For the last eight months, the World Cup Arts, Culture, and Heritage Task Force has been meeting to help prepare for the influx of soccer fans 2026 will bring.
The gatherings, largely an effort of ArtsKC President and CEO Dana Knapp and her staff, started with a core group of 124 attendees from all corners of the Kansas City arts community. Now there are almost 200 members.
“Arts and sports are the master connectors in society,” Knapp said. “It's the one place everyone can come together with divergent ideas or backgrounds and still kind of root for the same thing.”
The arts leaders who show up monthly see the global tournament dropped into Kansas City as a chance for artists and businesses to introduce themselves to the estimated 650,000 people expected to visit — and maybe even sell them something.
Even fans without tickets to the games are an opportunity: the FIFA Fan Festival, to be held at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, will draw tens of thousands of soccer fans right into the city.
“When planning exhibitions and performances, you need a long lead time, especially for the larger organizations,” Knapp said. “It’s not something we just pull out of our back pocket and put on a stage. For it to really be a professional effort, we need time and we need funding.”
Knapp said the meetings have helped art leaders stay informed and on track, but some in the room still wonder about support from the city and World Cup organizers.
“Everyone always quotes the arts and culture ecosystem in Kansas City,” Knapp said, “but we're not so often invited to the planning table, especially in the early stages, and we're kind of expected to swoop in at the end and do our magic.”
“We wanted this to be different,” she said.
Access to entertainment
Kansas City will host six matches next year, including a quarterfinal game, at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium between June 16 and July 11.
To help spread the word about local arts events during that time, ArtsKC plans to roll out a marketing campaign around ArtsKCGo, an online platform for arts and culture resources. An upgraded version of their arts calendar and information hub will have new features geared towards an international audience, like multilingual translation, itineraries for visitors and a regional public art map.
Much of the current official transportation plan revolves around shuttling thousands of soccer fans to and from the FIFA events. But getting them to entertainment areas like the Historic 18th & Vine district is a work in progress.
The late night jams at the Mutual Musician’s Foundation are popular with international visitors, and Creative Director James McGee hopes to capitalize on that.
“It's a great place.” McGee said. “It carries a large part of the Kansas City story. But the ease and accessibility for people to be able to get here, and then get back, has been a challenge.”
McGee said offering transportation to the district has been discussed by the task force and with the city. And while he’d like to see support from the city, he’s also looking into ways to partner with private businesses and vendors to bring soccer fans to and from music venues.
“What people don't understand about the World Cup challenge is, a lot of this is going to be on the people in the businesses themselves to kind of figure out how it works.” he said.
When Kansas City hosted the three-day NFL Draft in 2023, expectations were high that local brick-and-mortar businesses would benefit from the surge of fans. But many businesses that didn’t make it into the draft’s fan festival area felt left out.
“There was a lot of effort from entrepreneurs, businesses, and arts organizations to figure out what to do to capitalize on that, and most people would probably say the investment wasn't worth the return,” McGee said. “Just honestly, straight up, it was kind of a shake your head type of moment.”
McGee said he thinks that’s why the arts community is taking a more aggressive approach for the World Cup.
“I do definitely think that there are times where the city just thinks that we're just going to be there,” McGee said. “But the thing about art and culture is that it's living, breathing people doing things.”
“If it doesn't have a set structure to be able to help support the organization of it, it's going to fall flat every time,” he said
Assuaging fears
Assistant director of Kansas City’s Neighborhood Services Department, Nia Webster, said the comparison is unfair.
“When you say NFL Draft and World Cup, you're comparing apples to oranges,” Webster said. “I believe we'll have double, almost triple, the amount of people in Kansas City than what we did for the NFL draft.”
Webster also expects more small businesses and entertainment venues to benefit from the longer surge of visitors.
“I think the NFL draft only brought in around 300,000 people, and this one is expected to bring in 650,000 or more,” she said, with events scheduled over the course of 26 days.
In August, Webster and others made their pitch for the KC BizCare program to a room full of artists at the task force’s monthly meeting at ArtsKC offices in the Crossroads. Webster wanted to generate interest in a city effort to fill vacant storefronts.
“The idea of the program is to get artists and business owners as close to tourists as possible,” Webster said.
The program offers subsidized pop-up space downtown, and Webster said she already has 184 applications in progress.
“That's where tourists are going to be,” Webster said. “That's where the streetcars are going to run, for free transportation, so I can almost guarantee foot traffic if you are there.”
Risks and rewards
Lindsey Rood-Clifford, president and CEO of Starlight, the city's oldest and largest performing arts organization, said there are still a lot of unknowns for the biggest entertainment venues, and arts leaders are trying to manage the risks and rewards.
“What I've seen is most institutions say, ‘Yes, of course we want to be a part of this moment for the city, but what are the things that we can reasonably invest our time and resources in without, sort of, fully knowing what to expect next summer?’” Rood-Clifford said. “We know there's going to be a whole lot of people in town, and we hope that they want to do more than just watch soccer and go to soccer matches.”
Rood-Clifford said Starlight has an advantage since their primary season occurs during the summer months. She said the venue is looking now at what they might do during a normal season, and try to do it bigger – like expanding the theater’s concert series.
“We see our concert series as something that is broadly accessible, so we've tried to open up our summer calendar to include as many of those as possible, because music transcends culture, transcends language,” she said.
Unfortunately, the timing doesn’t work for the Kansas City Ballet. World Cup matches fall outside their regular season, so, for now, there are no plans for company dancers to perform.
“As there has been no offer for additional funding, nor any guarantee of where and when performances could occur, we are not planning to participate at this time,” Executive Director David Gray said in a statement. “If either funding or specific performance opportunities arise, we may be able to participate at some level, though perhaps not with anything as grand as our performances of classics such as ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘The Nutcracker.’”
Arts KC’s Dana Knapp said, whether any particular arts organization is able to participate or not, the event will be a unique opportunity for the city.
“It is an enormous event, and it's greater and continues to be bigger than I think we all imagined,” Knapp said. “I just hope we'll work hard to ensure this community can be front and center as hosts and as individuals and organizations that really communicate and represent everything that Kansas City is.”
