Football supporters from Argentina and Switzerland who stop to read the inscription on the bronze plaque for Lamar Hunt outside Arrowhead stadium on Saturday night will learn that he was not just the founder and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, but a man whose “ideas and innovations permanently altered the landscapes of American sports”. And in Kansas City, sports folklorists trace the origin story of Hunt’s fascination with soccer to an unlikely romantic date, on a chilly night in 1962, at a Shamrock Rovers game in Milltown.
At that stage, he was a sports obsessive and the youngest son of HL Hunt, who emerged from the hard scrabble lands of east Texas to build an oil empire that made him one of the 10 wealthiest men in the United States in the late 1950s. HL’s youngest child (of 15) was destined to make an impression in sport and, also, to marry a schoolteacher named Norma Noble.
When she was on a study sabbatical in Dublin, Lamar Hunt flew across and decided it would be a good idea to bring her to a Rovers game. It was drizzly, they were on the terraces and both were enthralled by the atmosphere. They remained married until his death in 2006. And the shorthand version of that night is that he had a vision of a soccer league across America.
“All he cared about was sports,” Nate Bukaty, the sports broadcaster and MLS announcer explained when we met on Wednesday in the historic neighbourhood of Westport in Kansas City. (There’s a sign, opposite Kelly’s pub, marking the fact that the narrow road was an entrance point to the Oregon Trail). It was the first rest-day of the World Cup and you could sense the city lull after the carnival’s four-week stretch.
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By 1962, Kansas City officials had already convinced Hunt to invest in the Chiefs. Arrowhead had its inaugural season in 1972. Hunt was involved in the doomed North American Soccer League and helped bring professional soccer teams to Kansas City, several of which folded before Sporting Kansas City became its flag-bearer.
When the USA won the bid to host the 1994 World Cup, Hunt led a bid to convince a visiting Fifa delegation that Kansas could be a host. They took a look around in their bloodless Mitteleuropean way and pointed out that not only did the city not have an international airport, it possessed not a single five-star hotel. No, Fifa would not be breakfasting in Kansas.
That disappointment could have served as a confirmation that the city’s natural place in the order of US cities was, as Nate Bukaty felt growing up here, to be overlooked.
“Everyone,” he says when I ask him who it was that dismissed the city. “Everyone who’s not from this region. Nobody thinks, ‘oh I want to go see Kansas City’. It’s in the middle of the country; it doesn’t have mountain vistas or sea views. It’s the hub of the midwest.”
To be clear, Bukaty worships “KC”. The grandson of Polish immigrants, he is a rich contradiction to the archetype of Polish restraint and understatement. Bukaty is an enthusiastic, informed communicator, skills which have helped him become one of the most prominent game announcers in American soccer. Like most locals, he has been thrilled by the exoticism of having thousands of international football fans in the city over the past month.
“It’s the biggest number of outside visitors we’ve had in the history of Kansas City,” he says in wonder. Bukaty is among the group who spent a decade working to sell the idea that Kansas City could become a host city. It was such a big event that the city held an official watch party for the announcement of the winning cities in 2022. Thousands of locals showed up. Bukaty was asked to be master of ceremonies.
“We still didn’t know that we were getting it. That night, the organising committee went up on the roof of the Sporting Kansas City office. I was invited up. We had scotch and cigars and looked at the city skyline and wondered what was going to happen to our city. But there was paranoia. A worry that we’re not going to be ready for this.”
He accepts it was a gamble. Some cities, including Chicago, an obvious host option, did not bid after then-mayor Rahm Emanuel pulled the plug, unhappy with Fifa stipulations.
“I was not going to basically allow taxpayers of the city of Chicago to be dumb money,” Emanuel explained this month. “They assumed that we were going to take all the risk and they were going to get all the reward. I told them to take a hike.”
Chicago, though, is long established as one of the great, 20th-century American cities. For Kansas – which grew from its role as a massive cattle-transport hub through the Stockyards, with attendant tales of wild saloon brawls – getting noticed was always more difficult.
The decision to build the National World War One Museum and Memorial, in 1926, was taken by the town burghers in order to bestow a sense of national prominence on the place. It never fully worked. Like many midwest cities, its downtown suffered from the vacuuming of life and commercial vitality in the 1970s and 1980s. The Stockyards stunk and finally closed in 1991.
The advent of bioscience and tech has helped create a gust of new wealth over the past 20 years while the city has always used sport as a way to bolster its sense of self.
And that sense of self is virtually Freudian. Kansas City sits on a historical and civic faultline, divided by both the Missouri River, the Kansas/Missouri state line and its violent and complex Civil War history, when Kansas was Free State and Union while its neighbour was Confederate. It was a sprawling, motor-car dependent city made up of extraordinarily differing neighbourhoods: Westport is low and narrow-streeted, the Plaza modelled on Seville. Mission Hills and Sunset Hill hide their old-money mansions behind lush landscaping. Kansas City has its billionaire set now. “Polish Hill”, where Bukaty lived as a child, is now one of the most ethnically rich enclaves of the city.
Its sports teams are its great unifier. As a state, Kansas is basketball-nuts. The Royals won the baseball World Series in 2015. The Chiefs won the Superbowl in 1970 before becoming a global phenomenon after the revolutionary quarterbacking style of Patrick Mahomes led the team to three titles in 2020, 2023 and 2024. Taylor Swift, digital-age pop dictatress, became a bona-fide resident of the city – at least for the five months of football season – following the start of her relationship with Travis Kelce.
It is, as Bukaty says “a city of contradictions”.
But becoming an official part of the World Cup has really, really mattered to Kansas. When the Dutch fans staged a ceremonial march down to the fan zone, thousands of locals wore anything orange and joined them, just to be part of it.
The city spent $110 million (€96 million) for the honour of hosting its six World Cup games, mainly on infrastructure upgrades and security. The projection was a $650 million return, which was probably wildly optimistic. Some businesses in Kansas City have reported record numbers, but the Hispanic-dominated businesses along Southwest Boulevard have been disappointed by the numbers. Beyond the hard economics is an awareness that this is a unique moment for the city.
“It’s a hard thing to quantify,” Bukaty says. “There are reports that the hotels aren’t quite as full or that small businesses aren’t getting the lift they would have hoped [for]. But there is the sense of self-esteem that being part of this brings to Kansas City. And locals here are seeing how much all the visitors here are loving the city.
“I don’t think people here suddenly think Kansas City is going to become a global destination now. I hope some people want to come visit. But it has increased our standing and it matters that so many people have come here and have loved the experience.”
He cites Walt Disney’s first animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram on East 31st, and Ernest Hemingway’s cub-reporter stint at The Kansas City Star, as examples of a pioneering spirit. Arrowhead was a prototype, too: a radical and futuristic sports stadium concept implemented by a local architecture firm, Kivett & Myers. (Today, KC is considered the brand-leader in global sports architecture firms).
Yet nothing here is straightforward. Arrowhead is reaching the end of its illustrious history. In 2031, the Chiefs will play in a brand new $3 billion stadium, moving across the state line from the Missouri part of the city to the Kansas part of the city. It will be the end of an era.
“Lamar Hunt called Arrowhead his favourite place on planet Earth. But it is outdated. And in America, when something is outdated, we tear it down and build something new. And that’s good and bad. We lose our history a lot. But we need to modernise.”
This World Cup quarter-final appearance of Argentina – and Lionel Messi on his quest – bestows on Arrowhead and Kansas City the most important night of soccer the city has enjoyed. It is one whose source story has an oblique connection to Milltown – the lost, beloved ground of Shamrock Rovers.
By next week the foreign football fans will be gone. Kansas City’s World Cup summer will seem like a mirage. Arrowhead’s role will be part of the city sportslore, even after it is razed in five years’ time. Apart from anything else, the World Cup has been a distraction from that emotional subject.
“There are a lot of feelings right now, especially on the Missouri side and some people are saying they won’t follow the Chiefs anymore,” says Bukaty. “But once the team starts playing football again, I’m pretty sure they will. They will follow the town.”
Source: The Irish Times
