Lionel Messi, No. 10 of Argentina, celebrates scoring his team's first goal during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group J match between Argentina and Algeria on June 16, 2026, at Kansas City Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Charlotte Wilson/Getty Images)
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What else, besides sports?
What else could provide a rollercoaster of emotions from frustration to ecstasy, from civic embarrassment to regional pride within a few hours?
Consider Tuesday night’s World Cup match in Kansas City.
As Lionel Messi, the consensus best soccer player alive, netted his third goal in the city’s inaugural World Cup game, I spun around to face my son, a Kansas soccer kid from the start, looked him in the eyes and screamed with joy. Thousands of fellow fans joined us.
Both wearing Argentina jerseys after years of following Messi’s career, my son and daughter hugged. The Argentina fans surrounding us pointed to their hero, their GOAT, and cheered.
As I high-fived strangers in the surrounding seats, I yelled, “I can’t believe it!”
The scene at Kansas City (née Arrowhead) Stadium was everything the World Cup marketing promised. Celebrities flocked. The crowd sang. And the soccer delivered with crackling quality.
The World Cup was here — at home — with the most electric moment of this tournament so far.
All of the fun almost allowed me to forget the sourness from an hour before, when our family and thousands of others had been scrambling to get to our seats in time. Along with dozens of other buses and cars, our shuttle was marooned on Blue Ridge Cutoff, the main artery of traffic into the stadium. An hour before kickoff we were in a dismal gridlock.
We were going to miss it — surely the pregame and perhaps the game — I was sure.
It seemed bleak enough that I bargained with the bus driver to let our family off the bus so that we could walk along the side of the road. Yes, I even shamefully faked an illness. After all, the column of people walking into the stadium was maddeningly faster than the bus.
The driver sensibly held firm and told me to stay put.
At that moment, close enough to see the stadium but not get there, I was sure that our tickets — expensive enough to cover a modest vacation — would be largely wasted. I was also sure that my worries about the World Cup and our city’s preparations were coming true.
When the traffic eased, I relaxed a bit.
Corrals outside of Arrowhead Stadium directed fans on a long and often confusing path toward the match between Algeria and Argentina on Tuesday. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)That didn’t last, because the scene outside the stadium was a Seuss-ian maze of corrals sending fans zigzagging away from the stadium and then toward it, left and then right, wondering why. We looped from one corner of the stadium to another, obeying the gate recommendations on our tickets and cheerful, if misguided, event volunteers who were providing directions.
We were rerouted a few times, only to return to where we were 30 minutes earlier.
“This is ridiculous” was the most common refrain muttered by fans who, like me, have attended dozens of football games or concerts at the complex and have never seen such a labyrinth just to get through the turnstiles. If it worked for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs, why such a drastic change?
(In fairness, the shuttle system was wildly efficient after the game, as a sea of buses waited and quickly delivered fans to their starting points across the metro area.)
In all, the arrival process took us nearly two hours and 2.5 miles of walking, from the time we entered the corrals at the transportation hub on the Country Club Plaza to arrival at our seats. (That didn’t include our drive from the Kansas suburbs to the Plaza.)
Luckily, the rollercoaster had reached its low point.
As it often does, the game redeemed, this time spectacularly.
An Argentina fan uses a cellphone to record the reaction of fans and players to Lionel Messi’s first goal in Kansas City during Argentina’s 3-0 win against Algeria on Tuesday. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)Messi was at the center of it all.
Again and again, he received the ball in the middle of the field and pivoted toward goal. When he did, crowd members rose from their seats in a surging wave, from left to right, tracking his run toward goal. He stood apart from a field full of elite international players, and the crowd sensed it.
Caring about soccer is to marvel at Messi. Everyone, except perhaps some Algeria fans, wanted to see a Messi goal. We got three. Each Messi goal (even the one called back for offsides) triggered pandemonium that rivaled any Chiefs touchdown I have seen in that stadium.
We got more, too. On the bus ride back to our parking spot, I sat next to an Argentinian who took three flights to arrive at an Airbnb rental in Kansas. He will spend thousands of dollars (or millions of Argentinian pesos) plus weeks away from home to follow his national team through the tournament.
We talked about his soccer son (“He’s pretty good, actually”), his team’s chances to repeat as champions (“They play so well together”) and his respect for local preparations (“It has been very easy, so far”).
Since the Kansas City region made its bid eight years ago to be a host city, we have been told that it all would be worth it. The public money spent on renovations to Arrowhead Stadium. The municipal spending on security and transportation. The scrambling of local hotels and hospitality. The distraction of lawmakers. And more.
Is a Messi World Cup hat trick worth all of that?
If you would have asked me when I was stuck on the bus, the region’s World Cup trade-off looked like a blunder. Or, one week earlier, when I was obsessed with local event spaces sitting empty, I would have given the same answer of no. Or when I was worried the Kansas Statehouse had better things to worry about, I would have said probably not.
But three hours later, I had converted my hometown embarrassment into ecstasy after watching the best player in international soccer play at the highest level less than 20 miles from my house in Kansas.
If you asked that version of me, enjoying my soccer-loving family on a perfect summer night, I was distracted and manic enough to say yes — over and over and over.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.