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Last fall, I finally made it to CPKC Stadium for my very first Kansas City Current home match. Sitting behind the goal in the middle of the supporter group section, the atmosphere was electric.
Everybody was decked out in teal, singing songs, and waving flags. Fans with giant bull horns led the sold-out crowd in chants, lit off fireworks after goals, and kept the drum line going.
“It’s a safe space to get wild,” said Danielle Russell, vice president of the KC Blue Crew, who stood in the front row with her friends.
Russell travels all the way from Des Moines, Iowa, to join the Blue Crew at matches. She believes this fan community is a key component to the team’s success over the last few years.
“Players all around the world have said that fan support will bring them from, ‘I’m running 90 minutes, I’m exhausted,’ to, ‘These people are cheering for me, let’s kick the ball into the net,’” Russell says.
Completed in 2024 on the banks of the Missouri River, CPKC Stadium is the first in the world to be built specifically for a professional women’s soccer team. It’s the crown jewel of the National Women’s Soccer League, which launched just over a decade ago, is growing in popularity, and now features 16 teams across the U.S.
Kansas City’s teal temple and the team it houses are a significant factor in our strengthening reputation as a soccer city, including our prominent role as a host for the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup and a base camp for multiple national teams.
It’s not hard to argue that women’s soccer is the reason why the United States gets taken seriously in soccer at all. But this moment has been nearly 200 years in the making — the triumph of women players and fans who had to reject sexist systems, overcome prejudice, and dare to build something bold and totally new.
“You can appreciate the growth, you can appreciate the fan support, just watching the history of it,” Russell says. “It makes me really emotional.”
Pioneers of women’s soccer
Women have been enjoying soccer for as long as it’s been played at all. (You can read more about the history of soccer in the first installment of this series.)
There’s documentation of women playing on a team in Scotland during the 1600s, much to the disapproval of the church.
But by most accounts, organized women's soccer first started in England. That’s where the sport was officially founded in 1863 by a group of male players, who formalized a foot-oriented “Association Football” — what’s now widely known as “football” across the world, and “soccer” in the United States.
After those official rules were established, groups of women in England and Scotland started picking up the game. But women at the time were fighting for the right to vote and confined to pretty narrow roles in society.
So it was seen as improper, even dangerous, for a woman to play a “man’s game.”
“The women that were involved, none of them were using their real names, because they were afraid for their own safety,” says Heidi Smith, author of “Play On: From Adversity to Advantage Through 140 Years of Women’s Soccer.” “And those fears actually proved to be pretty well-founded.”
One early player was a Suffragette named Helen Matthews, better known by her pseudonym Mrs. Graham. She helped form The British Ladies Football Club, which grew to several dozen members in the late 1800s and attracted large crowds — but at times, with the wrong sort of attention.
“It seemed like it might be good news that 5,000 people showed up, but it wasn’t, because they were all men,” says Smith. “And before the whistle even blew, they were rushing the field.”
These clubs were threatened with violence, and barraged with unfriendly press coverage criticizing women’s character, abilities and attire.
The game shifted mostly underground until World War 1, a time in history when public perceptions around women’s roles shifted. As men went off to war, women stepped into traditionally-male factory jobs — such as producing ammunition, an industry that employed nearly a million women in England alone.
Dick Kerr and Company was one of these ammunition manufacturers, and their factories encouraged women’s soccer teams as a way to boost morale, in line with the tradition of male factory teams that existed before. Women’s matches between factories also served to raise money for different charities.
The Dick Kerr team in Preston, England, was especially strong. One match saw 53,000 fans show up and another 14,000 waiting outside.
“They became like the most legendary team of their era,” says Smith. “They were like super stars in their time.”
‘Unsuitable for females’
After World War I ended, women’s rights advanced to a degree, as the English government granted some women of a certain status the right to vote. But attitudes around women playing football took a negative turn: Newspapers reported that women's bodies were too frail to play, and called the activity “foolish”
England’s Football Association, known as the FA, was eager to get men back to playing the game, and bring in money from ticket sales. And the organization felt threatened by the women’s large crowds.
“And so they found a way to get rid of them by accusing them of financial improprieties,” says Smith. “Which basically meant that maybe some of the players might’ve been actually getting paid.”
In 1921, the FA passed a resolution restricting women from using men’s fields, referees and resources: “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.”
England’s ban lasted 50 years, before finally being lifted in 1971.
Australia, Afghanistan, Brazil, France, Germany, Iran, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Paraguay, Spain, Scotland, Wales and many more countries had bans on women’s soccer too. The reasoning, consequences, and timelines vary from place to place: For some it was financial, tied to religious and cultural beliefs, or based on concerns for women’s reproductive health.
But these restrictions forced women who wanted to play football to take risks and get creative.
“You’d have people meeting on tennis courts, and just kind of sending each other little messages like, we’re going to meet up in secret over here and play,” says Smith.
The Dick Kerr women’s team continued even after the FA ban, finding other spots for matches, like parks and open fields. They even traveled overseas to places like the U.S. for a series of games — but against men’s teams.
Because, at the time, the U.S. didn’t have any organized women’s teams for them to play.
Women’s soccer in the United States
While the United States didn’t officially ban women from soccer, the country also didn’t encourage it.
For many decades, soccer was considered an immigrant’s game. It didn’t get the attention or resources as American-made sports like baseball or football. Outside of immigrant churches, social clubs and work sites, few people knew of soccer.
Which also means these early soccer years in the country are not very well documented. And it’s even harder to paint a picture of how involved women were.
Luckily, the archives at Missouri Valley Room at the Kansas City Public Library hold some of the pieces to Kansas City’s fragmented soccer history. One of the earliest documentations of local men’s soccer comes from a Kansas City Star article in 1904.
For women, old yearbook photos from Paseo, Central and North East High school show school teams coming together in the late 1920s, 30s and 40s. One entry said soccer is very popular with the girls “despite the sore shins.”
A photo from the Kansas City Star archives in 1948 shows a large group of girls from Westport High School playing soccer during gym on the grass at Gillham Park. And from Haskell Indian Nations school in Lawrence, Kansas, a black and white action shot from the 1950s of seven girls attacking the ball in the middle of a scrimmage.
Across the state in St. Louis, Father Craig at St. Matthew’s Parish is often considered the organizer of one of the first women’s leagues in the country. The Craig League formed in the early 1950s, with about 70 girls between the ages of 16 and 22. According to David Lange’s book, “Soccer Made in St. Louis: A History of the Game in America’s First Soccer Capital,” they played regular Sunday matches at Fairground park, attracting large curious crowds.
It was at schools and churches where intramural soccer for women picked up steam in the U.S. And in the mid 1960s, one of the very first collegiate varsity women’s teams started at Castleton State College in Vermont.
Fighting for the Cup
But while the women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum and attitudes around women playing sports was softening, the organizing body for international soccer, FIFA, still had no interest in women’s soccer.
So in 1970, a private federation organized a women’s multinational soccer tournament of their own — without FIFA. It was held in Italy, sponsored by vermouth company Martini & Rossi, with seven teams participating. (No United States, however, as we wouldn’t have a national women’s team for another 15 years.)
The tournament’s success inspired organizers to try again the following year in Mexico. The final attracted over 100,000 fans, breaking records as the most attended women’s sporting event up to that point.
But back at home, many of the players faced public scrutiny and punishment from their national football associations for participating in a non-sactioned tournament.
According to Smith, this rogue Women’s World Cup “got completely buried, which is astonishing.”
It’s only because of the 2023 documentary “Copa 71,” produced by Venus and Serena Williams, that this history is now being discussed.
In one scene, U.S. Women’s National Team player Brandi Chastain appears visibly stunned watching clips of the tournament for the very first time. “It makes me very happy, and quite infuriated to be honest,” she says.
How Title IX changed American sports
The United States didn’t play in Copa 71 either, but the next decade brought significant leaps forward for women’s rights and women’s sports.
The very next year, in 1972, Congress passed the law known as Title IX.
The law required educational institutions to offer equal opportunities for men and women, including in sports: “No person in the United States shall be, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“And that was like a sea change,” says Smith. “Because women’s sports had not had that level of support ever. And so suddenly it’s the law that if you’re offering this for boys, you need to be offering it for girls.”
Title IX laid the groundwork for advancing all women’s sports in the country, and it also created a significant boom in women’s soccer specifically. One reason was the lower cost, because soccer didn’t require the same level of equipment as other sports.
And because Smith says soccer was still considered newer here, it wasn’t marked with some of the stigma or patriarchal baggage.
“It wasn’t football, American football. It wasn’t baseball. So it wasn’t a traditionally male sport in this country, which I think is why girls were allowed to play it,” says Smith.
The 1980s saw an explosion of youth soccer programs across the country — especially in middle and high schools — along with attempts to create a national men’s soccer league.
“Because of that timing, you had this whole generation of girls, including me, growing up with this game all of a sudden,” Smith says.
But even with this talent pipeline being built, there really wasn’t anywhere for women’s soccer players to go after college. Cities still didn’t have real professional teams in the way that they supported NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA teams — and there was no official U.S. women’s national team yet.
Arriving on the world stage
At international women’s soccer tournaments, the country was informally represented by The Sting, a team out of Dallas, Texas. This group of elite high school players was created in part by sports mogul Lamar Hunt, founder of the Kansas City Chiefs and an early advocate for the sport of soccer.
The Sting was a powerhouse team in the national U-19 (under 19 league). And their solid performance defeating Italy and winning the 1984 Xi’an Women’s Tournament in China helped convince the U.S. Soccer Federation to form the first women’s national team in 1985.
Internationally, pressure was building for FIFA to catch up and finally create a World Cup for women. So FIFA decided to try a test to see if this could work — and make them money.
The 1988 Women’s Football Invitation Tournament in China involved 12 countries, with 45,000 people attending the opening match between China and Canada.
So FIFA announced it would hold the first ever official Women’s World Cup in 1991, also in China. But even still, FIFA had low expectations, and named the tournament “World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&M’s Cup,” to incorporate some corporate sponsor branding.
The U.S. Women’s National Team had only existed for six years at that point. But they came into the 1991 tournament with power. Beating Norway in the final, the U.S. women accomplished something that the U.S. men’s team still has never done: Become world champions.
That kicked off a decades-long run of U.S. domination in the global soccer scene — for women, at least.
The U.S. women’s team went on to win gold in the Olympic Games in 1996, the very first year that women’s soccer was offered as a competition.
“The ‘90s were so pivotal because that’s the coming of age for this generation that were children in the ‘70s,” says Smith.
Three years later, in 1999, the U.S. hosted the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. After a nail-biting penalty kick shootout, Brandi Chastain sank the ball into the corner of the net.
She ripped off her shirt, exposing her black sports bra, fell to her knees and screamed with joy. Her teammates rushed the field, jumping and tackling one another in celebration. That moment earned the U.S. its second World Cup win, and cemented the team’s fame as “The 99ers.”
Demanding respect
Even when these women athletes were on top of the world, they were still not being taken as seriously as their male counterparts — let alone, being compensated.
While the 1998 men’s World Cup winners went home with over $6 million in prize money, FIFA did not offer any money for the women’s tournament a year later.
Meanwhile, The 99ers were in a dispute with the U.S. Soccer Federation over pay — which turned into a decades-long fight and eventually a gender discrimination lawsuit over working conditions, facilities and more.
After a six-year court battle, the women’s national team settled with the U.S. Soccer Federation. The deal was finalized in 2023 and included a $24 million settlement, World Cup bonuses, and a promise to equalize pay.
Lack of money continued to be the main hurdle as players and advocates attempted to form a professional women’s league in the 2000s. They could never quite sell enough tickets or get enough corporate support to sustain the teams, and after a few years, they’d fold.
Among the short-lived experiments were the WUSA (2000-2003) and Women’s Professional Soccer (2009-2012.)
Meanwhile, the men’s national league, Major League Soccer, was also in its infancy and struggling. The MLS kicked off in 1996 after its own false starts, and was trying to gain a foothold in popular culture.
So for the first few decades, the players on the U.S. women’s national team were basically doing it as a side hustle. They won the Olympic Gold medal again in 2004, 2008 and 2012, already setting the record for the winningest team in the sport — men or women. (This is even before their victories in the 2019 Women’s World Cup and 2024 Olympics.)
Kansas City gets in the game
Danielle Russell was one of the fans watching as the hype built around the U.S. Women’s National Team. And like many, she saw parts of herself in these players.
“Women’s sports were something that was safer for queer women,” Russell says.
Russell was especially inspired by players like Megan Rapinoe, one of the first openly gay athletes in the U.S. “I was like, this is who I am, I got to watch,” she says.
In 2012, Russell’s life changed when she heard that a new National Women’s Soccer League was forming. As part of that, Kansas City would land its first professional soccer team, FC Kansas City.
“We were the first supporter group in the NWSL,” Russell says. “We were smaller than some of the other ones, but we were the first.”
FC Kansas City’s team nickname was “the Blues,” hence the Blue Crew moniker. The team played here for five seasons, winning two national championships along the way. But they never quite entered the mainstream of Kansas City culture.
“I don’t hear FC KC mentioned at all. Or if I do, it’s very briefly and they usually call it KC-FC or something wrong,” Russell says, laughing. “Which happened while the team was playing. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
When FC Kansas City first began, they didn’t play their games at a stadium, but rather on a field at Shawnee Mission North High School. “So it was this great product, not played in front of a lot of people,” Russell says.
Games moved the next year to the campus of The University of Missouri Kansas City, then eventually the fields at Swope Park, but attendance was still low.
“In the supporter section, there were four of us,” says Russell, who would travel in from Des Moines to attend games. “So we did our best but you know, it wasn’t a lot.”
In 2017, low ticket sales and mismanagement of funds led to the announcement that the team’s assets and players would transfer to a new team, in Utah. FC Kansas City was no more.
“The team was folding. Those championships are gone with it,” Russell says. “And it was devastating.”
But the Blue Crew stayed active, trying to support different civic causes and local events. Until 2021, when their patience was rewarded by an announcement: A new NWSL team would be built in Kansas City, backed by entrepreneurs Angie and Chris Long and Brittany Mahomes.
This new team’s name? The Kansas City Current. Their colors? Teal and red.
Russell says the ownership group made it known that they wanted the Blue Crew involved, to build up hype and to help fill out their brand new stadium. Gone were the days of four fans cheering on the sidelines or games at high school fields.
In just a few years, teal fever has taken over Kansas City. You can easily spot people wearing Current clothes around the city, and player’s faces plastered on billboards, buses, murals and the new street car line.
Home games have consistently sold out. The Current's training facility in Riverside will serve as a base camp for the Netherlands men’s national team during the men’s World Cup this summer.
Kansas City is even applying to be a host city again 2031 — for the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Russell says the Blue Crew fan club decided to keep their original name, even after the Current changed its colors to teal. It’s a tribute to Kansas City’s journey and the city’s first professional women’s team.
Sitting with the Blue Crew, next to Russell and her friends, it was clear to me that we weren’t just cheering on one team’s success — we were claiming a larger space for women’s sports.
“You can see how special it is now,” Russell says.
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 third 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 the us to the rest of the world, and the Us@250 Initiative at New America.
Read and listen to the first installment, "The immigrants who made us a soccer city," and the second installment, "Lamar Hunt and the dream of U.S. soccer."
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
