Kansas City vs. St. Louis: Latest chapter of towns’ sports rivalry kicks off Saturday

Sporting Kansas City and St. Louis City SC are about to christen a new chapter in a decades-old sports rivalry.

It’s the first matchup between the two Major League Soccer teams — St. Louis City began MLS competition this season as an expansion club.

Will “Sporting vs. City” one day rival the fervor of the 1985 World Series between the KC Royals and St. Louis Cardinals? Old NFL games for the Governor’s Cup, between the Chiefs and (now L.A.) Rams? Or Kansas City BBQ vs. toasted ravioli?

Time will tell — we’ll slow our roll a bit— but the first Sporting KC-St. Louis City match arrives late Saturday evening in The Lou. Kickoff is scheduled for 8:55 p.m. at St. Louis’ CITY Park.

Sporting (2-7-4) rolls east with some momentum, having beaten Seattle and blanked Minnesota before tying defending league champion LAFC after an awful start to the season.

Meanwhile, St. Louis City SC (6-4-1) is enjoying a solid inaugural campaign after blazing to a 5-0 record to begin the year.

The stage is set for an exciting evening. And there will be a lot of history behind this historic first matchup.

Rivalries, or derbies, in soccer

Soccer rivalries, also known as “derbies,” are a significant part of the game’s global landscape.

El Classico pairs regional and political rivals Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. Liverpool and Manchester United are the two most successful clubs in Europe, and off the field, their rivalry began as competing industrial hubs in the north of England. Politics, geographical proximity and shared history infuse these rivalries with reverence.

So far, of course, the only such elements offered by the budding Sporting-City rivalry are geographic proximity and a general competitiveness between the cities of KC and St. Louis.

“I think it’s got a long way to go before it can be considered a big rivalry,” Sporting KC captain and Scotland native Johnny Russell told The Star plainly. “But, you know, it has to start somewhere.”

Growing up in Glasgow, Russell was immersed in the Old Firm Derby, one of the fiercest in the world. Rangers and Celtic fans quibble on game day and otherwise about politics, religion and, naturally, soccer.

The Old Firm Derby dates to 1888. The first competitive match between Rangers and Celtic was played during the 1890 Scottish Cup. Since then, the clubs have met some 436 times.

While Russell is an ardent Celtic fan, some of his friends and family sit on the Rangers’ side of the rivalry.

“It can absolutely ruin a week, or it can make it,” Russell said. “There’s a lot of back-and-forth talking that goes on.”

America’s First Soccer City

St. Louis has always been a soccer city. But it lacked a prospective ownership group that was willing to support a team at the level required by MLS for admission into the league.

So for years, as MLS continued to grow its footprint through expansion, it did so without the original “Soccer City.”

That sad reality ignored decades of St. Louis’ impact on the American soccer scene. Just ask Taylor Twellman, the former MLS star now working as a soccer broadcaster — and whose father, Tim, played for the Kansas City Comets during the early 1980s.

“How many cities in the United States have soccer in the fabric and heartbeat of the city?” he said. “Very few cities can say soccer is at the heartbeat, and soccer is at the fabric, of the city. I think there’s a real argument that St. Louis is at the top of that.”

Twellman, tasked with color commentary for Saturday night’s match on Apple TV, is from St. Louis. His uncles played at SIU-Edwardsville. Rivalry matches between SIU-Edwardsville and St. Louis University, known as the Bronze Boot series, drew upwards of 20,000 people during the 1970s and 1980s.

But St. Louis’ soccer heritage dates back even further. Six players on Team USA’s 1950 World Cup roster hailed from St. Louis. The city ran its own pro soccer league from 1907-39. The St. Louis Stars had a decade-long run in the old NASL before moved to Southern California in 1977.

What followed was a 50-year drought: no first-division pro soccer could be found within a two-hour drive of St. Louis.

And that half-century gap gives Twellman some pause when asked if his hometown is still America’s soccer capital. This history also helps explain the excitement about pro soccer in St. Louis today.

But were it not for the success enjoyed by Sporting KC, especially following the organization’s rebrand from the Wizards more than a decade ago, St. Louis might still be pining for its own MLS team.

Old school meets new school

If St. Louis is an old-school soccer city with a new-school team, KC might be considered new-school to the core.

The KC soccer scene began an upward trajectory with Sporting KC’s 2010 rebrand and construction of a new soccer-specific stadium. The venue now known as Children’s Mercy Park became an instant model — and object of envy — for teams across the league.

Sporting KC has actually trademarked the slogan “Soccer Capital of America,” and that moniker seems to fit.

Sporting KC opened its state-of-the-art Pinnacle National Performance Center in 2018, and the Kansas City Current of the National Women’s Soccer League have since followed suit: They’ve built a glistening training center of their own just north of the Missouri River and are now constructing a new riverfront stadium that’s set to open next season.

But even as Sporting KC burnished an increasingly impressive brand, its ownership knew this much: The league needed a club in St. Louis, too.

To hear Twellman tell it, that, too, helped make the case for St. Louis as an expansion site for MLS.

“They did everything in their power to make sure that everyone within Major League Soccer circles understood that if the league was going to expand at the rate they were going through, (MLS) has to be in St. Louis,” Twellman said. “It makes Kansas City better, and it makes the league better, to have this rivalry.”

Tantalizing geographical element

Sporting has had rivals in the past. Manager Peter Vermes recalled how his club had a good thing going with the Chicago Fire, for instance, until Sporting KC moved to the Western Conference.

Smaller rivalries have developed in its place. One, with Real Salt Lake, sprouted in part thanks to the 2013 MLS Cup championship match (won by Sporting) and repeated playoff matchups. The Houston Dynamo became another rival organization when they were coached by Dominic Kinnear.

But none of those rivalries included a true geographic component, the proximity that this one with St. Louis provides. Saturday’s game falls during the league’s annual “rivalry week,” an eight-day period offering numerous games with heightened intensity.

In KC and St. Louis, even as Sporting and City played other rivalry-tinged matches last week, the online discourse between the two fanbases was squarely focused on Saturday night’s showdown.

Vermes said this new series with St. Louis is poised to become something special.

“I look at that as a really good thing for both clubs, “ he said.

Many recently spawned MLS rivalries, such as El Traffico (between the two L.A. clubs) and the Hudson River Derby (the New York teams), and even Miami vs. Orlando, have become much anticipated affairs.

“You’ve got all these different ones that are out there, and it’s good for us to have something like that,” Vermes said. “It’s good for the fans, I think it’s good for the (soccer) environment and I think it’s exciting that we’re embarking on this. I think it’ll be good for both organizations.”

With anticipation high, it’s reasonable to expect an emotional meeting on Saturday. Vermes, Twellman and Russell all acknowledged that the excitement level will be through the roof.

Sporting KC’s spirits are in a much better place than they were a month go, when scoring goals seemed impossible and 10 matches passed without a league victory. But while Sporting battled LAFC on the road this week, St. Louis had no scheduled midweek match.

Sporting will be looking to manage players’ minutes carefully in hopes of avoiding a letdown Saturday evening. But Vermes said channeling their emotions in a such a high-intensity setting will be just as critical.

“When you talk about the emotions, I really think that you gotta try to use them,” he said. “You have to control them but use them as a motivator, as opposed to letting them get the best of you.”