Only seven World Cup teams remain — and two of them call Kansas home
Charlie Hustle created a line of shirts to celebrate World Cup teams staying in the Kansas City metro area, including England, which is based in Prairie Village. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)
Pull out your map of North America. Now, stick pins where the seven remaining World Cup teams stayed and practiced as they prepared for the tournament’s quarterfinal matches.
Teams in Boston and Greensboro? Yes, two for the east coast. A couple of squads on the west coast in Washington state and San Diego? True. Plus the Spanish team in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The isolated pins scatter from coast to coast.
Add to those five locations the twin pins in Kansas City.
The men’s soccer teams from England and Argentina provide the most incredible World Cup stories so far and the most enticing possibilities to come — right here in the Heartland.
England, based in the Meadowbrook housing area of Prairie Village, scoots across the state line to train in Missouri at Swope Soccer Village. Argentina makes the opposite commute, leaving their riverfront housing in Missouri to train in Kansas at Sporting Kansas City’s facility.
Both teams will play Saturday in the quarterfinals, as England squares off with Norway and Argentina faces Switzerland.
If they both win, they will play each other Wednesday in Atlanta for a chance to play in the final. It would be a Kansas City vs. Kansas City semifinal.
Having world-class athletic celebrities in town has the metro area chattering with player sightings.
My son’s friend served ice cream to a handful of players from the England team this week at Betty Rae’s in Leawood. The store mixed up novelty flavors for the World Cup, such as London Fog: “Earl Grey Tea steeped in our sweet cream base with a touch of vanilla and lavender to finish. A flavor to Welcome England National Team to KC for base camp.” (England captain Harry Kane, it turns out, ordered exactly that.)
A different family friend texted with England players that he knows through business and invited them to a Fourth of July party. (It’s unclear how celebratory English blokes feel about U.S. Independence Day.)
Meanwhile, Argentina fans have swamped Kansas City Stadium (cough, Arrowhead Stadium) and staged joyful parties in public spots like the Country Club Plaza.
Driving around Kansas City shows how local fans are supporting the two remaining visiting World Cup nations. Front lawns in southern Kansas City are dotted with yard signs supporting England. Some suburban homeowner’s associations nearby have costumed their neighborhood statues with Union Jack flags.
Local clothing brand Charlie Hustle is in on the action, selling T-shirts that blend symbols from either national team with the enduring KC icon.
I’ve spent my summer break from teaching by endlessly watching the World Cup, so trust me that both remaining Kansas City teams are compelling for more reasons than their Kansas City homebases and winning ways.
They are the two most exciting teams because of how they have won. Consider the on-field drama that each Kansas-based team has provided, particularly this week. Soccer pundits dubbed both matches as “instant classics.”
England started the mania with a trip from KC to Mexico City to play co-hosts Mexico at the Azteca Stadium, which as always was a roiling cauldron. They survived a game that had everything: tense penalty kicks, diving headers, controversial video reviews, a red card and an English team that won (and scored) despite playing down a man for most of the second half.
The game was so magically absurd that a player for England “completely smashed” his arm and earned a yellow card — and he didn’t even play. Want another Kansas City connection? That player, Jordan Henderson, had surgery to repair his wrist at the Kansas City Orthopaedic Institute, based in Leawood.
Argentina took the frenetic tension and upped it. Playing Egypt on Tuesday, the defending champions went down 2-0 late in the second half, threatening to end the World Cup career of consensus GOAT Lionel Messi. Three goals in 13 minutes seemed impossible. After he scored the tying goal and a teammate scored a stoppage time goal for the win, Messi cried on the field at the final whistle before returning to Kansas City to rest up.
Just behind those two games in terms of theatrics, the match between Argentina and Cape Verde last week also delivered a heart-stopping ending. The 67th-ranked team almost pulled an upset with a swerving goal from the left side. That is my goal of the tournament.
In those matches, our Kansas City teams provided the best three of the tournament so far.
In terms of featuring the heartland, I have only a few notes for the World Cup script writers — if you indulge me in believing that such a creative committee orchestrates the tournament’s rollercoaster plot.
First note: It is likely that the Kansas City climactic match arrived too early in the narrative arc. In the first match, Argentina delivered a 3-0 ecstatic thumping of Algeria and a hat trick for Messi. A joyful kickoff for sure, but a bit premature timing to hit such high notes.
Second, if Colombia could have converted a pair of additional penalty kicks this week, they would have faced Argentina in Kansas City on Saturday. The Colombia fans hungered for a South American showdown with Argentina that would have tested Arrowhead Stadium’s crowd noise record (and lofty ticket prices because of Colombia demand).
Instead, a staid Switzerland squad will try to mellow Messi, if that is possible without double-teaming or triple-teaming him. The Argentina-Switzerland quarterfinal Saturday will be the last game in Kansas City.
However, both England and Argentina will perhaps return Saturday night to prepare for a Stateline Semifinal.
With all of this — two teams base camping in Kansas, two more in Missouri, two teams in the final seven and six matches played locally — civic leaders told us to brace for a busy metro area throughout the tournament, especially on game days: traffic, crowded restaurants, houses rented for weeks by visiting internationals.
The reality has been more sedate, with pockets of congestion around the stadium and tourist areas. The Kansas suburbs feel like an unexpectedly easy summer. (It’s a bit myopic to celebrate because so many business owners invested in and expected bigger and more lucrative crowds.)
After months of planning and build-up, the World Cup and its presence in the region will end in the next 10 days. The only suspense remaining is whether England and Argentina found enough good luck during their stays in Kansas to hoist the trophy at the end.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.