Brit Boy Street Food Featured on KSHB 41: England's Kansas City Base Camp Excites Local Fans
There are more English people in the Kansas City metro than you'd think, and for a few weeks in 2026 all of them had somewhere to be.
Brit Boy Street Food ·
KSHB 41 covered England’s decision to base their 2026 World Cup camp in Kansas City, and the angle they took was the one that mattered locally: what it meant for the fans already here.
The expat community nobody counts
Kansas City isn’t a city people associate with British expats. There’s no British quarter, no cluster of pubs, no equivalent of the Irish presence in Boston or Chicago.
But they’re here. Military families who served at UK bases and came back. Engineers and academics who moved for work. People who married Americans. Students who never went home — Chris among them, having arrived on a soccer scholarship in 2007 and stayed.
They’re spread thin, which means most of them don’t know each other. What a World Cup base camp does is give a scattered group a reason to be in the same room.
Why a base camp matters more than a match
A host city gets a handful of fixtures. A base camp gets a team for the duration.
England training here meant weeks of squad presence, a permanent press corps, and supporters travelling in — rather than one afternoon of noise and then nothing. For local businesses that’s a genuinely different proposition, because it’s sustained rather than a spike.
What it did for us
Two things, and only one was obvious.
The expected one: English people looking for food that tasted like home, and Americans curious about what all the fuss was about.
The unexpected one: a lot of Kansas Citians found out there was a British pie business in the Northland because a football segment mentioned it. Some of them are now regulars who have never watched a match in their lives.
And then the part we still can’t quite believe — we ended up inside the England camp itself, feeding the press room and, on a second visit, several of the players.
Still here after the whistle
The tournament’s finished. We aren’t a World Cup business and never were — here’s the full retrospective.
The pies carry on. Order online, collect around the metro, or we’ll ship frozen overnight anywhere in the fifty states — including to England supporters who went home and can’t get a decent sausage roll where they are.
The KSHB 41 report is here. More on our press page.