‘Holding our breath’: Uncertainty about World Cup crowd sizes trickles down to Kansas watch parties
The Scheels Soccer Complex in Overland Park will host a World Cup watch party along with many other locations in the Kansas City metropolitan area — but the community appetite for such events remains uncertain. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)
Like an elaborate wedding, a surprise birthday party or a Fourth of July barbecue, the World Cup has Kansas City and its Kansas suburbs wondering about crowd sizes.
What if no one shows up?
Like nervous hosts, municipal and private event planners aren’t quite sure what to expect, particularly for watch parties where locals will gather to watch the matches, often at free outdoor venues with hundreds of other fans.
What if everyone shows up?
Uncertainty about watch party crowd sizes is inevitable. Kansas City has never hosted World Cup matches, 32 years have elapsed since the United States last hosted the event and soccer culture here has changed drastically in the meantime.
How many people will come?
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In a January study, the Visit KC tourism group estimated the number of World Cup visitors to the Kansas City metropolitan area at 650,000. That estimate was touted by KC2026, the local World Cup organizing committee.
Since January, however, current events (along with press scrutiny of that 650,000 visitor figure) have created a roller coaster of crowd expectations.
Globally, high fuel costs have driven up travel prices, making a World Cup trip from abroad much more expensive. From Washington, D.C., immigration policies have likely discouraged international visitors.
From FIFA, inflated ticket prices and the cancellation of tens of thousands of room nights has wounded local hotel occupancy. In Kansas, we will soon see how many local folks are enthusiastic enough soccer fans to attend an outdoor summer watch party.
On this shifting ground, how do you plan a watch party — or really any Kansas City World Cup event?
According to four folks behind local watch parties, you overprepare.
“I’d rather overplan,” said Krystal McFeders, director of strategic communications for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas.
She echoed the sentiment I heard from each event organizer: “It’s basically been all hands on deck for people (working for) the city.”
The region will host dozens of watch parties over the tournament’s 104 matches. I spoke with four watch party organizers to see how they are handling the uncertainty:
- In Kansas City, Kansas, the unified government plans at least eight watch parties inside Memorial Hall, often paired with community festivals outside, and all of it branded as “Kick It In KCK.”
- At the stadium home of Sporting Kansas City, fans can watch up to four matches in one day. The club plans to host 10 days of watch parties. Admission is free, but parking requires payment.
- In Overland Park, watch party events will travel through the city during the tournament, including events in old downtown and the sprawling Scheels Soccer Complex further south.
- In Leawood, a shopping district will become a June 16 watch party with four screens televising the first game in Kansas City: Algeria v. Argentina.
All of these are in addition to the flagship FIFA Fan Festival hosted on the Missouri side at Liberty Memorial in Kansas City — and scattered private events.
The watch party organizers I interviewed described largely similar events. Residents and visitors will find giant screens, food and drink vendors and activities, such as soccer skills challenges, local artist collaborations and fun for children. Each of the four watch party events allow for free general admission.
In short, imagine a summer community festival smooshed together with World Cup enthusiasm.
Organizers are divided on whether to ask attendees to register for the watch parties. Sporting Kansas City and Overland Park requires registration, a process that they say helps them project attendance.
Watch parties at Sporting Park for the early matches have drawn 3,000 registrations each, according to Alesia Lawson, the senior director for Argyle Events & Experience. For the first Overland Park event, the city has registered a few hundred people, although visitors can also register when they arrive on the day of the event.
“We are erring on the side of planning a little more than we might actually get,” said Meg Ralph, director of strategic communication for Overland Park. “What’s the worst case scenario? You have a couple thousand people, and they don’t have to wait in line for the face painter or to play a game. That seems OK versus the alternative, which is where you don’t have enough people to control crowds or you have problems in terms of safety with too many people being there.”
To help crowd estimates, Beth Breitenstein, strategic communications director for Leawood, said the city has been tracking airport metrics and other numbers since the announcement was made that Kansas City would be a host city. Doing so helps the city plan not just for the watch party, but for other city services.
“We certainly haven’t been living under a rock,” Breitenstein said. “We keep our eye on what the numbers are saying. We have our eye on that for many reasons, beyond, ‘Can we fill our events?’ … Whether it’s 650K (visitors) in the region or it’s 300K in the region, I feel we’re very ready for all scenarios.”
Breitenstein said the city doesn’t have a stated goal for attendance at the city’s watch party.
“I think we just remain optimistic,” Breitenstein said. “Our focus is on really creating a great and safe experience for our attendees. At the end of the day, that’s how we’re measuring success.”
McFeders of the Unified Government said that accurate crowd estimates help municipalities plan resources like emergency management surrounding an event.
“It has been interesting,” McFeders said about the moving target of crowd metrics. “That’s the only adjective I can kind of give. We kind of went off of all of the information that we were given initially.”
With those estimates in hand, McFeders said that overplanning seemed safer.
“Now, as things are coming into play and we are one day out from that very first match, we see things have somewhat shifted,” McFeders said Wednesday. “We were kind of working off of a target. We were kind of going blind.”
The watch parties at Sporting Park are the most elaborate, relying on a new permanent stage in a renovated plaza outside the soccer club’s stadium. The team’s events will feature live music, mural painting and mascot appearances.
Lawson said that working for a sports team means routinely ramping up and down staffing for events. Even so, the World Cup presents challenges.
“We’re all making our best guesses, but we’re also all kind of holding our breath to see what happens,” Lawson said.
With so many local events seeking event staffing during the World Cup, she said, the club needs to staff as accurately as it can in advance.
Employees “might have another gig that they need to go to,” Lawson said. “So we’ve really had to make some educated guesses. … We work with some really smart people who are able to use data to give us some good projections of what to expect and where to go, but it’s certainly tough.”
As the first Kansas City match approaches Tuesday, it is clear that FIFA, VisitKC and KC2026 could have relayed more realistic visitor numbers. Nevertheless, uncertainty is baked into any ambitious event.
Given the uncertainty, watch party organizers are overplanning, the default midwestern hospitality approach.
“It’s always an exciting thing to bring new people in and show people regionally and potentially internationally who we are as a city — that we are a destination and not a flyover country,” Breitenstein said.
If that means overdelivering — why not hire a few more face painters? — then they probably will.
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.