On 24 hours in KC: Chiefs go to Super Bowl, Bobby Witt Jr. contract, 6 World Cup games

At a watch party Sunday afternoon at No Other Pub in the Power & Light District, Kansas City officials and the organizing group that invested thousands of hours enticing FIFA to bring the 2026 World Cup to the region learned that we’ll have a breathtaking six games here — including a knockout round game and a quarterfinal.

“Today is a huge win for Kansas City,” Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas said on Sunday. “And it’s another sign of the great work we’ve done and the great work ahead.”

Somehow, that was an understatement about a momentous, even redefining, 24 hours in Kansas City sports history. Or, for that matter, in the history of the city itself.

About 90 minutes after the reveal, the Chiefs took off from the not-yet-a-year-old Kansas City International airport to Las Vegas — where the team led by phenom Patrick Mahomes will play in its fourth Super Bowl in five years and will seek to beat the San Francisco 49ers to become the first NFL team to win back-to-back titles in nearly 20 years.

And the exclamation point was delivered at noon Monday, when the Royals announced they had signed budding superstar Bobby Witt Jr. to what amounted to an 11-year, $288.7-million guaranteed extension. This after an offseason in which the Royals went on a relative free-agent spending binge of more than $100 million, the fourth-most in Major League Baseball.

The Witt deal, astronomically above the previous most prolific in franchise history, reflects a profound message about the franchise’s commitment to a revival. And it makes a statement that surely will bolster its intention to build a downtown ballpark district with the aid of Jackson County voters it hopes to have approve a ballot initiative to extend the current stadiums’ sales tax that the Royals and Chiefs enjoy.

Any one of these three developments in itself would speak to a landscape-shifting and even psyche-altering trend in a Kansas City that already can claim the most triumphant decade in KC sports annals — including Sporting KC’s MLS Cup in 2013, the Royals’ back-to-back American League titles and 2015 World Series crown, the first (and later second) Super Bowl victory since 1970 and, sorry Kansas State and Mizzou fans, Kansas’ 2022 national title.

The bookend on this span has collective crossover power that is almost unfathomable and immeasurable in what ought to be savored as the Golden Era of Kansas City sports.

Especially when you consider the opening next month of the Kansas City Current’s CPKC Stadium, the first purpose-built venue for a women’s professional team, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s campaign to build a new home and the surging momentum and energy of our own pop icon Taylor Swift.

Over the months dating Travis Kelce, she has become an adoptive daughter of Kansas City, which on Sunday was the top TV market for the Grammy Awards with a 13.6 rating — up 86% from 2023, per John Ourand of Puck News.

“Kansas City is clearly the home TV market for Taylor Swift,” he added in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

No wonder the Chiefs feel comfortable striving to make themselves the “world’s team,” a story in itself we’ll have soon about the franchise that has been the “it” team long before Swift arrived on the scene.

Their recent success, particularly considering the previous 50 years of futility, is the most visible and influential of all these elements now.

With that as the baseline, the synergy ahead for Kansas City is hard to even comprehend in terms of the vast implications of the World Cup to be played at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, the groundbreaking tone that the Current is setting and the hopeful days ahead for the Royals in the wake of their recent moves and now the long-term signing of Witt.

“I promise to do everything in my power to help bring championship baseball back to Kansas City!” Witt said in a statement released by the Royals.

And plenty more is percolating.

A Chiefs victory on Sunday would certify them a dynasty at a time such a feat is more challenging than ever in the NFL. The Royals by Feb. 29 are planning to announce their site selection toward a move that has doubters and detractors but appeals to the imagination of what it could be and mean to the broader community if done right.

Between those visions and the visionaries who brought us the World Cup, it’s a remarkable series of events that you could hardly make up to be woven together at once like this.

Then again, as NLBM president Bob Kendrick often reminds, a wise man perhaps saw it coming when he arrived in Kansas City in the late 1930s.

“I knew I was coming to the Heart of America,” Buck O’Neil liked to say. “I didn’t know I was coming to the center of the universe.”

Now more than ever.