As World Cup fever ramps up, a Shawnee brewery known for its soccer watch parties couldn’t be more excited.

On weekend mornings during the Premier League season, people have crowded in to Friction Beer Company to cheer on their favorite soccer clubs and commune with other fans.

On Sunday, the bar celebrated its final watch party of the Premier League season, with about 40 people coming through their doors to watch one of the 10 games being broadcast.

While some of them share favorite teams, each has a different story to how they discovered their preferred club, as well as fell in love with the sport, and ended up coming to Shawnee to find community with other soccer fans.

“We opened this brewery to bring people together, and this is just a fun, cool way to do that with a really dedicated audience,” saod Nathan Ryerson, Friction Beer co-founder. “There’s nothing like soccer fans and to just bring even more people to it, that’s just awesome.”

The big difference this year will be while the Premier League’s season is over, the watch parties are only beginning as it will stream every World Cup game, starting with the first match on June 11, as well one of the organizers for Americana and Ales on June 20, Shawnee’s unofficial World Cup tie-in event.

“As the year’s been going on with the Premier League, (the World Cup is) what we’ve been talking about,” Ryerson said. “Like, we’re excited for the end of the season here, but the excitement’s kept growing throughout the year, so we’re almost to that crescendo.”

“I’m, like, fully invested”

At the watch party on Sunday, the featured match was Tottenham Hotspur F.C. vs. Everton. Adding to the tension that day was Tottenham’s tenuous status in the Premier League; one of the biggest clubs in the world, it faced relegation, or a demotion to a lower-tier league, if certain factors played out.

“That would be huge. A major team has not been relegated in more than 25 years,” Ryerson said.

Clad in a Tottenham jersey, Jay Urban, of Kansas City, watched the match anxiously. The football club is the reason he got into the sport, he said.

“I didn’t really like soccer much. I’ve been a big American football fan and baseball fan my whole life, until I went to a Premier League game, a Tottenham game two years ago,” he said. “After seeing that, it opened my eyes to soccer, and I completely became a huge soccer fan. We watched every game, and now I’ve got World Cup tickets. I’m, like, fully invested.”

For many soccer fans, like Urban, the connection to the team lies in the narrative.

“Tottenham has a really interesting stigma to it, where it’s a high-budget club that continuously like underperforms, and so you see all these really cool stars join Tottenham, who have high aspirations, and then part of Tottenham is you see them sputter and fail … There’s just a lot of drama to it,” he said.

For him, the narrative played out well. Tottenham won the game 1-0, narrowly avoiding being demoted.

Fans follow teams for different reasons

Across the bar, other narratives are playing out with different fans.

After a heartbreaking season for her favorite team, Liverpool F.C., Marissa Todd watched tearfully with other fans as they said goodbye to two beloved players, Andy Robertson and Mohamed Salah, whose contracts expired at the end of the season.

Todd fell in love with soccer during the 1994 World Cup and soon after, she chose Liverpool as her favorite team because of how they represent their hometown.

“They’re very much focused on the town and also, ownership is a big thing. They’re owned by actual humans and not oligarchs,” she said.

Having recently moved to Shawnee, Chris Carrano was happy to find a place nearby that streamed games of his favorite team, Chelsea F.C. and even happier to watch it with his father, Ken, a Chicago native who got him into the sport at a young age.

His reason for originally picking Chelsea as his favorite was, as he admitted, “silly.”

“It was from a video game. It was FIFA 2000 on the computer, and my club team was blue, and so, I was 7, 8 years old, and my club team was blue, and they were the blue team, so I picked them, and I followed them religiously ever since,” he said laughing.

Friction Beer will host watch parties and a city event

Involved in planning soccer watch parties in the Kansas City area for more than a decade, Ryerson said that when Friction Beer opening in 2023, he wanted it to be the go-to spot for fans in and around Johnson County.

“It brings a lot of people together. Some of my good friends that I have in life today are because of those watch parties,” he said.

This will be the first World Cup for the bar and it has big ambitions, serving as the official watch party location for supporters of England’s national football team.

“We were (England’s) watch party location for the Euro (Championship tournament) two years ago, and if you weren’t here an hour before, you couldn’t get in,” he said.

While Ryerson acknowledges the skepticism from non-soccer fans people who are already viewing the World Cup as a disappointment — based on studies like the American Hotel & Lodging Association calling Kansas City the weakest World Cup hotel market — he shrugs it off.

“I think Kansas City showed that people understand they’re a good soccer city by the fact that we did get Argentina, and then England (for their team’s base camps),” he said.

As Ryerson expects people from both out of the county and the city to show up, he wants them all to feel welcome, as well as the excitement for “the beautiful game.”

“I hope people understand this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and to even play a tiny, tiny part of it is so much fun,” he said.

Tickets and information for Americana & Ales is available at its official website.