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Just under a year from now, Kansas City plans to welcome hundreds of thousands of soccer fans from all over the world for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The most televised sporting event on the planet, the World Cup will put Kansas City on the international mainstage like never before, showcasing a vibrant soccer city on the level of Mexico City, Los Angeles, Toronto and New York.
"We're really excited about the opportunity that gives us to really rise on the world stage, and demonstrate why Kansas City is a great place to live and come to visit for these kinds of events," says Lindsay Douglas who is the COO of KC2026 — the nonprofit responsible for event preparation.
Kansas City is the smallest host city in North America to participate, and it’s been building up to this moment for decades.
The metro is home to professional teams like Sporting KC and the Current, which is the first professional women’s team in the world to get their own stadium. Fans can join epic watch parties in the Power & Light District, and find games of all experience levels around the region.
But Kansas City may not have embraced this sport at all, if it hadn’t been for the immigrants who first advocated for and educated people about the beautiful game — back before the city even had soccer fields to play on.
“Soccer is still what you would call an underdog sport,” says G.E. White, author of the book, “Soccer in American Culture: The Beautiful Game’s Struggle For Status.”
How soccer got to America
By most accounts, the game we’ve come to know today as soccer came from the United Kingdom in the 1800s. Schools across the country played their own versions of the sport, but the rules could differ widely: Can you touch the ball with your hands, or tackle other players?
According to White, a group of players in 1863 established “association football” with its own set of regulations separate from sports like rugby. “They decided to have a completely foot-oriented game,” White says.
Now with its own governing body, association football spread to British colonies, throughout the rest of Europe, and into the New World.
(As for why the United States mostly calls the sport “soccer,” White says that’s actually a British nickname, a contraction of the word “association.”)
During the late 19th century, the United States underwent an industrial boom, as a large number of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal and other European countries moved here to work manufacturing jobs. Those workers brought soccer with them to cities on the East Coast and Midwest.
It’s actually St. Louis, on the other side of Missouri, that’s considered the first soccer capitol in the U.S. Between hosting the 1904 Olympics and World’s Fair, this multinational manufacturing hub did a lot to establish some of the early national soccer infrastructure.
“It was always these immigrant enclaves within these cities that you’d find the soccer teams,” says Cris Medina, who is a descendant of one of these early trailblazers in Kansas City.
Teams formed out of businesses, athletic clubs and churches, since the sport offered a way to decompress and socialize. But both soccer and the immigrants who played it got labeled as outsiders.
“There’s a certain amount of stereotyping, negative stereotyping of immigrant groups, and all of this results in soccer being identified as an immigrant sport,” White says.
Soccer’s beginnings in Kansas City
It’s hard to paint a full picture of how soccer first started in Kansas City, because there was so little being written about immigrant communities, in addition to the significant language barrier.
But old newspapers clippings, from The Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times, offer glimpses at different pieces of the puzzle.
One of the first people to start a soccer team in Kansas City was J.T. Gallagher in December 1906. A former St. Louis player, Gallagher had moved to Kansas City and was “looking for more recruits” to meet him at Association Park (once located at 20th Street and Prospect Avenue) to try out. His team would later be dubbed “J.T. Gallagher’s Regulars.”
Into the 1920s through the 40s, other makeshift teams get mentioned as playing matches around the city: The Thistles, Shmelzers, Tigers, St. George, the Shamrocks, Hutchison Electric, German Turners, Hibernians, Victorians, McFarland Upholsterers, Heine’s Kickers.
The Kansas City Athletic Club had a team, as did the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. There was a Catholic Youth Council team and members of a group called the Kansas City Soccer Club. They carved out makeshift places to play at 39th and Gillham, Westport high school, Swope Park and Parade Park.
But soccer remained, for the most part, out of the mainstream.
In schools, kids were mostly taught American-made sports. And when soccer did get played, as in Kansas City, its season fell typically in the worst slot of the year — the winter — between the football and baseball schedules.
“You can’t really play soccer in the Midwest or northeast in the winter unless you want to play on a field that’s covered with snow or ice and that’s difficult,” White says.
Even those conditions, however, couldn’t stop Kansas City’s soccer lovers — such as José Portuguez, a Costa Rican immigrant, and my grandfather.
Getting the team together
For my senior project in college — two decades ago now — my family and I traveled to Costa Rica with my grandpa. I documented our journey, and the stories my family told.
My grandpa José was funny. He loved to dance and laugh, and he adored soccer.
“He said he was born with a soccer ball,” said my mom, Vallie Portuguez Hogan.
José Portuguez died back in 2021, when he was 97 years old. And I always knew vaguely that he was also a part of the reason Kansas City became a soccer town.
He arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, in the 1940s to study engineering at the University of Kansas. There, José helped organize an intramural soccer league of international students, and even coordinated tournaments with nearby schools — driving hours to games around Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
“They’d have a barbecue, they’d cook out,” describes Jim Portuguez, my uncle and José Portuguez’s son. “Drink beer, eat steak, talk about their homes, talk about how well they played.”
Soccer players were hungry for community, because it could be lonely outside of that world. They faced cultural and language barriers, as well as outright discrimination, and often struggled to fit in.
Jim says players were constantly fighting for respect, and field space.
“They would tease them and say, ‘Oh, that’s an easy game, anybody can play that. It’s not like a real game, you know, a hardy game like American football,’” Jim Portuguez recounts. Even though that attitude would irritate him, José would stay cool, and use the opportunity to teach them more about the game.
After José graduated from KU, he married his college girlfriend — my grandmother — and in the 1950s moved to Kansas City. They started a family while José worked as an engineer, but my grandpa looked for any chance he could to play soccer.
My family says he found remnants of those early immigrant teams around the city and region, in Parkville, Leavenworth and St. Joseph.
But to get soccer taken seriously in Kansas City, he would need a friend. And he found one in Augustin “Chino” Medina.
A home for Los Latinos in Kansas City
“Chino” Medina was a professional soccer player in Mexico, and he was a star. As a player for Atlas and other bigtime teams, Medina was twice the national scoring champion. (“Pelo chino,” means curly hair in Spanish.)
Towards the end of his career, Chino met his wife: a woman from Kansas City’s Westside, who would come to Mexico to see her family.
When his wife got too homesick, in the 1950s Chino followed her to the Westside. But the transition was hard for him. He had never lived in the United States, and didn’t speak English.
“He would cry, he would tell me he’d pick radishes and nopales and work in the fields just to have some work, because he didn’t have skills at the time that were applicable where he could find a job to maintain his family,” Cris Medina says of his father.
It was at church that Chino Medina found support. Specifically, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, and the Guadalupe Center — of which Cris Medina is the former director.
The Guadalupe Center was formed in the 1910s, a time when the construction of the railroad and the Mexican Revolution brought a large wave of Mexican immigrants to the Westside, and around the tracks in Kansas City, Kansas.
Its mission today is to help improve the lives of Latinos in Kansas City, but the center was originally created to offer services and help “Americanize” these new arrivals. The organization provided health care and educational opportunities like English lessons, and it promoted American activities.
“They wanted the immigrants to play American sports,” Cris Medina explains. “So baseball, basketball… and they had football, six man tackle and stuff like that.”
By the time Chino Medina had arrived, though, the Guadalupe Center had been taken over by Mexicans, who instead focused on Mexican pride rather than assimilation to white culture.
An associate priest from Spain named Ignacio Orozco, who worked at the church, formed a recreational soccer team called Guadalupe. And they were more than happy to welcome Chino Medina to play with them.
“They were just like, ‘Man, this can’t be true. This guy’s a star soccer player in Mexico and he’s going to come play with us?’” Cris Medina recalls.
Fields of their own
Kansas City’s soccer players eventually grew tired of holding games and practices on baseball or football fields. They had outgrown park fields with DIY goals.
So according to Jim Portuguez Chino Medina and my grandpa arranged a meeting with the mayor of Kansas City, Harold Roe Bartle.
Known by his nickname “The Chief,” Bartle loved sports and eventually played a big role in convincing the Dallas Texans football team to move to Kansas City.
Medina and Portuguez made the case to Bartle: Their sport was growing, it didn’t need a lot of equipment, but they did need soccer fields of their own. No more competing with other sports for space.
Plus, soccer was a healthy activity, and good for the kids. “I think that’s what got the mayor’s interest,” says Jim Portuguez.
They got the greenlight to install official soccer fields at city parks like Gilham and Swope with goals and bleachers. To guys like my grandpa, this was a big deal, because it showed these players that they had buy-in from the city.
Armando Diaz and Salvador Gomez remember playing on those fields with Chino and José. Both men are from Mexico, and joined the team “Los Latinos,” which evolved out of that earlier Guadalupe team.
According to Diaz, securing the fields at Swope helped Los Latinos become a more formalized team in the late 1950s. Of course, it was still hard to find some of the other basics like balls and uniforms, so team members like Diaz went down to Mexico to retrieve some.
“There was nothing here, nothing,” Diaz recalled in a 2018 interview.
Diaz said that other teams formed in time. One of Los Latinos’ friendly rivals was “Los Internationales,” a group of immigrants from Hungary, Croatia, France, Germany and other parts of Europe.
Despite their language and cultural differences, these soccer-playing immigrants formed deep connections.
“And the Europeans didn’t speak English either,” Diaz told me with a laugh. “And we didn’t speak English. So the only thing that keep us together was the little ball right there… because that’s the only language that we knew.”
Cris Medina and his siblings remember attending some of those games when they were little. It was a central part of their social lives.
“Making sandwiches and food … tortas to go to the game. That was an all day deal,” Medina recalls.
It seems fitting how much of this soccer scene revolved around feeding people, since feeding the greater soccer family was also part of their mission. Their dad Chino Medina later opened the restaurant La Fonda El Taquito, which has become a staple soccer watching joint on Kansas City’s Westside.
These soccer families hosted out of town teams, had parties afterwards, and went to exhibition matches outside of the city. Cris Medina recalls a Polish team in Des Moines, a German team in Omaha, Italians in St. Louis, other Mexicans in Wichita.
This was all being organized by working people, some with kids, in their spare time, all for the love of the game.
Kansas City has come a long way since then. If you go to Swope Park these days, you’ll find a hive of soccer activity. The Swope Park Soccer Village, managed by Sporting KC, now boasts six full sized fields, constantly bustling with practices and matches.
An even larger soccer complex now exists in Overland Park, and more pitches have been built in parks and schools across the metro.
Without those critical first pioneers, though, soccer might still have been mostly relegated to backyards or DIY pitches.
Building a home for soccer in Kansas City was a team effort, just like the game itself.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Suzanne Hogan with editing by Mackenzie Martin and Gabe Rosenberg.
This is the first installment of a series leading up to the 2026 World Cup in collaboration with the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, which explores how sport connects U.S. to the rest of the world.
Over the next year, we'll hear about the time Kansas City attracted the biggest soccer star in the world, and the founding of our very first professional team. We’ll learn about the sport’s ongoing fight for recognition, how women’s soccer emerged and then dominated. And we'll find out how Kansas City grew into an international hot bed for both athletes and fans.
If you know about a local champion of soccer in Kansas City who helped bring the city to this extraordinary moment, email us at peopleshistorykc@kcur.org
