To make matters even more impressive, four nations chose Kansas City as their basecamp for the tournament: Algeria, Argentina, England and the Netherlands. “The Desert Foxes” of Algeria set up in Lawrence, igniting an unlikely love story made for a Disney movie, while the trio of Argentina, England and the Netherlands – three giants on the international soccer stage – chose to call Kansas City home.
It all presented an opportunity unlike anything this region had ever experienced before, and its arrival was no accident.
“I’ve been with the Chiefs since 2017 – so for almost 10 seasons – and this process was already underway when I started,” said Matt Kenny, Chiefs Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer. “There has not been a time since I’ve been here that the opportunity to host the World Cup wasn’t there.”
Indeed, the Chiefs and Kansas City as a whole had been working with FIFA long before North America was even awarded the World Cup back in 2018. At that time, any and all potential host cities were working together in an effort to bring the planet’s largest sporting event to the Western Hemisphere, but once the bid was secured, the work could really begin.
“That’s when the competition really started,” Kenny said. “We’ve been a part of the bidding process for many things, but nothing of this scale.”
Truly, it’s difficult to contextualize the grandeur that is the FIFA World Cup. An estimated five billion fans watched the 2022 World Cup. In other words, 62% of people from around the globe engaged with the tournament in some way. The average live audience throughout the event was 175 million people, and thousands more traveled to Qatar to witness matches in person.
This was the opportunity in front of Kansas City. It was a chance to bring a certain notoriety to this region that no other event possibly could, and unsurprisingly, The Kansas City Spirit was up to the task.
“When we hosted the FIFA delegation from Zurich and rolled out the red carpet, we had such a level of detail and thinking,” Kenny said. “We had VR imagery of what the stadium would look like, which nobody else did during the process. We showcased the city. We went all-in.”
Kenny and his team, in partnership with the Kansas City Sports Commission and numerous other stakeholders, presented a plan with gargantuan ambitions. GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, later to be known as Kansas City Stadium for the tournament, would drop from its normal capacity of 73,426 to approximately 69,000 in order to expand the playing surface to FIFA’s specifications and accommodate additional global media rightsholders. LED lights would be installed, and even the exact grading of the field would be adjusted.
Those were just a few of the logistical challenges contingent to a successful bid, and even if those were worked out, there were numerous other pitfalls that lay ahead.
That adversity aside, Kansas City possessed an advantage that no other potential host city could match: the will to get things done.
“There was a lot of learning along the way, but Kansas City as a region really came together so that we could showcase what makes this area so special,” Kenny explained. “A major part of our bid process was the hospitality to do whatever it took to make this happen.”