KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As a child in Overland Park, Kan., Matt Besler’s remembers his fondest wish once was to play professional indoor soccer for the Kansas City Attack/Comets.

Or maybe it was to get to play high school basketball in a Thanksgiving tournament at St. Thomas Aquinas.

“That was where my world was,” he said in an interview with The Kansas City Star last week. “How cool would that be?”

Cool enough that he certainly wasn’t visualizing playing in a FIFA World Cup.

Sure, he remembers watching it for the first time when he was 7 in 1994. But his primary memory was of the free-flowing hair of Colombia’s Carlos Valderrama, he told me in 2014, and most likely he was less focused on that destination than “I don’t know, like what popsicle I was eating.”

It wasn’t so much that playing in a World Cup was too big to dream as it was out of context, a sort of category error of things that simply don’t go together.

Especially when it came to a sport that still largely was first-generation mainstream in the USA — and coming from a state and area where no one before him ever had demonstrated it was possible.

Which helps explain how Besler, who in 2014 became the first Kansan and Kansas Citian ever to play in a World Cup, in certain ways embodies the arc of the growth of soccer here:

From a region that was late to the game, literally, to this summer serving as a 2026 World Cup host city for six games and four national-team base camps — bringing in three of the world’s most prominent and ardent fan bases, in Argentina, England and The Netherlands.

“The atmosphere and the energy in the stadium,” Besler said, “is different than most all games.”

His career essentially bestrides the slow-to-grow Before Times and the apparent soccer paradise of today, which was fortified by remarkable facilities, boosted by an ideal central location and forged by an eagerly welcoming host city that slugged above its weight to make this happen.

Along with Lamar Hunt and Latino and European immigrants and forever Rockhurst coach Tony Tocco and the original Comets ... along with six investors, led by Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson, who bought the Kansas City Wizards in 2006 and rebranded them as Sporting KC in 2011 ... Besler is part of the montage of key influences and reflections of the growth of the game here — a point nicely made by Tocco as Besler was heading to Brazil in 2014.

“You’ve got (23) players on the World Cup team, and to think of the massive amount of people playing … and one of them is from our little town?” Tocco said then, later adding, “It’s a tribute to Matt, but it’s also a tribute to development over a number of years.”

No wonder Besler, the Blue Valley West High School grad who spent 12 of his 13 MLS seasons with Sporting KC, is an official ambassador for KC2026.

Because he not only can appreciate from where this came, but also what it will look like and mean — topics he touched on as one of the featured speakers at Leadercast 2026 Thursday morning at the Midland Theater.

At the event, Besler largely focused on leadership as a dynamic skill to be developed and how sports makes such a great platform for that because it crosses over with many meaningful examples in real life.

Speaking of … speaking, Besler said, “It’s the closest I’ve felt to playing a game” since retiring in 2021.

But when he actually did play the game remains vivid and foundational to Besler, who last year founded the Captains Soccer Club for youths and says, “I feel confident saying that this is what I’m meant to do.”

That conviction emerged from consciously spending a couple years away from the game, he said, to flush out some of the mindset and ego it required that he called “not the best.”

But it also stems from the formative stuff that Besler doesn’t believe he’ll ever let go.

The stuff that effectively made him a pioneer and informed the pride and responsibility he felt as he was ascending through the developmental ranks while others scoffed.

Stuff that, in fact, tracks nicely with Kansas City’s own rise to become the smallest of the 11 U.S. host cities in the 48-team tournament to also be played at five sites in Canada and Mexico.

Most pointedly, Besler remembers well the doubters he encountered in his early teens, when he had developed enough to become part of the Olympic Development Program.

Even as he was becoming the only kid from Kansas to make one of the handful of regional teams, others repeatedly teased him about “playing in pastures” or made cow-mooing noises at him, figuring he had to have grown up on a farm.

“You’re embarrassed by it, and it (makes you mad),” he said. “You’re like, ‘I’m getting made fun of.’ Doesn’t feel good.”

Something happened over time, though: He started feeling proud of what it meant to be from someplace unexpected. It fueled him. He’d think, “‘Hell, yeah, I’m from Kansas. You want me to tell you about it?’”

So in 2014 he reveled in being in the lobby of the team base camp hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when broadcast images of raucous fans from all over featured everything from Hong Kong to London to … Kansas City.

“Guys, it’s the Power & Light. I drink beer there,’” he remembered saying to teammates.

Much like he’s been bragging all along about the host city, including data he said he processed constantly during his time with Sporting KC — a run that included winning the 2013 MLS Cup.

One of his “favorite feelings and memories,” he said, is of the procession of new teammates arriving here over the years with a seemingly pessimistic attitude about the area.

With a smile, he said, he loved to watch what he suggested would invariably unfold next.

“It was like clockwork,” he said. “Watching somebody come in, and they’re surprised by this. And they’re surprised by, ‘Wait, I can buy a house for this much? Oh, I’m living in a mansion here.’“

By the end of their experience, he said, many came to feel “this is where my heart” is.

That’s the same sort of surprise feeling Besler expects to strike many visitors during the games here from June 16-July 11.

“A lot of people are going to be visiting Kansas City that would never (otherwise) visit Kansas City in their life,” he said. “So it’s a great opportunity for us to kind of showcase what we’re about.”

Extending through ripples over the years, he believes.

By way of example, while he doesn’t believe Sporting KC is likely to soon sign a player from the Argentinian national team, he envisions players going back to their clubs and being asked about the experience here. And that the reviews will be raves about, say, the Compass Minerals National Performance Center or the hospitality.

And that they’ll say things like, “Kansas City, that’s the place to be,” and that it will “just spread and spread and spread” and plant some seeds for signings in the future.

As much as Besler anticipates that upbeat effect for others, there will be something new in this for him, too.

Because of safety concerns in Sao Paulo in 2014, he said members of Team USA, including his friend and Sporting teammate Graham Zusi, didn’t get out a lot.

For that matter, when they did get out they went nowhere fast: It was 90 minutes each way to their training center. Multiply that by 30 days, and it gets old fast.

“It affected us,” he said. “Like, it affected our experience.”

So much of the experience here will be fresh for Besler, who particularly looks forward to the FIFA Fan Festival at the National World War I Museum and Memorial and seeing cultures mesh across the area, even as the teams themselves likely mostly will be in their own bubbles.

“Do I think (Lionel) Messi is going to be walking around Kansas City? No. I wish. I mean, it would be cool if he was …” Besler said. “But from the fan’s perspective, I think that’s where the real opportunity is to get a sense of the country’s culture.”

Not to mention for our culture to get a sense of many others while we wait to see just how this will unfurl over Kansas City.

“Every World Cup’s different, so no one has any idea exactly what it’s going to be like,” Besler said. “But I think that’s one of the exciting parts. There’s this mystery about, ‘What is it going to be like?’ We can’t predict it.”

Just like not so long ago no one would have predicted a Kansan would play in the World Cup. Let alone that he would become entwined with the improbable story of luring the event to Kansas City.

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