KC Royals’ Sherman discusses vision for new downtown stadium. Could it happen by 2026?
As the Royals looked to their future by firing president of baseball operations Dayton Moore and replacing him with J.J. Picollo, team chairman and CEO John Sherman also cast an eye on another item looming large in his vision of the club’s future in Kansas City.
Building a new downtown ballpark.
Sherman suggested that a new downtown stadium for the Royals team he purchased in 2020 would be an ideal addition to the evolving Kansas City skyline. He talked about how it would fit in well with the new terminal that’s currently under construction at Kansas City International Airport, as well as the new stadium being built by the Kansas City Current women’s pro soccer team along the city’s riverfront.
He spoke of such development’s collective place in an increasingly busy schedule of major upcoming sporting events that the city is scheduled to host, including the 2023 NFL Draft and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The Royals’ downtown ballpark concept isn’t new. Sherman announced his intent to explore such options for the club’s future a year ago. But his mention of the timetable around big events coming to Kansas City over the next few years would seem to suggest that Sherman wants to see a new stadium built long before the Royals’ current lease at the Truman Sports Complex expires as scheduled in 2031.
“I think about it in a really bigger context for Kansas City,” Sherman said. “We’re going to have a new airport, we’re going to have the NFL Draft, a women’s soccer stadium downtown. We’re going to have the World Cup.
“If you can dream a little bit — you have to do more than dream; there’s a lot of legwork to be done here to finance this and build support for it — but if we do something downtown or near downtown, and the Chiefs do something really special out there, these are the type of catalytic events that can really transform a region.”
The new KCI airport is scheduled to open in spring 2023, just before the NFL Draft descends upon Kansas City next April. The KC Current plan to have their new stadium ready for the 2024 National Women’s Soccer League season, and those aforementioned World Cup games will be played here in June and July of 2026.
“We have our part of it,” Sherman said. “We can play a big part in it. We certainly want to play a part in this.”
Sherman then focused on the World Cup, the world’s largest sporting event in terms of attendance and global audience, and what it could mean for Kansas City — the smallest U.S. World Cup destination for 2026 in terms of both media-market size and population.
“If you think about the World Cup and what we can do around it to enhance it,” he said, “Kansas City stands to gain more than anybody from the World Cup, and certainly more than June and July 2026.”
So is Sherman hoping the Royals could be playing in a new downtown ballpark by 2026? Things would certainly have to move quickly for that to happen.
On Wednesday, Sherman took exception to a recent report by WDAF-TV that the Royals have not been engaging in regular communication with city officials regarding a proposed new stadium.
“The biggest frustration that we’re feeling is that we haven’t been given a lot of information from the Royals directly,” Kansas City manager Brian Platt said in the TV station’s report, dated Sept. 15. “No one really knows what the plan is. No one knows what their intentions are.”
Sherman’s response: “I don’t really know, don’t really understand, why he said that. Because we’ve been very transparent and communicative with the mayor’s office. I think I have something on my calendar right now with the mayor.
“The good news there, it’s clear to me, is that they want to work on this and they want to help make it happen,” Sherman said. “The criticism about transparency, I don’t agree with it, but the fact they’re talking about it and he’s wanting to help and wanting to get more out of us, I see that as a positive.”
