will be talking about that this week in Kansas City.
A teen fan at Tartaretas Burger noted: “It’s really different stuff about soccer and politics, that’s really not the same thing.”
Ahead of a group-stage match last week, the restaurant was full and the workers all wore Colombian soccer jerseys.
A day after one match, the restaurant had sold out of nearly all of its beer.
“We usually close at 10, but because of the game(s being played) too late, then we close (when) the game ends. And the games that we have won, we don’t close until probably 12, 12:30, as people stay celebrating,” Suárez said.
“We have some customers that just walk in and they’re ordering to go, and then they start looking at the people here yelling and getting so emotional, and ... they see all the crazy stuff that we do, we jump and all that stuff. So I think they usually to stay with us because of the environment.”
And that’s the environment we can expect in Kansas City.
This story was originally published June 29, 2026 at 11:29 AM.
