"Pinch-me moment" is how KC Current co-founder Angie Long described it. And honestly, that's fair. Six years ago she and her husband Chris were watching women's football crowds light up Paris. Now the Royal Dutch Football Association is training out of the facility they built — one that was originally designed for a women's professional team in the American Midwest.
That's not a coincidence. That's a compounding bet that paid off.
The Netherlands officially took over the Current's training complex on Monday ahead of their 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign, with the facility serving as their base camp through the quarterfinal stage. Kansas City hosts six World Cup matches in total, including Netherlands vs. Tunisia on June 25 and a quarterfinal at Arrowhead — rebranded as Kansas City Stadium for FIFA — on July 11. Algeria, England, and Argentina are also basing operations in the area.
A Women's Facility Chosen by a Men's World Cup Nation
That last part matters more than it might seem. A top men's national team selecting a women's club's training ground isn't just a logistical decision — it's a statement about the standard the Current has set. Chris Long put it plainly: "Their actions speak so loudly when you have this top men's team select a women's facility that's leading the way globally in sports for its investment."
The Current opened their CPKC Stadium — the world's first stadium purpose-built for a women's professional team — with an 11,500-seat capacity, and they're already planning an expansion to 18,000 by 2031. The adjacent $25 million Riverside Stadium and Performance Center opened next door just in February. The players will use that facility during the NWSL's month-long break while the Dutch occupy their usual home.
Angie Long's read on what this means long-term is pointed: "They can't unsee that. They can't." The idea being that Dutch football officials, players, and staff will return home with a recalibrated picture of what a women's club facility can look like. That kind of soft influence is hard to quantify, but it's real.
Current Landing and the Bigger Riverfront Picture
Meanwhile, directly outside, Kansas City is mid-construction on something that goes well beyond football. The Current's parent organization is nearing the end of phase one of a projected $1 billion-plus private investment on the Berkley Riverfront — a development that includes around 430 apartment units, 50,000 square feet of retail space, a riverfront promenade, and a 40-foot wide videoboard plaza at Current Landing that will host watch parties starting June 6.
None of it will be fully finished by the time the World Cup starts. But the plaza will be active, the KC Streetcar Riverfront Extension is already running, and the Longs are clearly building toward something that outlasts this summer by decades.
Palmer Square Real Estate partner Mukul Sharma, a Kansas City native who lived in New York, Chicago, D.C., and Philadelphia before returning, put the vision simply: "Those cities have activated waterfronts. There's absolutely no reason why Kansas Citians don't deserve the exact same thing."
Defending champions Argentina, meanwhile, are training at Sporting KC's facility but staying at the Origin Hotel at Current Landing — the one with the floor-to-ceiling Lionel Messi mural on the exterior. That image, more than anything else this week, probably captures where Kansas City soccer finds itself in 2026: a city that started chasing this moment six years ago and somehow ended up with Messi's face on a building next to a women's football stadium on the Missouri River.
"Every investment decision that we've made has been with the concept of, 'Oh, no we're not going anywhere. This is here for the next 100 years or longer,'" Angie Long said. That kind of conviction either looks naive or visionary in hindsight. Right now, with the Netherlands unpacking in their locker room, it's looking like the latter.
