FIFA Fan Festival™ Kansas City

The FIFA Fan Festival™ at the National WWI Museum and Memorial was at the center of this effort. Part watch party, part entertainment venue and part civic gathering space, the temporary destination would welcome up to 25,000 guests each day across 18 days of tournament programming. Visitors came for the matches, but the Fan Festival asked them to stay for something more: camaraderie, sportsmanship, a sense of place and, of course, the occasional pickup game. 

Years before the first kickoff at Kansas City Stadium, Populous began working on the Host City bid. The team evaluated several potential locations, eventually determining the National WWI Museum and Memorial offered the strongest combination of capacity, access and visibility. Early feasibility studies established the framework for the festival, informing crowd capacities, circulation, event infrastructure and the overall site organization. As the project came to fruition over the following years, those foundational planning decisions remained unchanged.  

Working alongside KC2026, the Populous team brought together expertise in event planning, experiential graphics, wayfinding and production to create an experience that felt effortless for every visitor. Behind the scenes, that experience depended on years of planning and the coordination of thousands of people.  

The design challenge was one worthy of a world stage. How do you welcome the world to the Heart of the Game through an experience that is as intuitive as it is fun, as grounded in community as it is of the entire world? From the festival master plan and event operations to citywide branding, wayfinding and production strategy, every technical decision worked toward the same goal: designing the conditions for moments of spontaneity, celebration and shared joy.

How does a visitor first encounter Kansas City? The experience begins at the airport and funnels itself through downtown streets, hotels and public transport before ever arriving at the Fan Festival or stadium itself. Through signage and activations, the team used each of these touchpoints as an opportunity to both orient and excite visitors, reinforcing the city’s identity while reducing uncertainty and stress for guests arriving in the city for the first time. In this way, orientation became an act of hospitality in itself, building anticipation for what, for many visitors, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and shaping a positive impression of Kansas City from the moment they arrived. 

This perspective shaped every discipline working on the project. Event planning, brand activation, graphics and wayfinding developed in tandem, allowing each decision and each discipline to support the other. The citywide decor program, airport installations, experiential graphics, digital messaging and wayfinding all formed a coordinated system that strengthened the entire experience and connected the visitor journey from arrival through departure. At the airport in particular, graphics acted as a warm greeting to the city, amplifying the scale of the moment before visitors ever reached the event itself.

The festival itself was planned through the exact same mindset. Beyond understanding how guests would move through the site, Populous shaped how they would best spend their time there. The team developed the operational framework for the event, helping determine which tournament days the festival would operate based on Kansas City matches, Team USA matches, anticipated attendance and available resources. Stage programming, entertainment strategy, production planning and the overall run of show were developed to create an immersive experience that unfolded seamlessly for each guest. 

The project team approached programming as an integral layer of design and guest experience. Live entertainment before matches, halftime programming, post-match analysis, concerts and community events encouraged guests to remain on site throughout the day. Through the layering of these experiences, the festival quickly became an immersive experience of joy — visitors celebrating cultures and traditions with every guest and fanbase, capturing the unique beauty that surrounds the world’s game.

Hospitality was a core tenet for many of the project’s defining decisions. The project team developed a visual identity born of Kansas City’s welcoming spirit, designing a brand system that spanned throughout the festival and across the region. As guests enter the festival, they are met with a 65-foot-tall heart, symbolizing Kansas City’s central location as the Heart of the Game. The heart set the tone for the experience: a welcome message to the world and an opportunity for fans to take a photograph, tell their own story and capture a memory of Kansas City to carry with them. It framed views of the main stage and the Liberty Memorial beyond, shaping an entry sequence that showed the world exactly what Kansas City stood for.  

As guests moved throughout the site, generous shade structures, cooling mist towers inspired by Kansas City’s status as the City of Fountains, tree canopies and premium hospitality spaces created a comfortable environment during the outdoor summer tournament. The Legacy Lounge and Premium Garden extended that hospitality through elevated guest experiences. While the festival itself remained free, these spaces introduced a broader range of offerings for different audiences, applying the same principles of choice and hospitality Populous brings to stadiums, arenas and venues.

Populous also designed activations for Host City supporters including JE Dunn, Hallmark and Black & Veatch, integrating sponsorship into the larger festival experience. 

The festival succeeded on the world stage because of the extensive collaboration behind the scenes. As both a project partner and Host City supporter, Populous assembled and coordinated production partners responsible for entertainment, event production, installation and experiential graphics while working closely with KC2026 and FIFA to balance local aspirations with the tournament’s global standards. The result was a culmination of all our expertise — from decades of international event planning across events including Super Bowls and the Olympic Games, to hospitality, wayfinding and experiential graphics — in a beautiful expression of Kansas City that the entire world was able to take part in. 

The FIFA Fan Festival™ transformed the National WWI Museum and Memorial into one of the tournament’s defining civic gathering places, welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup™. For the smallest of the 16 host cities, the effect was anything but small: Kansas City showed up at the scale of the tournament itself, turning its hospitality into an experience visitors from around the world could see, feel and remember.

Those moments represented the project’s entire ethos and its greatest success. Years of planning, coordination and technical expertise disappeared into the background, allowing visitors to focus on what mattered most: being together. 

The festival’s most recognizable element may have been the Heart of the Game, but its lasting impact came from everything visitors never had to think about. Every operational plan, wayfinding decision, brand element and programmed experience created an environment where celebration occurred naturally. It is a unique opportunity to design the joy of shared moments on a global stage, offering the world a glimpse into the heart of our work and the Heart of the Game.