How did Kansas City lure 3 top-10 World Cup teams? Here’s the inside story
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- KC2026 wooed top teams with facility tours and intensive preparation.
- Organizers emphasized preparation and checked every detail to compete.
- Kansas City landed three top-10 base camps by prioritizing visitor needs.
Inside the private room of a Country Club Plaza steakhouse, top officials from the England national team contemplated their World Cup future.
Or, more specifically, their future home.
Still several months shy of the FIFA tournament’s draw, they’d made a half-dozen stops in Kansas City, touring practice facilities, hotel venues, even off-day entertainment.
But as they dined that night with their tour guides — former Sporting KC chief operating officer Alan Dietrich and team president and CEO Jake Reid — they had one final request.
It’s a tradition, they explained, that everyone involved in England’s World Cup get a tattoo.
So, they asked Dietrich and Reid, are you guys going to join?
The two men, a combined zero tattoos between them, turned to each other and laughed.
“We’re in.”
England.
And Argentina.
And the Netherlands.
Three global powerhouses will call Kansas City home this summer. And Algeria could soon join them 45 minutes west in Lawrence.
There is one metropolitan area scheduled to host base camps for more than one top-10 country.
Kansas City will host three.
Inside FIFA circles, they have begun using a new nickname for this flyover town: the base camp capital of the tournament.
If you’re wondering how that could happen — how Kansas City, not New York or Miami or Los Angeles, could become the preferred destination — well, the KC2026 group knew it couldn’t out-glitz-and-glamour the bright lights. But it wondered if it could at least out-prepare them.
They knew they were the underdog.
That’s always suited Kansas City just fine.
‘What about Swope?’
The tournament will send six World Cup matches to Arrowhead Stadium this summer. Argentina, the Netherlands and Algeria will all play matches here.
England will not.
The English team made six trips here in 2025 alone and asked FIFA for permission to book Kansas City before the draw came out. But the selection priority — proximity of group-stage matches took precedence for teams in the same pot — pushed Argentina and the Netherlands to the front of the line.
Kansas City was at full occupancy. England feared it was out.
But then it remembered Swope.
Out of curiosity, England officials wanted to know where Sporting KC would practice during the World Cup, considering the Major League Soccer club would be vacating its home at the Compass Minerals National Performance Center in Wyandotte County (where Argentina will hold its base camp).
During one of the tours, Dietrich showed them the Swope Soccer Village on the Missouri side.
Months later, after England was bumped by Argentina and the Netherlands for the KC location, representatives from the British team reached out again:
What about Swope?
It would put Sporting KC in a bind. The MLS team still doesn’t know where it will practice during the World Cup as Argentina moves into Compass and England into Swope.
But when Reid approached the Illig family, Sporting’s ownership, about the possibility, a question emerged.
“How can we not do this?” Reid said. “We can’t call ourselves the soccer capital of America if we kick out one of the top teams in the world.”
The foundation of the KC sales pitch
Alan Dietrich, the former Sporting KC COO-turned tour guide, drove his SUV down Interstate-70 a couple of months ago, four Argentina men’s national team officials his passengers.
For the past 18 months, Dietrich had welcomed nearly a dozen national teams to town.
This one? It felt like a long shot.
Initially.
The soccer world, even those on the inside, considered Argentina’s choice for its base camp location a foregone conclusion — surely they would pick Miami, right?
Their star, Lionel Messi, makes his MLS home in Miami, a city on the beach and a beacon of Latin American culture. The dots were pretty easy to connect.
But after a quick breakfast to start the trip, Dietrich could sense something: Possibility.
Could Kansas City pry the defending World Cup champions from Miami?
As he barreled toward the Sporting KC training facilities, the next stop on the tour, Dietrich fired off a text message, relaying everything he’d learned over breakfast that just might persuade Argentina to pick Kansas City — their training-facilities preferences, their hotel priorities, anything he felt useful.
He thought he’d snuck the text through discreetly while carrying on a light-hearted conversation. Until one of his passengers interrupted.
“Should we be worried that you’re driving with your knees?”
Outwardly, he laughed it off.
Inside, he considered the messages urgent.
Kansas City figured its best sales pitch centered on its facilities and its location in the heart of America. Every team that visited found that appealing.
But the foundation of the pitch rested on preparation. How could they make things as easy as possible for their visitors? How could they check every last box?
The KC2026 leadership used Kansas City’s small stature — relatively speaking, of course — as an advantage.
Who else needed this more?
“I think that’s what’s special about Kansas City,” said Kathy Nelson, the president and CEO of both Visit KC and the KC Sports Commission. “A lot of the feedback was, ‘My gosh, we were so well taken care of.’”
The Argentina officials left impressed with Kansas City.
And they left with a perfectly Kansas City story.
On their final day here, the group stopped at Jack Stack BBQ downtown. Between the four of them and Dietrich, they ordered five two-meat platters.
Gone.
They ordered every side item Jack Stack has on its menu.
Gone.
And then they ordered every dessert item on the menu.
Gone.
“They loved it,” Dietrich said.
They’ll have a chance for seconds.
Whatever it takes
The Netherlands’ first visit was perhaps the hardest to read.
Dietrich and the Kansas City tour guides left perplexed about how seriously they were being considered, even if they knew they were at least in the conversation.
The Netherlands officials clearly loved the pristine pitch at the KC Current’s facility in Riverside, along with its relative proximity to the airport.
Then, in a Zoom call to sort out what training logistics might look like at the Current training facility, team owners Angie and Chris Long emphasized their drive to support women’s sports.
Those on the call could sense it resonated.
“They take great pride in their women’s side, (which has) some of the best players in the world,” Chris Long said. “...I think they were attracted by the level of investment (here) and also the newness of it. This isn’t a facility that’s been around a long time. Everything’s new.”
Eleven teams visited Kansas City over the course of 18 months — Uruguay, Japan, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Austria, Korea, France, Argentina, Tunisia and Algeria.
Some still believe Kansas City might have been a couple of other countries’ top choice. KC could have played host to France this summer, for instance, if not for the location of France’s matches on the East Coast.
Maybe. Austria was interested, too.
The come-to-Kansas-City sales pitches weren’t one-size-fits-all.
They required adjustment.
A lot of it.
The Netherlands, England and Argentina, for example, chose three distinct hotels.
The Netherlands’ officials, who arrived with a literal printed sheet of hotel possibilities, prioritized a full-floor meeting space and wanted a location that would allow for a relaxing break. When Dietrich showed them Loose Park, they were sold.
Argentina needed a hotel away from skyscrapers that could accommodate the entire team on a single floor, with a particular room configuration. After a half-week tour, they didn’t settle on a hotel until their final stop on the final day.
England wanted lodging that could make them feel a little more like home. Their eventual choice will rent out the entire building — a building that also stopped renewing leases at an apartment property next door to create even more space.
“These hotels, even the ones that weren’t chosen, bent over backwards to put on a good presentation,” Dietrich said.
It wasn’t just the hotels.
It was the city.
England was very diligent with its vision. It was drawn to the player flow at Swope, where the team also plans to build a tent outside the facility that will allow them to put an equipment room outdoors and turn the indoor space into a player lounge.
Keen on mapping out every day in advance, even the off-days, England also toured local golf courses, Topgolf and La Casa del Padel, the place owned and operated by former Sporting KC players Graham Zusi, Roger Espinoza, Johnny Russell, Andreu Fontas and Uri Rosell and current player Daniel Salloi, along with engineer Jamie Mahoney.
Those places agreed to shut down to give the team access and privacy.
There are pools across Kansas City willing to do the same for a team or two.
“More than anything, I think what Kansas City — and Lawrence — showed them,” Dietrich said, “was just how much we cared.”
The long shots
Three months after FIFA selected Kansas City as a host city, Dietrich sent an email to his team with Sporting KC, recapping a meeting they’d had the previous day.
They’d built a preliminary pitch to sell World Cup qualifying teams on having their base camps locally. Dietrich attached a list of national teams they analyzed, though in a far right column, he cataloged a handful of teams separately:
“Important but unlikely.”
Two of the initial three teams in that pot:
Argentina.
England.
Important. But unlikely.
It once seemed so.
But those two teams — and thousands of their fans and likely tens of thousands for Argentina — will converge on Kansas City.
England will play its matches in Dallas, Boston and New York. And it’s still base-camping here.
Four years ago, Kansas City mapped out an effort to fight for these teams.
But those teams, in the end, fought for Kansas City.
This story was originally published February 13, 2026 at 11:30 AM.