How a man who ‘couldn’t spell soccer’ helped Kansas City land the World Cup
Cliff Illig pushed one arm into the glass doors, swinging open the entrance of a sprawling conference room. His other arm held a packed-to-the-brim work bag atop a binder with block letters printed across the front:
KC2026
Some two decades ago, virtually everyone in his life — his wife, his friends, prominent Kansas City businesspeople — told him to reject the venture that’s led him here. It would occupy his time and money, they told him, and return neither investment.
He understood that. But one dinner changed his mind.
One dinner changed the future of soccer in Kansas City.
Twenty years ago, Illig and Neal Patterson received a phone call from Lamar Hunt, owner of the then-Kansas City Wizards along with the Chiefs. Illig and Patterson were plenty busy with Cerner, their company that sat at the intersection of IT and healthcare, as Illig simplifies it, and they’d made it big.
They weren’t just building a business but constructing actual buildings — or entire campuses, for that matter.
Major League Soccer found itself on a contrasting trajectory. The league had already folded two teams, and the buzz was that Kansas City might be next. Wizards players had begun to analyze where they might end up. The leader in the clubhouse, some had heard, was Philadelphia.
Sensing that backward momentum, Hunt called Patterson and Illig, hoping he could hand over the team to local ownership. The three of them met for dinner at The Capital Grille on the Country Club Plaza. The Lamar Hunt sales pitch talked up the world’s game, its popularity and the favorable American demographics for growth.
But the most compelling part of the presentation resonated with Illig so deeply that as Patterson asked him if they were actually going to buy a soccer team, Illig replied, “After (hearing) that, do we have a choice?”
Illig and Patterson didn’t need soccer.
Kansas City, Hunt had convinced them, needed soccer. Kansas City needed them.
Illig called his wife on the way home.
“Bonne,” he said, “I think Neal and I might be buying a soccer team.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she replied, as he recalled. “What are you talking about?”
‘We just figure it out’
There are a lot of people about whom this statement rings true, but the World Cup isn’t coming to Kansas City without Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson — because, most evidently, professional men’s soccer is almost certainly not here without them.
But how many subjects of that sentence embarked on this journey while knowing nothing about the game itself?
The expanded initial ownership group included Greg Maday, Robb Heineman, Pat Curran and David French. They followed a bubbling grassroots movement to save a game they loved from leaving Kansas City. (Earlier this year, Peter Mallouk became the club’s principal owner.)
Illig and Patterson weren’t motivated by a love of the game. Some 20 years ago, Illig frequently jokes to cement the point, he could not even spell soccer.
That defines his unique place in Kansas City’s World Cup arc. It was a decade ago that he began to talk about the prospect of a World Cup, and it’s his life story that ignored just how ridiculous the idea sounded.
The company that made him rich began on scratch paper on a topic about which he knew so little. The soccer team he acquired bled so much money that it was on the verge of folding. The sport-specific stadium that would become a model for the league first included two failed tries.
Why couldn’t Kansas City land the World Cup?
“We’ve never been afraid of complexity,” Illig says. “We’ve tried some things that may have seemed kind of stupid at the time — I can give you a list of (people) that have called me and said, ‘You’re nuts.’
“That’s never affected us. We just figure it out.”
The unexpected flavor of Kansas City being part of this World Cup — the smallest city to host matches, and it’s earned six — mirrors his own story.
Even if he’s never bothered to pause and consider it.
The magic moment
After buying the Wizards and rebranding to Sporting Kansas City, the ownership fixated on providing the club its own stadium. That was one of Hunt’s requirements for success — to leave behind the little-brother relationship they had with the Chiefs.
After the first two stadium plans failed, Illig walked into a meeting with designers for the third, which would later become Sporting Park.
“I don’t want to see your pretty pictures,” he interrupted.
“You should’ve seen the look on their faces,” he said.
He wanted, he would say, to consider the guests of the stadium. They came up with 27 groups — the home team, the visiting team, media, referees, every segment of fans you could imagine — to consider. For each of the 27 groups, they settled on the same question: “What do we want their experience to be?”
We’ve written plenty in this space about how Kansas City landed a piece of the World Cup. But there’s a through-line between those stories:
Experience.
That’s what resonated with the three national teams that chose to call Kansas City home for their base camps — England, the Netherlands and Argentina. They were persuaded by the details.
Track back further: It’s what resonated with FIFA officials before they made the determination to award Arrowhead Stadium — err, Kansas City Stadium — four group-play matches, and then another in the initial knockout round and a quarterfinal that has the potential to feature Lionel Messi against Cristiano Ronaldo.
It’s also the word that has occupied Illig’s attention for the past half-century.
Experience.
Illig has stayed mostly behind-the-scenes during the World Cup lead-up, but he’s active there, more than the honorary co-chair of the committee. He has obsessed over the lingering effect the tournament could have for Kansas City and more obsessed with how to bring that to fruition. (He’s assigned his nonprofit company, Enterprise KC, to analyze how effective they were in accomplishing that goal as and after the tournament unfolds.)
His team built the web app on the KC2026 website to offer visitors a guide around the city during the stay. It’s one of two north star objectives he has outlined.
“I want people to leave with memories,” Illig says. “What better sustained impact could we achieve than have thousands of people leave Kansas City with memories?
“We need Kansas City to grow. In order to get that, we need people to realize that our lifestyle is the best asset we’ve got.”
The other north star objective, you might wonder: “I want people from Kansas City to be prideful about what’s going on. If you’re from Kansas City, I want you to feel good about how Kansas City presented itself.”
Those two objectives have consumed his time, from the biggest of pictures to the smallest of details. In an early meeting, he emphasized the importance of decorating the airport. In a recent meeting, he asked how they could ensure Uber drivers were well-versed to have conversations with riders about the World Cup.
“He’ll go super granular — to the point where you’re like, ‘Cliff, I don’t know if we can control or influence that,’” said Jake Reid, Sporting team president. “But his point is that he wants to make sure we’re asking the right questions.”
It’s the same question he once asked about their own stadium: “What do we want their experience to be?”
The stadium opened in 2011. It would host playoff games, MLS Cup titles and U.S. Open Cup finals. Don Garber, the MLS commissioner, once called it “one of the great sports turnarounds in the history of soccer in America.”
The team they bought from Lamar Hunt for reportedly less than $20 million was valued at $700 million when they sold the principal stake to Mallouk earlier this year.
They transformed soccer in Kansas City by not just settling for keeping soccer in Kansas City but growing soccer in Kansas City.
It transformed them, too. They love the game. Bonne, Illig’s wife, is as big of a Sporting KC find as you’ll find, he says.
But there’s a consistency about him just the same.
Illig grew up in Kansas City. That pride he hopes others feel? It’s what he hopes he feels.
“That’s the lens he looks through almost everything on,” Reid said. “Even the origin story of this club is based on Kansas City.”
Those who know Illig will repeat the same catchphrases he’s repeated for years now. Sweat the details. Push people out front. And sprinkle in some magic moments. He’s carried it with him in every business. The first made him literal billions.
The latest?
“I don’t know,” he says, “if we’ve ever had a magic moment quite like this.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2026 at 7:00 AM with the headline "How a man who ‘couldn’t spell soccer’ helped Kansas City land the World Cup."