Missouri Sports:

There is a good argument to be made that the Show-Me State is indeed demonstrating a power flex with the growing appeal and influence in the sport that—by a wide margin—draws more fans than any other. On four continents—Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia—the sport draws from a combined fan base of 3.5 billion people, with 250 million active players (professional and amateur/recreational).

This year, Missouri upped its game by earning designation as a host city for the FIFA 2026 World Cup series, with Kansas City beating out far larger U.S. sites for an honor that officials call, appropriately, game-changing.

“Using past World Cups as a measurement, having about six games here would have an economic impact of about $620 million, more than doubling that of the projected $260 million impact that a Super Bowl would bring,” said Kathy Nelson, whose organization spearheaded the drive to win World Cup host status. “The KC area would host tens of thousands of international visitors, and the broadcast viewing audience would total around 1 billion worldwide.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this and will never see anything like this again,” Nelson said in the run-up to the announcement.

The World Cup news is just the latest in a generation-long series of developments that have raised the profile of soccer in the Midwest broadly and in KC specifically. Beginning with the purchase of the Kansas City Comets by the founding partners of Cerner Corp. nearly 20 years ago, soccer infrastructure began a serious facelift.

In 2011, the pro franchise rebranded from the Comets to Sporting Kansas City and opened what is now Children’s Mercy Park still regarded a decade later as one of the best fan-experience venues in the U.S. Under development, just a few blocks east of that stadium is the $75 million National Training and Coaching Development Center, planned as a locus of player and coaching development. US Soccer has agreed to a 20-year lease firmly cementing the Kansas City area among America’s soccer elites.

St. Louis City SC starts play in 2023 as a new Major League Soccer expansion franchise. It will be at home in Centene Stadium, a 22,500-seat, $457.8 million project now under construction.

Women’s socccer, as well, is taking off, with the Kansas City Current starting out in the National Women’s Soccer League in the 2021 season. It will play in a $117 million soccer-specific riverfront stadium Downtown.

The ‘Other’ Football

While soccer continues to build its fan base, Missouri already can lay claim to preeminence in American football, thanks to the Kansas City Chiefs. The National Football League franchise, which moved here from Texas in 1963, earned immediate recognition for on-field excellence in the years before the first Super Bowl—and in fact, represented the old American Football League in Super Bowl I back in 1967. 

A long drought of 50 years followed before the Chiefs made it back, but they did it in fine fashion, defeating the San Francisco 49ers with an epic fourth-quarter comeback to become world champions after the 2019 season. The team made back-to-back appearances but lost the 2021 Super Bowl to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and came within a hair of a third straight appearance before losing to Cincinnati in the AFC championship game this past season. 

Despite the final-game disappoint-ments of the past two seasons, the Chiefs’ recent run of excellence has made them the only team in more than 100 years of NFL history to host four straight conference championship games. That has gone a long way to expanding their fan base across Missouri—indeed, the nation. And those goes for football-starved fans in St. Louis, which lost its NFL bragging rights when the Rams moved to Los Angeles after the 2015 season.

That success has made the Chiefs one of the hottest tickets in town. Save for the eminently forgettable 2020 season played largely without fans in the stands (thanks, COVID!), the team has averaged roughly 74,000 in game-day attendance for a decade. So popular a draw is tailgating at Arrowhead Stadium, fans will show up with smoking units in tow, spending the night before and most of Game Day prepping for a barbecue bonanza—and many of them are there for that experience alone, never setting foot inside the stadium.

Baseball

For a brief, shining stretch in the mid-2010s, Kansas City was just about the hottest thing going in pro baseball, breaking a 30-year championship series dry spell with back-to-back World Series appearances in 2014-15, winning it all in six games the second time around.

That made the Royals the talk of the sports world, but in St. Louis, the Cardinals have appeared in the World Series 19 times in their 118 seasons, made the playoffs 31 times, and won it all an impressive 11 times. Things have cooled a bit since the last Series title in 2011, but the Cards have nonetheless posted winning seasons every year since 1999.

College Sports

Missouri—and specifically, the University of Missouri—rocked the collegiate football world in 2010 by declaring its intent to join the Southeastern Conference after more than a century of affiliation with the old Big Eight/Big XII and its predecessors. That put the Show-Me State’s premier Division I athletics program in the spotlight, with Saturdays in autumn challenging some of the nation’s elite. How elite? The SEC has produced the Bowl Series champion in 12 of the past 16 seasons, and from 2006-2012, it won seven straight. That’s the level of excellence that Missouri fans are treated to in football, and the university’s leadership firmly believed that taking the program to new heights would require going head-to-head with that level of competition.

The state also boasts two other Division I programs, both in the Football Championship Division—Missouri State University in Springfield and Southeast Missouri State. And there is a host of NCAA Division II and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics programs that bring football to small-campus venues across the state.

Perhaps the most prominent collegiate athletics program is in Maryville, where Northwest Missouri State has long been an annual contender for that division’s football championship. The Bearcats have made it to the Division II championship game 10 times, winning six of those, including back-to-back titles twice—in 1998-99 and again in 2015-16, a stretch that includes three out of four years at No. 1.

Recently, however, Northwest has become a formidable force on the basketball court, as well, with three straight national titles in basketball, a Division II record.

Those programs are part of a basketball ecosystem that features five Division I programs—Mizzou, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri State, Southeast Missouri State, and Saint Louis University.

On the Ice

Missouri even has a solid foothold in the National Hockey League, with the St. Louis Blues—the only pro team at that level between Columbus, Ohio, and Denver. As such, there’s a large regional fan base for the Blues that extends well beyond the St. Louis metro area.

The fans waited nearly 50 years to see their team crowned champions, following three straight years of runner-up finishes from 1968-70. But their loyalty was rewarded in 2019 with a Stanley Cup trophy in the only seven-game title series since 2011.

Missouri also boasts several minor-league pro hockey teams, including the Kansas City Mavericks and NCAA hockey programs at Mizzou, Missouri State, Maryville University, and Lindenwood University, the latter two both in the St. Louis area.