For travellers, it’s easy to, literally, look down on Kansas City, Missouri. In the heart of the United States Midwest, it represents the definition of flyover country for those on their way to more famous locales.That perspective is about to change as this summer, the attention of the sporting world lands on Kansas City, along with hundreds of thousands of football fans.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listArrowhead Stadium, the 76,000 capacity home of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, will host six World Cup matches, including a possible Argentina-Portugal quarterfinal, anticipated as a Lionel Messi-Cristiano Ronaldo showdown.Kansas City overcame major odds to become one of 11 US venues for the biggest World Cup ever, a 39-day tournament stretching from Mexico City to Vancouver, Canada.While Kansas City is the 37th most populous city in the US, according to the 2020 census, most of the other hosting cities are in the top 10 in terms of population.“That’s a big gap, and most of those in between were bid cities,” Alan Dietrich, chief operating officer of the Major League Soccer (MLS) team Sporting Kansas City, told Al Jazeera in a recent interview.The initial bid list in 2017 included 37 stadiums in 34 cities, including four – Chicago, Detroit, Orlando, and Washington, DC – that played host to the ’94 World Cup. They all fell by the wayside and, when the announcement was made on June 16, 2022, Kansas City became a World Cup city.How did it happen?Go back to 2013, wh …
