Let’s talk some World Cup.
I’ve had a good time paying attention, even though it has been well documented that I am not a soccer fan. It has been fun seeing the TV shots of watch parties and such. I attended the Downtown Platte City Watch Party on Main Street last Tuesday night when Argentina was playing in KC and Messi was getting a hat trick, a term that had to be explained to a few folks who are suddenly casual soccer fans.
I was invited to the Parkville American Legion Post for their big Netherlands event on Saturday but couldn’t make it. The scenes looked fun and entertaining in the TV news reports from the Parkville American Legion that have filled our screens about 87 times in the past few days.
That guy managing and doing the PR for the Alley Bar at the Parkville American Legion, whose name rhymes with Chris Wallingford, must be doing a heck of a job reaching out to the TV folks. All this time I thought I was the Alley Bar’s go-to media contact, but now I’m starting to get a complex.
While some of the watch parties and crowd gatherings have been fun, let’s not pretend the event is living up to the hype–in terms of number of visitors–that we were sold over the past four years.
Is the Kansas City area getting 650,000 visitors for the World Cup? No. Are Kansas City hotels flooded with occupants? No. Latest numbers, in fact, show the hotel occupancy rates are about one percent lower– that’s lower, as in less–than they were last summer.
But at the airport, flights are showing to be up five percent over last year at this time. That’s not huge, in fact it can generously be described as modest, but at least it is an increase.
Here’s the best succinct summary of the situation I’ve come across. It’s from Patrick Tuoehey, a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute. The Show-Me Institute is a nonpartisan, free-market public policy think tank based in Missouri.
“The problem is not whether/if people are coming to Kansas City, it’s that business and policy decisions were made based on garbage projections,” Tuoehey tweeted on Tuesday.
In other words, the issue isn’t whether people will come, it’s whether projections matched the actual draw. That answer is no.
Kansas City got a fun slate of soccer games with Argentina and Netherlands involved, but that’s not a max demand slate like it would have been with games involving USA, Mexico, Brazil, or England.
I mean, the industry was literally told that hotels would be booked from Omaha to Wichita. Didn’t happen. Didn’t even come anywhere close to happening.
Not many folks challenged the early World Cup claims of massive swarms of visitors to KC. Many got caught up in the excitement and spent money prepping for the promise of enormous crowds that haven’t materialized in the majority of areas.
Still, those of us who aren’t even soccer fans can appreciate and enjoy the civic pride and the atmosphere surrounding the games. That counts for something.
In addition to the Alley Bar in Parkville, I can tell you another operation that’s not disappointed in the crowds it’s getting. That’s Scott’s Kitchen, located in Platte County not far from KCI Airport, at 11920 N. Ambassador Drive, Kansas City.
“We are jamming,” owner Scott Umscheid texted me Tuesday morning, sending along a few pictures and videos from scenes at his popular barbecue restaurant. “Planned for all of this and it’s going great. We are blessed,” he texted.
To handle larger than normal crowds, Scott said his restaurant has hired 18 people since the beginning of May.
Coming in hot in my text messages: The Alley Bar at the Parkville American Legion has just been informed that the Wall Street Journal will be in the house to report on the wildly successful Netherlands-themed attraction during the World Cup. That Wallingford guy has connections, apparently.
Remember when I mentioned several weeks ago that fellow columnist Guy Speckman and I have a friendly wager over whether old time rocker Rod Stewart, age 81, will be healthy enough to perform when it comes time for his scheduled concert at Morton Amphitheater in Riverside in August? Well, things might be getting dicey.
TMZ reported this over the weekend, accompanied by video proof: “Rod Stewart had a rough show in Utah. . . doubling over in discomfort during the set. .. and needing puffs from an oxygen tank onstage.”
Uh oh.
The Rod Stewart concert is set for Aug. 15 in Riverside. Yikes. Does he realize how high the heat index gets in Kansas City in mid-August?
More World Cup stuff, just for funsies.
A new state-by-state analysis by Covers.com, a leading sports review site, has revealed the World Cup nations most likely to become America’s unofficial “second teams” in 2026, based on where each country’s foreign-born community is most strongly represented across the U.S. The study analyzed foreign-born population data for World Cup nations and compared each country’s presence in every state against its national footprint. The result is a World Cup Diaspora Support Index, showing where participating nations may find the closest thing to a home crowd thousands of miles from home.
Based on the criteria, Missouri’s top five “second favorite” teams behind the USA are:
- Bosnia/Herzegovina. 2. DR Congo. 3. Germany. 4. Jordan. 5. Iraq.
(Find Foley now turning on the TV news to find an 88th report from the Alley Bar in Parkville. Email ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)
