Four teams will call the K.C. area home during the tournament, including three top-10 teams with huge fanbases -- England, Argentina, the Netherlands and Algeria -- though in “many ways,” K.C. is “an unlikely choice,” according to Elizabeth Merrill of ESPN.com. It is the least populous of the 11 U.S. cities staging the World Cup, and it has never hosted the Olympics or a Super Bowl. The site England settled on “wasn’t even in FIFA’s catalog of training sites when the team visited.” But the city “harnessed its longtime investment in soccer, its location in the middle of the country and a thick layer of Midwestern hospitality and hustle to become the base-camp capital of the World Cup.” Holding the base camps and pulling off six matches and a FIFA Fan Festival in the heart of the city is a “tantalizing and daunting proposition” for K.C. Former Sporting KC exec Alan Dietrich concedes that the city has “never hosted anything close to this scale nor had teams with such rabid fanbases in town for such a sustained amount of time.” But he and other local organizers “have no doubt they can pull it off.” KC2026 CEO Pam Kramer said that the geographic location in the middle of the U.S. and halfway to the coasts “also factored in to why so many teams chose” to call K.C. home. A group from Visit KC traveled to the Netherlands and Argentina to introduce fans to K.C. and “build excitement for potential tourists.” Visit KC also “recently coordinated cultural training for the area’s restaurants and hotels” (ESPN.com, 5/19).
ICE ENFORCEMENT QUESTIONS: In K.C., Sofi Zeman wrote it is “still not publicly clear what federal immigration enforcement will look like” in K.C. in the metro this summer. The federal government has previously said that it is “tapping immigration enforcement officials to offer security during the major worldwide soccer event” that is making its way to K.C. and 10 other U.S. host cities. Despite local concerns, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t specified where people should expect to see ICE” in the K.C. metro during the World Cup. It also “didn’t say whether to expect an increased presence of immigration law enforcement officers or what that would look like.” ICE’s public affairs office noted that “DHS will partner with local and federal agencies to ‘secure the 2026 FIFA World Cup -- in line with federal law and the U.S. Constitution.’” KCKPD “will partner with local law enforcement agencies to help with staffing.” The department said that ICE “has not communicated its plans for during the World Cup with KCKPD” (K.C. STAR, 5/19).
