Get Ready. The World’s Spotlight is Landing on Kansas City

The World Cup May Change More Than Soccer

For most of its existence, Kansas City has enjoyed a peculiar advantage: people underestimated it. Not necessarily in an insulting way. More in the way people underestimate something they simply haven’t thought about very much. Mention New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Miami and almost everyone has an opinion. Mention Kansas City and people usually start with barbecue, work their way to the Chiefs and then begin searching for additional material.

The funny thing is that Kansas City never seemed particularly bothered by the arrangement. While other cities spent years trying to convince the world how important they were, Kansas City mostly went about its business. It built companies and neighborhoods, developed a genuinely interesting food scene and transformed large parts of its downtown. It became one of those places people visited for a long weekend and then found themselves talking about months later.

I’ve always thought the city was better than its reputation. The rest of the country simply wasn’t paying that much attention. The World Cup changes that.

Next summer, hundreds of thousands of visitors will come through Kansas City while international media, broadcasters and soccer fans around the world turn their attention here. For a few weeks, Kansas City won’t just be a regional destination. It will be part of a global event, and that kind of attention can have consequences that last much longer than the tournament itself.

Kansas City Is About to Be Seen Differently

Cities spend a tremendous amount of time talking about themselves. Economic development groups tell one version of the story, tourism organizations tell another and residents have their own version entirely. What cities experience far less often is the opportunity to have enormous numbers of outsiders show up at once and form their own opinions.

That’s what makes the World Cup so interesting to me. Visitors won’t experience Kansas City through a tourism campaign. They’ll experience the airport, hotels, restaurants, neighborhoods, sidewalks and random conversations with people they meet. Their impression of Kansas City may be shaped as much by an Uber driver, bartender or person giving them directions as anything officially planned for the tournament.

Those little experiences are difficult to manufacture, and they tend to stick. Cities are ultimately remembered through experiences rather than advertisements. Kansas City is about to have an unusually large number of people forming those impressions at roughly the same time.

Businesses Are Going to Feel That Attention Too

There are plenty of Kansas City business owners looking ahead to the World Cup and imagining packed dining rooms, increased foot traffic and record sales. Some of them will absolutely get that. But attention has a habit of exposing things as much as rewarding them.

A great local business suddenly has an opportunity to be discovered by people from around the world. A mediocre one becomes just as easy to discover, along with every review explaining why someone should go somewhere else. Businesses that deliver memorable experiences can benefit from word of mouth on a scale they rarely encounter. Those that have survived mostly on convenience, habit or limited competition may find that visitors arrive with no loyalty to them at all.

There’s another wrinkle here too. Visitors aren’t necessarily comparing a Kansas City restaurant with another restaurant five blocks away. They’re comparing it with restaurants they’ve visited in London, Mexico City, Buenos Aires or Tokyo. The same is true for hotels, entertainment, transportation and the overall experience of being in the city.

That sounds intimidating, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. Competition and attention have a way of forcing businesses to become clearer about what makes them worth choosing.

The Neighborhoods May Change Too

Kansas City has neighborhoods that locals have quietly loved for years while much of the country barely knew they existed. They have history, personality and a sense of place that feels distinctly Kansas City rather than something designed for visitors.

Global attention can change places like that. It usually doesn’t happen overnight. Visitors discover an area, investment follows, businesses open, property values move and eventually new residents arrive. The neighborhood that was once described as a hidden gem becomes considerably less hidden.

There’s nothing automatically good or bad about that cycle. Cities evolve. But almost every city that experiences significant growth eventually confronts the same question: how do you welcome investment and new people without gradually eliminating the character that made the neighborhood interesting in the first place?

Kansas City isn’t going to be exempt from that conversation simply because we’re excited about hosting the World Cup.

The Biggest Return May Be Hard to Measure

Most conversations about the World Cup eventually turn toward economic impact. That’s understandable because hotel occupancy, tourism spending, restaurant revenue and tax collections give us numbers we can put into reports.

I suspect the more interesting impact may be harder to measure.

Someone may come to Kansas City for a match and return two years later for a convention. Someone else may recommend the city to a friend. A company executive may come here for the tournament and remember Kansas City when considering an expansion five years from now. A college graduate may accept a job here partly because a previous visit changed what they thought living in Kansas City would be like.

None of those decisions will fit neatly into a World Cup economic impact report. Collectively, however, they may ultimately be more important than what visitors spend during a few weeks in the summer. Cities grow partly through accumulated impressions, and the World Cup may create the largest first impression Kansas City has ever had.

The Hard Part Comes After Everyone Notices

There’s an assumption that attention is automatically good because most cities spend an enormous amount of energy trying to get it. But attention also creates pressure. Businesses begin optimizing for visitors. Neighborhoods begin branding themselves. Cities can gradually start viewing themselves through the eyes of outsiders instead of the people who actually live there.

That’s the part of this conversation I find most interesting. Kansas City’s challenge isn’t going to be getting noticed. That part has already been taken care of. The challenge is holding onto the qualities that made the city worth noticing in the first place: its accessibility, its authenticity and the sense that Kansas City has historically been more interested in being itself than convincing everyone else how impressive it is.

Eventually, the tournament will end. The visitors will leave, the television crews will pack up and the global conversation will move somewhere else. Kansas City will still be here.

The interesting question isn’t whether people will notice the city during the World Cup. They will.

It’s what they’ll remember afterward.

My guess is that a lot of people are going to discover something residents have known for years. Kansas City was never really a hidden gem. The rest of the world was simply late to notice.