Going Full Potemkin

PUBLISHED JULY 2025

Not since Chinese potentate Xi Jinping visited San Francisco two years ago has a city undertaken so shameless a makeover as Kansas City is undertaking right now. As the city prepares for the 2026 FIFA World Cup quarterfinals, Mayor Q—as in “Qatar”—Lucas has shifted into full Potemkin mode. The question, though, is whether soccer fans can be fooled as easily as a visiting head of state.

The most famously fooled head of state was Empress Catherine II of Russia. Hoping to impress the empress about the progress the nation had made under his supervision, Field Marshal Grigory Potemkin constructed a perfectly presentable village as flimsy as the set of a TV western. When Catherine journeyed to Crimea down the Dnieper River in 1787, Potemkin just moved the facade downriver one step ahead of the empress’s barge.

Potemkin only had to fool one person. Kansas City has to fool an estimated 650,000 coming to town for the six-game sequence, which will play out over three-plus weeks from mid-June to early July 2026. 

Soccer fans, of course, are a breed apart. For starters, they mistakenly call the game “football.” The British, who more or less invented soccer, began calling the game “soccer” as early as 1875 but eventually yielded to globalist pressure. America hung on to “soccer” mainly because no one here much cared.

According to KC’s official World Cup website, we had to import people who did care. The site tells us that the region would not have embraced soccer “if not for the efforts of early immigrants who fought for the beautiful game—before there were even soccer fields to play on.” 

Take that, Tom Homan.

A year from now, the city will be welcoming many more foreign visitors, not all of them well-behaved. In researching his 1990 classic Among the Thugs, American author Bill Buford spent a few seasons traveling with “supporters” of a British soccer team. Kirkus Reviews accurately called the book “a horrific and almost unbearably up-close look at British football (soccer) fan violence.” Yikes!

What keeps soccer fans on edge is that almost no one scores. Consider, for instance, the 2006 World Cup. In their slog to the championship, the Italians beat Ghana 3-0, the Czech Republic 2-0, tied the US 1-1, beat Australia 1-0, beat Ukraine 3-0, beat Germany 2-0, and tied France 1-1 in regulation. 

In the final against France, the French scored first on a penalty kick; Italy then scored following another penalty. After 90 minutes of play, the game ended 1-1. Extra time—please, not “overtime”—produced no further goals so, the game moved to the penalty shootout. In American terms, this would be like ending an NBA finals with a free-throw shooting contest. Italy won this contact-free skirmish 5-3. 

Fans tell me that penalty kicks are harder to make than free throws. They appear to be right. In the last 10 World Cups, players made 73 percent of their penalty kicks. NBA players, on average, make 75 percent of their free throws. Yes, much more difficult.

Fans also tell me that what matters is not the scoring but the skill and the strategy of the players. This may be so, but how to explain that in the 2022 World Cup finals, France went the first 70 minutes of the game without even taking a shot at the goal.

The fans coming to the city will come with high expectations. The city that visitors are being promised is a spectacular one. “Innovative, energetic, creative and welcoming, Kansas City is at the center of the map and the American story.” What is more, “It’s home to more than 100 barbecue restaurants, a collection of beloved jazz clubs and more working fountains than any city on earth outside of Rome.”

In the same spirit that the city stripped the name from the most celebrated of those fountains (hint: it’s on the Country Club Plaza), our Potemkins have erased the name of Arrowhead Stadium. Almost miraculously, this insensitively named relic, all but beyond repair just a year ago, has been reborn as “Kansas City Stadium”—an “iconic symbol of innovation” and an “architectural marvel.”

To move the fans to Kansas City Stadium and elsewhere, the city “is proud to be the first of the 16 Host Cities to announce the procurement of buses,” 200 in all. These buses will complement the city’s existing bus routes—and there’s the rub. Locals don’t ride the buses unless they have to. 

The fear of crime and general disorder has kept us in our cars. That fear is not ungrounded. In the first half of 2025, Kansas City had 87 homicides—or 17 for every 100,000 people. In that same period, New York City had 146 homicides—1.7 for every 100,000 people.

Nothing on the official website warns visitors that they have a 10-times-better chance of being murdered in Kansas City than they would in New York City. Do we not have an obligation to tell them?

It is not hard to imagine, say, a swarm of British thugs, angry at having lost an otherwise scoreless tie in a penalty shootout, running into a swarm of just generally angry Kansas City thugs. The website tells the visitors that the city has hired a “Director of Safety & Security.” It should tell them that our thugs come armed.

FIFA could help. What they could do, and at minimal cost, is to make the goals a little bigger. The goals are the same size they were when the rules were set in 1863. The goalies, however, are literally a foot taller on average and much more athletic.

Bigger goals would mean more scoring. More scoring would mean fewer penalty shootouts and less aggravation. Less aggravation would mean fewer fights. This solution won’t solve KC’s crime problem, but it would at least make the game more watchable and maybe keep a fan or two alive during their stay in our innovative, energetic, creative and welcoming city.