Kansas City International

The chants came in Dutch and Spanish, in Arabic and German, in the universal language of grown men weeping when their team’s run ends on foreign soil. For more than a month, Arrowhead—the FIFA-decreed “Kansas City Stadium” for the duration—is playing host to the world. Six matches. Four group-stage games. A Round of 32. A quarterfinal on July 11 that will send one nation a step closer to lifting the trophy in New York and another home to grieve.

Hotels benefitting from the Country Club Plaza to the Legends. Restaurants doing the kind of business that ends a long workweek with a sigh of gratitude. The Fan Festival drawing crowds nightly to the lawn at the National WWI Museum and Memorial—an apt setting, given that the world was, again, gathering peaceably in KC.

This was supposed to be the heavy lift. The audition. The proof that a metro of 2.4 million, plopped down in the middle of the continent, could absorb a global event and not embarrass itself in front of hundreds  of thousands of travelers as well as an international television audience numbering in the billions. By any honest accounting, we passed. Buses ran. The new KCI terminal—opened in February 2023 and built precisely for moments like this one—handled the inbound surge without the meltdowns that afflict older airports. Police and emergency planners cooperated across two states and a half-dozen jurisdictions and managed, in the main, to avoid the sort of organizational pratfall that makes for bad CNN segments.

So here is the question that ought to be sitting on the desk of every civic leader, every corporate citizen and every elected official within a 90-minute drive of the Truman Sports Complex:

Why not Kansas City?

We just hosted the world. Why not host it again, and potentially bigger? Why not host it every year, in one form or another, until “global destination” stops being aspirational marketing rhetoric and starts being a description of fact?

I believe it’s prime time for bold thinking and to leverage the World Cup event and take action. One historic assembly on the afternoon of January 31, 2003 at the offices of Blackwell Sanders and co-sponsored by Burns & McDonnell, Ingram’s Regional Transportation Industry Outlook was held and with the help of MO Sen. Harry Wiggins, we recruited U.S. Sen. Kit Bond (MO) and Pat Roberts (KS) to co-chair the assembly which included 35 of the most powerful executives in bi-state transportation. What resulted was bi-state collaboration and massive investment in infrastructure. Ironically, after the reception I visited with Sen. Bond and asked if I may share a bold idea and he appeared enthusiastically interested. I rolled out my blueprints for a statewide bid to host the Summer Olympics in Missouri,  for 2008 or maybe 2012. The plan included international flight access to Kansas City and St. Louis connected by a bullet train along I-70 and the epicenter of the games would be hosted at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Sen. Bond rolled up the plans and said he was taking them to Washington. I haven’t seen them since but the concept represents the kind of bold thinking I believe this region should flex.  

In the KC region especially the infrastructure piece is no longer hypothetical. We have a new airport built for this. We will have, by the start of the 2031 NFL season, a new $3 billion fixed-roof stadium rising in Wyandotte County—a domed venue that, unlike open-air Arrowhead Stadium, can host indoor events 12 months a year regardless of weather. Think about what that unlocks. A Super Bowl in February. A men’s or women’s Final Four in March or April. A College Football Playoff or Championship. NCAA wrestling finals. International basketball. The kind of marquee concerts that until now have routed themselves through Dallas, Atlanta and Minneapolis without giving KC a second thought.

It unlocks something larger than sport. A 65,000-seat, climate-controlled venue with convention-grade hospitality infrastructure already going up around it puts Kansas City, for the first time in more than half a century, in the conversation for a Democratic or Republican National Convention. The 2032 cycle is not far away. Site-selection committees for both parties will begin their reconnaissance in earnest within the next 12 to 24 months. Charlotte has hosted one. Milwaukee. Tampa. Cleveland. Cities our size, our profile, our political temperament. The notion that Kansas City cannot host a major party convention is a notion built on a Kansas City that no longer exists.

The temptation, having pulled off the World Cup, will be to exhale. To congratulate ourselves and slide back into the comfortable middle-American assumption that the truly big events belong to other, larger, more glamorous places. That would be a mistake on the order of the one Jackson County voters made in 2024, when they sent the Chiefs and Royals shopping for new homes—a self-inflicted wound whose costs will compound for generations.

The opposite instinct is the right one. Press the advantage. Bid for the conventions. Bid for the Final Fours. Bid, when the moment comes, for a Super Bowl in the new stadium’s inaugural season. Build the case file now, while the World Cup is fresh, while the international media has had a month to discover that Kansas City barbecue is not a marketing gimmick and that the people here are, in fact, as friendly as the brochures advertise.

The world just came to Kansas City. The world is leaving impressed. The only question that matters now is whether we have the institutional nerve to keep inviting it back.

Why not?

PUBLISHED JUNE 2026