"We're not in England any more" — that's Tuchel, framing Kansas City as exactly the kind of low-key, windows-open, small-hotel environment he thinks England need to go deep at a World Cup on American soil.
The FA has settled on the Inn at Meadowbrook, a five-star, 54-room boutique hotel on the Kansas side of the state line, as England's base for the 2026 tournament. The plan is deliberate: fly in, fly out, but always return here. No cavernous conference-resort where players pass each other in lifts and eat breakfast in a room built for conventions. Tuchel was explicit about what he wanted to avoid.
"A small hotel, not a 400, 500, 800-bed hotel where we see each other maybe just in the elevators," he said. "The air-conditioning is on and you cannot open the windows. There are a lot of these hotels in America." The FA has already requested a basketball court on-site — and when that proved impossible, they went looking for a local pool instead. Small details, but they add up across a six-week tournament.
Kansas City makes geographic sense
The location isn't sentimental. Kansas City sits near the centre of the continental United States, which matters enormously when England's group games are spread across Arlington (Texas), Massachusetts, and potentially beyond. The FA ran the numbers on travel logistics and liked what they found.
Training will happen at Swope Soccer Village — Sporting Kansas City's academy home, on the Missouri side of the state line — after Argentina moved faster to lock down the club's first-team performance centre. The Netherlands and Algeria are also basing themselves in the region, which makes the area one of the tournament's unofficial hubs.
England's schedule: slow start, then a sprint
England don't kick off until 17 June — a group opener against Croatia in Arlington — the latest possible start in the group stage. Their second game follows on 23 June against Ghana in Massachusetts, after which the schedule compresses fast if they advance.
Tuchel framed that late, condensed run as a feature, not a bug. "The players like that it becomes condensed so you have no chance to get bored once you go through the tournament," he said. For anyone pricing England's outright odds, note that a slow warmup window followed by relentless knockout football is a double-edged structure — it suits a settled, experienced squad, and punishes any team still finding its feet by the quarter-finals.
Before any of that, England head to Florida in early June for pre-tournament friendlies against New Zealand and Costa Rica. Low-stakes on paper. But with a squad still forming its identity under a relatively new manager, the chemistry Tuchel keeps mentioning needs to show up somewhere before the group stage begins.
"We have to get our chemistry right. This is the most important," he said. Hard to argue with that.
