KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Swope Soccer Village wasn’t supposed to be a FIFA World Cup 26 base camp this summer, but England's love for Kansas City and its respect for Sporting Kansas City mean the Three Lions are coming to town after all.
“I'd say England has been the most engaged club from the beginning,” Sporting Kansas City President and CEO Jake Reid said Thursday at Swope. “Over a year now, they've been in Kansas City meeting with us.”
England confirmed Wednesday that it will use the facility — where Sporting KC II, the club’s second team, and its youth academy teams train.
“Yeah, this one came out of, I shouldn't say to nowhere, but the facility came out of nowhere,” Reid said. “Obviously, it wasn't one of the ones listed as the official three from day one.”
Officially, the Kansas City region started with three base camp options, but now seems poised to land four.
Sporting KC’s first-team training facility Compass Minerals National Performance Center, which will be branded as the Sporting Kansas City Training Centre for Argentina’s World Cup base camp; the Current’s University of Kansas Health System Training Facility, which will be branded as the Kansas City Current Training Facility for the Netherlands’ World Cup base camp; and the Rock Chalk Park at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
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Algeria, which plays two group-stage games at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, is expected to train at the Jayhawks’ facility, but there hasn’t yet been a formal announcement. Arrowhead will be called Kansas City Stadium during the World Cup.
Exactly how England landed at Swope, where Sporting KC used to train before moving to the newer and bigger state-of-the-art facility it shares with US Soccer in 2018, is a crazy journey.
FIFA originally said it would use the FIFA/Coca-Cola Men’s World Ranking to allocate base camps and set a Jan. 9 deadline for the 42 teams that have already qualified — six more will be determined via playoffs in late March — to submit base-camp preferences.
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Soccer’s world governing body planned to sort through the allocation process from there and England, which is ranked fourth in the world, felt great about its chances to land in Kansas City.
But things changed after the Dec. 5 draw, when Argentina was drawn into Group J with games in Kansas City, Dallas and Santa Clara, California.
La Albiceleste had been expected to build a base camp in Miami, so they weren’t very engaged in the process of visiting base-camp sites, but the draw changed those plans.
“We had no engagement with Argentina up to the draw,” Reid said. “Then, suddenly they called us after wanting to come out.”
FIFA also added a new tiebreaker to its base-camp allocation process, giving teams in the same pot priority, regardless of world ranking, if they were playing a game in the same market as the base camp.
That allowed two fellow Pot 1 teams — second-ranked Argentina, which opens defense of its World Cup title June 16 against Algeria at Arrowhead, and the Netherlands, who are ranked seventh and play Tunisia on June 25 in Kansas City — to cut the line in front of England for Sporting KC’s and the Current’s training grounds.
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England still coveted Kansas City for its central location, but it seemed like Lawrence was its only option — and the Three Lions wanted to stay closer to the city center.
“Panic might be too strong, but they were concerned at that point, because they knew they're going to be on the outside looking in,” Reid said.
Until they weren’t.
“They loved the city,” Reid said. “They loved us, just from the relationship and what we could bring to the table for them in terms of their time here, so they approached us and said, ‘Hey, is Swope an option?’”
Sporting KC, which had been a driving force in getting the ball rolling to get the World Cup in Kansas City more than a decade ago, happily obliged.
Still, when Kansas City was named one of 16 North American host cities in June 2022, organizers optimistically hoped to land four games and a base camp.
Being allocated six games, including a coveted quarterfinal, and having three of the top seven teams in the world coming for base camps is more than anyone could have dreamed at the outset.
“It is absolutely crazy to think about that,” former Sporting KC left back Seth Sinovic said. “It's also extremely cool. ... It’s incredible. It makes sense, just logistically, that teams probably want to have this location just being centrally located in the country.”
Sinovic, Sporting KC’s 2014 Defensive Player of the Year, knows Swope well. The Leawood native trained there as a youth player and with Sporting KC from 2011-19.
“It's a great facility,” Sinovic said. “The fields are always in fantastic shape. The facility itself, while it's smaller, is great. It has everything you need.”
He would know. Sinovic and his Sporting KC teammates trained at Swope during the club’s glory days from 2012 to 2017 — a stretch that included winning the 2013 MLS Cup and Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup titles in 2012, 2015 and 2017.
It’s not as fancy as the new training facility, but it’s got a championship pedigree, which England will now tap into.
“You've got a few more bells and whistles, obviously, at Compass with the first team, but at the end of the day, this was a great option for them once they got out here and saw it,” Reid said.
Sinovic believes there’s still magic to conjure there.
“It's smaller,” he said. “I mean, it's not where Sporting is training right now, but it's a great facility. ... I just felt like we bonded pretty well there, and maybe close quarters were a big reason for that.”
Sporting KC’s second team welcomes the chance to share their fields this summer with the Three Lions, whose only World Cup title came in 1966.
“That is going to be a surreal experience,” Sporting KC II starting goalkeeper Jacob Molinaro said. “I’m excited for it, for sure.”
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