KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kansas City has hosted its share of major sporting events, including NCAA championship games, all-star games, four World Series and six of the last seven AFC Championship Games, but the FIFA World Cup 26 quarterfinal on July 11, 2026 — one year from Friday — will be the biggest sporting event the city’s ever seen.
“You can't match the global scale,” Paul Carr, who attended the 2010 Uruguay-Ghana quarterfinal in South Africa, said. “Those events (Kansas City has hosted before) are always the biggest thing going on in the U.S. at that time, but this is the biggest thing and sporting event going on in the world.”
Carr was in South Africa working as a researcher for ESPN and said Uruguay’s penalty-kick shootout win was the greatest sporting event he’s ever attended.
“I've been to Final Fours, NCAA tournaments, World Series, World Cup qualifiers, etc., but there's just a united passion that you get,” he said. “... It's the biggest sporting event on the planet. It's the biggest sporting event most of these fans will ever be at or be involved in or root for, so all of that just comes out.”
KCK Community College women’s soccer coach Jefferson Roblee attended the 1994 Brazil-Netherlands quarterfinal at the old Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
“The quarterfinal is a knockout game, so it's a do-or-die type situation,” he said. “You have intensity that the game means something, but it's on a global level. You also have just the energy of the game would be like a gigantic Super Bowl, World Series type of event, except for on a global level.”
Roblee attended Brazil’s win en route to the World Cup title with his twin brother and some friends.
“You would have thought that you were in Brazil,” he said. “To be honest, there were a lot of Netherlands fans, but the Brazil fans seemed to just engulf the stadium. ... There were 65,000 people at the game; it felt like there were 165,000 people.”
Recent World Cup finals have drawn between 517 million and 571 million global viewers, while the typical quarterfinal draws roughly 250 million viewers around the world, which dwarfs the estimated 186.2 million people who watched the Chiefs beat San Francisco in Super Bowl LVIII.
“It's like the Elite Eight in NCAA basketball or the divisional round of the NFL playoffs,” Carr said. “You have the best of the best. There's eight teams left. ... A great team, great player — someone does something in these quarterfinals, because it's the biggest stage. ... Making that jump from the quarters to the semis is legacy building for both players and teams.”
Next summer, it’ll happen at Arrowhead.
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KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
