When the 2014 World Cup came to Brazil, more than 22,000 families were evicted from their homes in Rio de Janeiro. Favelas surrounding the Maracanã stadium in Rio — communities where families had lived for generations — were demolished to make way for parking lots, some of which were never completed. Residents who refused government compensation were forced out anyway. The lucky ones were relocated to substandard housing miles away. The unlucky ones became homeless.
When the 2022 World Cup came to Qatar, migrant workers who built the stadiums were subjected to what Human Rights Watch documented as widespread abuses — illegal recruitment fees, wage theft, injuries, and deaths. A 2021 investigation found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from South Asia died in Qatar between 2011 and 2020 in the years of World Cup preparation. Qatar's own World Cup organizing committee chief later acknowledged that between 400 and 500 workers died specifically on World Cup-related projects. The workers' families are still waiting for justice.
Kansas City is neither Qatar nor Brazil. No one is being bulldozed out of their home to make way for a parking lot and a stadium. Despite that reality, our elites continue to project optimism through rose-colored glasses, ignoring the ground truth entirely.
We were told 650,000 tourists would travel to Kansas City for the World Cup. According to a survey by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA), Kansas City emerged as the most negatively impacted host market in the survey. Roughly 85-90% of respondents reported a booking pace below expectations and trailing a typical June or July. Properties describe extensive FIFA room block cancellations, reaching 70-95% of originally contracted inventory, while more than 70% cite visa barriers and weak international demand as key issues. Together, AHLA noted, “these factors have left the market oversupplied, underperforming, and highly rate-sensitive relative to normal summer benchmarks.” The 650,000 tourists increasingly look like an imaginary number.
That is the good news. The bad news is that Kansas City has found its own way to clear the streets for the planet’s most popular sporting event — not with bulldozers, but with an expansion of the police state.
Kansas City is the only one of sixteen World Cup host cities that built new detention infrastructure for the tournament. A modular jail — rushed to completion in months, with the city waiving its own environmental standards to meet a June 1 deadline — was constructed by Brown and Root Industrial Services, co-owned by KBR, the military contractor that built the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Its cost ballooned to $25 million. Some city officials insist the jail was not built for the World Cup. But according to Councilman Wes Rogers, "[a] modular jail would serve two purposes: It would give us much-needed beds for the World Cup, and it would get us by until the new permanent jail is built.” The council approved it 12 to 1. Councilman Jonathan Duncan was the lone dissenting vote.
Decarcerate KC, a local abolitionist group, put it plainly. “This is not a temporary response to a temporary event,” Amaia Cook, their executive director, told the Kansas City Defender. "It will outlive the tournament by decades.” The jail, as it happens, will not be fully operational in time for the World Cup. But the anti-loitering ordinance Kansas City passed in 2025 is. The camping ban North Kansas City enacted covering every match day through July 21 is. The legal architecture is in place. Whether or not the jail's cells are fully occupied this summer, the message to Kansas City's unhoused population has been delivered.
The federal government has also been generous with funding this expansion of the police state. Kansas City is receiving $59.5 million in Department of Homeland Security funding for the World Cup — part of a $625 million nationwide grant. That money covers police overtime, equipment, and the infrastructure of surveillance and control that accompanies a FIFA tournament wherever it goes. The so-called security budget dwarfs any commitment the city has made to the residents most vulnerable to the event's consequences. In a country that imprisons nearly two million people, we can hardly be surprised.
The complement of repression in the United States is weak social democracy. Along with a modular prison, we have inadequate mass transit, but we did get buses for affluent tourists. Sunrise Movement and the Kansas City Bus Riders Union put it well in their March 2026 zine, Not a Game to Us: “For 33 days this summer, KC's public transit will bloom; granting more routes and greater frequency to tourists and visitors, all things that Kansas Citians deserve everyday.” Our transit authority has built an entirely new transit system for the World Cup — one that disappears the moment the last match is played. Meanwhile the same transit authority is cutting its weekday bus routes this fall, including routes serving impoverished east side neighborhoods. Buses had been free-of-charge, until June 1st, the same day that the modular jail was supposed to become operational. The city that cannot fund a permanent bus system for its residents can apparently fund a temporary one for wealthy tourists. The irony is not lost on anyone.
There is another protagonist in this drama: the algorithm. FIFA does not simply “sell” World Cup tickets. The conglomerate deploys a sophisticated dynamic pricing algorithm — conceptually, a similar mechanism to the one that charges you more for a flight because you hesitated, more for an Uber because there’s a thunderstorm, and more for a hotel room because there’s a conference in town. The economic argument for dynamic pricing sounds reasonable in the abstract: prices should reflect what tickets are actually worth in the market. Efficient. Rational. Optimal. Profit-Maximizing. That’s the theory, but in the reality we actually live in, the algorithm is an extraction machine fed by big data. As Karl Marx famously observed: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx was talking about labor exploitation, but the same principle applies to these dynamic pricing algorithms. In a city where 40% of the population earns below a living wage, much of the working class is priced out of the World Cup. We are simply not going to pay $851 for the cheapest ticket to the Algeria-Argentina match.
This is the gentrification of the World Cup — the appropriation of an identity that belongs to working class communities and its conversion into a commercial brand that serves the interests of sport capitalists. Soccer culture in Kansas City was built by immigrant communities who spent decades advocating for recognition. It was built by families from Latin America long before it was decided that soccer could make money in the United States. Yet for the people of Kansas City, in strict material terms, the World Cup will leave behind surveillance infrastructure and a jail.
There is a reason that the best players came from the favelas of Rio and the shantytowns of Buenos Aires. Soccer is the only sport that belongs completely to the poor. You need nothing — no court, no net, no equipment, no fee, no institutional permission. You need a ball, or failing that, rags bound with string, or whatever can be made to roll. In the favelas of Rio, barefoot children take over the concrete of an irregularly shaped passageway and play. In northern Uganda, children displaced by war in South Sudan play with a ball made of rags. In the streets of Lagos during the African Nations Cup, the matches never stop. This is the democratic truth of the beautiful game that no amount of Premier League money or FIFA corruption can fully extinguish. When everything else has been taken, when the landlord has evicted you and the boss has fired you and the government has made clear that your life is expendable, the children still find a flat surface and a round object and play. The spirit of soccer is not in the stadiums. It is at that moment — in every favela, every township, every refugee camp, every park — when the game begins with nothing and everyone is welcome and the only thing that matters is the ball. That will never be taken away from us.