Dr. Anthony Cavaiani
is an associate professor of communication at William Woods University in Fulton, MO. His research examines the intersection of rhetoric, sport, and space/place.
Amidst the major North American cities hosting World Cup games sits Kansas City, Missouri. Arrowhead Stadium, home of the NFL’s Chiefs, hosted group stage and knockout matches. Despite the Chiefs’ looming relocation to the Kansas side of Kansas City—a separate conversation in its own right—Arrowhead Stadium is one of the most iconic professional stadiums in the U.S. Particularly interesting is the nexus between place and soccer that was on full display during this summer’s World Cup.
Branding themselves as the “Soccer Capital of America” on the windows of their downtown convention center during the Cup, in addition to serving as base camp for the Argentinian team during the Cup, Kansas City has a rich lineage of soccer history, culture, and identity. They are home to Sporting KC, one of the original ten charter clubs of Major League Soccer (MLS), with their original name, the Kansas City Wiz.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world in terms of total participation, and may also be the most expressive. As this collection of essays makes clear, soccer is rooted in local and national identity. Kansas City does not connote expressiveness to a global audience, or leverage the sport media spectacle, in the same way as other World Cup host cities Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Boston, Mexico City, Toronto, or Vancouver.
Similarly, the language sports broadcasters use when talking about soccer can evoke an awe one may experience when experiencing art. One instance of this during the 2026 World Cup was after Spain’s semi-final win over France. American FOX studio analyst and former U.S. Men’s National Team member Alexi Lalas called Spain’s victory “a work of art. A beautiful thing to see unfold…not just the result, not just who the opponent was, but the manner in which Spain went out and got this victory. It was…something to see.”
Calling attention to the expressive nature of soccer, journalist Andy Brassell chronicles notable football murals that have been painted throughout the world. Of the over 120 murals documented, only seven are located in the U.S. While not exhaustive of every football mural painted, it is not surprising that most of them are located outside of the U.S. in soccer hotbeds Europe, Africa, South America, and England.
In the Crossroads Art District in downtown Kansas City, Ecuador in KC founder Paulina Tabares worked with Los Angeles artist MisterAlek to paint a mural of Lionel Messi and Ecuador’s William Pacho. Ecuador and Argentina both played group stage matches at Arrowhead, while the Argentine team also played a quarterfinal match there as well. Several minutes from this mural is the West Bottoms, where local grassroots organization SpraySeeMO painted several more murals.
At the KC Convention Center, an installation was located outside featuring a small soccer field titled “Tejiendo Redes,” or Weaving Nets in English. As the placard of the project explains, the exhibit represents how soccer and migration are weaved into the social fabric of communities. The placard goes on to describe how the exhibit was inspired by the fans who represent the Hispanicizing of the 2026 World Cup and how the Anglo-Saxon sport was brought to the U.S. and Canada for the world to enjoy. The goals were made of lattice to highlight ancient and contemporary Mesoamerican football players and were intertwined with nets made by migrant communities from Mexico City to Canada. This installation represents the symbiotic relationship between place and soccer. Additionally, the murals pay homage to Mesoamerican culture and its role in facilitating the growth of soccer within the U.S. and Canada.
Perhaps more than any other sport, especially within the U.S., place and soccer are also symbolic of local, regional, and global communities. The KC murals illustrate how place relies on soccer, and vice versa, in how fans identify with each other, their clubs, cities, neighborhoods, and country. Most importantly, the KC World Cup murals articulate a global Kansas City identity that not only local citizens experience, but the Argentine, Ecuadorian, and other country’s fans who visit KC interact with and experience. The murals communicate a unity not through sameness and conformity, but through difference, similar to World Cup exhibits in Miami and Seattle, among other cities. They capture an essence of the World Cup experience which moves beyond commercialism and commodification through its invitation to experience the physical places and spaces of Kansas City. While news media indeed reported on these murals, one must physically visit each place to have a sense of its expressiveness and affect. Like World Cup exhibits in other cities, the KC murals are informed by their local identities as much as their intercultural ones.
As Pacho’s teammate, midfielder Alan Franco said after he heard about the mural, “I believe we [he and Pacho] have also shared the affection we hold—on a global level, in every location, in every unit and in everything we do. That love for one’s country, that love for the association.” Recognizing the contributions soccer makes to our notions of sport and place may help us realize how differences are strengths, not something to be feared. After all, the best way to experience something is to go visit it.
