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.

Arrowhead 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, when Kansas City declared itself the “Soccer Capital of America”, a registered trademark. They invested in stadiums and training facilities, more than $650m worth. The World Cup was a long shot, but that did not stop the local organising committee from pulling out all the stops.

“We did crazy things,” Dietrich said.

That included setting up a sort of Potemkin football village to impress visiting FIFA officials.

For the venue visit, FIFA officials arrived late at night at the decaying Kansas City Municipal Airport (since replaced), but the terminal was far from deserted.

“We had a bunch of volunteers from the Sporting Kansas City staff walking around, making it look alive and vibrant,” Dietrich said. “If someone looked lost or confused, they’d ask if they could help.”

On the 24km (15-mile) ride into town, drivers made sure to show the officials where the new airport was going to be.

The visitors were assigned hotel rooms overlooking a billboard reading “We Want The Cup”. Outside the hotel, pop-up, small-sided games on grass fields just happened to be going on.

“They would smile and nod when they saw that,” Jake Reid, vice president of the local organising committee and Sporting KC president, told Al Jazeera. “But I think it matters we put in the effort.”

The FIFA officials extended their stay to attend a US Women’s National Team game. They departed on a 6am flight.

“I won’t say which one, but the next city had forgotten transportation, and they spent three hours waiting at the airport,” Dietrich said. “We broke our backs to orchestrate everything, and another city, they aren’t even here to pick [them] up. That kind of helped. But we still thought we only had a 50-50 chance.”

Kansas City turned negatives into positives. Nowheresville became a “central location,” facilitating air travel. Long distances on roads, sure, but zero traffic jams.

“Our transportation ranking was dead last. We flipped that on its head in every way,” Reid said.

“The reality of distances is, it’s going to take you more than two hours getting from the airport to MetLife [stadium in New Jersey], and getting from our airport to Arrowhead is 22 minutes. We were the first city to lock in buses, and now we have more than 225 buses for [public transportation].”

A city with the US’s then 32nd-ranked Designated Marketing Area translated as “small market, big region,” Reid said. Kansas City’s population is listed at 508,000 and the metropolitan area at 2.2 million.

Like the Chiefs and Kansas City Royals baseball team, the World Cup can expect fans to come from within a three-hour drive. Reid expects them to “pop in from Omaha, Springfield. Look at Kansas City on a map, we’re small. Look at the fan base, it stretches around a significant area.”

Reid added: “The one factor that stands out, we just wanted it more.

“With New York, Boston, it’s a formality. They say we’re major market, events come here. We didn’t expect to get this and we had to put our best foot forward.”

‘Magic moments’ and base camps

Just getting the World Cup would satisfy most municipalities, but not these Kansas Citians. After the final draw last year, they pulled off another coup via base camps, as Argentina, England and the Netherlands chose Kansas City, and Algeria picked the nearby city of Lawrence.

That meant another round of romancing. For England, Kansas City set up a “huge lunch, as much barbecue to feed an army,” in the downtown Power & Light District, Reid said. They weren’t sure they’d clinched the deal until a dinner that included “a few glasses of wine”.

England coach Thomas Tuchel “turned to Jake, and said, ‘Are you all in with us? Because what we do if we win a tournament, we all get a tattoo specific to the tournament,’” Dietrich said.

“And Jake and I both said we’re in. I have three kids and they all have tattoos, and I always told them to think about how they would feel about having them [after] many years go by. But I would love to get a tattoo. I would absolutely get one.”

Facts on the ground, this is still the Midwest of vast distances and potential boredom. During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, while based in Rustenburg, outside Johannesburg, Wayne Rooney said England players became tired of “darts and snooker”.

Kansas City has taken downtime into account. During visits, “we would throw in what we call ‘magic moments,’ to surprise and delight,” Dietrich said.

That might be simply sitting down with Argentinians at Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue. The Argentina contingent talked about winning the 2022 World Cup, while Kansas Citians told of the city’s lore: from Jesse James, to the anything-goes jazz days, to the origins of barbecue and the local speciality “burnt ends” of the brisket.

“We did our best to educate them as much as we could,” Reid said. “What they retained, I couldn’t tell you.”

But it turned out there was more to recruiting than gluttony and over-the-top endeavour. Kansas City also tailored its pitch to Algeria, which preferred a low-key environment in Lawrence, 48km (30 miles) away in Kansas state.

“They were attracted to the tranquil setting,” Reid said. “Rolling hills and outdoor space, lots of trees.”

The hosts also tuned into customs and religious practices.

“They wanted halal meats, and we had that set up with three different suppliers,” Reid said. “Details meant a lot to them.”

Lawrence is a bucolic college town of about 100,000 people, home of the popular University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball team.

But the Algerians might also appreciate its days as an independence battleground. The Jayhawks nickname derives from the anti-slavery faction in “Bleeding Kansas” – a series of battles fought between pro and anti-slavery advocates from 1854-59 – that fought to keep the state free before the American Civil War.

The ‘Soccer Capital of America’

And the claims to being the Soccer Capital of America? The region’s footballing history dates to the opening of the American West, as the Santa Fe Railroad fielded a team in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1880s.

For decades, football was left in the dust by other sports, until the 1966 World Cup, which inspired investment in professional teams in several US cities. The Kansas City Spurs had a three-season run, starting in 1968, when they played against Santos and Pele (ending in a 4-1 loss for the hosts) in front of 19,296 at Municipal Stadium.

In 1969, the Spurs won the championship of the North American Soccer League (NASL), by then a five-team league, although the team dissolved in 1971 amid financial and organisational challenges.

Then came indoor football, the Kansas City Comets (1979-91) outdrawing and outlasting both an NBA team (KC-Omaha Kings) and an NHL team (Kansas City Scouts) at Kemper Arena.

The Comets did their part for the city’s footballing culture.

”Now, the average person actually knows about soccer, and that wasn’t the case,” Alan Mayer, goalkeeper for the US national team and the Comets, told Al Jazeera. “We had to do a lot of education, clinics, personal appearances. One year, I made 300 appearances to schools talking about soccer.”

When the ’94 World Cup came along, Lamar Hunt proposed Arrowhead Stadium as a venue, hoping to use the tournament to launch MLS.

FIFA passed Kansas City by, but Hunt went ahead with the KC Wizards, originally named the Wiz, and won the 2000 MLS Cup. The team rebranded as Sporting Kansas City, opened a football-specific stadium (capacity 21,000) in 2011, and won the 2013 MLS Cup title. The Kansas City Current women’s team was founded in 2021 and play at the CPKC Stadium (11,500).

“I didn’t really think we may be hosting a World Cup, I never gave it a thought, it was too far out of the realm of possibility,” said Mayer, who earned six US caps and once scored on a long clearance playing for Southend United’s reserve team.

“When I first got to Kansas City in the mid-‘80s there wasn’t any MLS. The difference between now and then is astronomical, how popular the game has become. But I really don’t think the public understands how much this is going to affect the economy and the visual effect it will have on how the rest of the world looks at Kansas City and the US.

“And how great and crazy this is going to be, the atmosphere created by hundreds of thousands of people of all different nationalities coming to the Kansas City area.”