How Dallas' most eminent soccer family laid the foundation for grand 2026 World Cup stage
FRISCO, Texas - For nearly two decades, Clark and Dan Hunt have carried, for moments like this, a wry brother-to-brother motto.
Usually, one Hunt invokes the phrase when the other is about to give a speech or interview. But now they're being interviewed together in Toyota Stadium's FC Dallas owners suite, so the tacit reminder applies to both.
Whatever you do, don't screw up Dad's legacy.
It's so droll. So self-deprecating. So like Dad, the late Lamar Hunt, humble pillar of Dallas' most eminent family and perhaps sports history's greatest visionary.
He especially was avant-garde for football, soccer and tennis, but his sons agree that before his December 2006 death, he could not have fully fathomed what is occurring over the next four weeks.
After playing a pivotal role in securing America's first World Cup in 1994, Lamar knew it someday would return, but not on this unprecedented scale and grandeur. And not with his beloved North Texas as the epicenter, hosting a tournament-high nine matches.
"I think Dad would be blown away," Dan Hunt said. "I think he would be speechless. Because the growth of soccer is unparalleled in professional sports in this country.
"Certainly, he would be proud."
As North Texas prepares to host its World Cup opener, Sunday's Netherlands-Japan group stage match in AT&T Stadium, and an estimated 3.8 million visitors in the next month, no family more personifies the collective effort than the Hunts.
No one has more World Cup perspective than the Hunt brothers, who since 1974 have collectively attended all but one of the quadrennial events (1978), including last 11.
The Hunt family's World Cup adventures, mostly led by Lamar and wife Norma, span five continents across five decades - with zany similarities to the 1980s National Lampoon's Vacation movies.
Yes, picture billionaire Lamar as Clark Griswold, frugally booking low-budget hotels and Category 3 match tickets, his legendary quirks for numbers and streaks keeping his family thoroughly entertained.
"Our dad liked to be his own tour guide, so it wasn't like we had a fancy car and a guide who was driving us around," Clark Hunt said.
"I'll say this now for the record," chimed Dan. "Lamar Hunt was one of the worst drivers you've ever seen and endangered our lives a lot."
The Hunts' World Cup commitment
Apart from the thrill and grandiosity of the annual game he named, the Super Bowl, the sports extravaganza Lamar most savored was World Cup.
He is and always will be the patron saint of American soccer. He's arguably the person most responsible for the United States finally landing its first World Cup in 1994 - and now by extension, its monumental return, with a record 48 teams and 104 matches played across North America.
In 1994, Lamar was co-chair of Dallas' World Cup organizing committee. The city hosted six matches in the Cotton Bowl, as well as the International Broadcast Center for all 52 World Cup matches.
Now, fittingly, Dan Hunt, 49, is co-chair of the North Texas FIFA World Cup organizing committee. As chair of Dallas' bid committee, he was instrumental in the city landing the coveted IBC for the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.
Clark, 61, is co-chair of organizing efforts in Kansas City, where he also is CEO of the NFL's Chiefs - the franchise Lamar founded in 1959 as the Dallas Texans.
In 1994, despite Lamar's lobbying efforts, Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium wasn't among the nine World Cup venues chosen by FIFA. Dan calls it one of the greatest regrets in Lamar's sports life. This year, Arrowhead is hosting six matches.
"One of the things I remember from '94 was how hard our dad worked for the local host committee to make sure everything was as perfect as it could be for the games here in Dallas," Clark said. "I think he would be excited that we've taken a similar role with his two favorite cities.
"And I know he'd be thrilled that we have games in Kansas City."
A family's football life
For Clark and Dan, who have attended World Cups since they were, respectively, 9 and 10, the approach of this one carried extra nostalgia.
It's their first World Cup without Norma, who died in June 2023, four months after attending the Chiefs' 38-35 Super Bowl victory over Philadelphia.
That was the 57th Super Bowl, and Norma, according to the NFL, was the only woman to attend all of them - Lamar's most cherished streak of the many he tracked to the day of his passing.
"When he was so sick in the hospital that he could barely talk, he told Clark to be sure that I went to the Super Bowl," Norma told The Dallas Morning News in 2011. "He couldn't bear for me to not make it."
Clark and Dan were Lamar Hunt's third and fourth children. Lamar Jr. and Sharron were born during Lamar Sr.'s first marriage, to Rosemary Carr. Lamar Sr. married former Richardson High history teacher Norma Lynn Knobel in 1964.
That was one year after Lamar moved the American Football League Texans from Dallas to Kansas City and renamed them the Chiefs.
"Sometimes people have a public persona and a private persona; he was 1,000 percent the person he was to the public in his home, with his children," Norma said in the 2011 interview. "Just the sweetest guy ever."
To the public, history shows that soccer interest in North Texas gradually grew after Lamar Hunt in 1967 co-founded the Dallas Tornado of the United Soccer Association, which the following year merged into the new Hunt co-founded North American Soccer League.
In reality, those origins are rooted in the Lamar-Norma love story.
While being courted by Lamar, North Texas State University student Norma took part in the Rotary Scholar Program at University College Dublin in Ireland. While visiting Norma in 1962, Lamar on a chilly night took her to a Shamrock Rovers match.
It was his first soccer game. He was hooked - on Norma and soccer. Later, watching the 1966 World Cup final between West Germany and England on TV compelled him to bring the soccer to America, specifically North Texas.
"He fell in love with it for two reasons," Dan said. "One, the passion of the fans; he saw the supporters in that culture and loved it.
"But secondly, he saw that moms and dads and brothers and sisters can kick a soccer ball together, unlike traditional American sports."
Clark Hunt was born in 1965. He was among the first generation of North Texas kids to grow up in what organically grew to be a soccer hotbed.
His early coaches were men from the United Kingdom who came to Dallas to play for the Tornado and needed extra income, so they ran clinics and camps and ultimately settled here as coaches.
Clark followed his father to SMU and was captain of the Mustangs' perennial top-10-ranked soccer team.
Dan, born in 1976, played in the highly competitive Dallas Classic Soccer League, so Lamar and Norma had an extended run as soccer parents.
"Mom was maybe the original soccer mom," said Clark. Added Dan with a smile: "Soccer Mom 1, without the minivan."
The Hunts' enduring legacy
On a cool evening this April, the panorama from the Toyota Stadium's Hunt Sports Group owners' suite was clear.
Clark and Dan certainly aren't screwing up Dad's legacy.
They're building upon it. Enhancing it. Honoring it, just as Norma did.
"We're so lucky to have two beacons like that," Dan said. "If you could emulate our mom and dad, which is next to impossible, then you're doing things the right way."
Three of the suite's walls are full of family photos and renderings of how Toyota Stadium will look when its $200 million renovation is complete in 2028.
The glass fourth wall and balcony seats display the past, present and future. The $58 million National Soccer Hall of Fame on the south end. Below on the pitch, the FC Dallas-Minnesota United FC match.
To the north, 17 fields on which FC Dallas Academy teams train and youth tournaments are held. And for this World Cup, the 145-acre complex is base camp for the Swedish national team.
"Our mother was so outgoing and a tremendous hostess," Clark said. "And our dad was so thoughtful and authentic and humble.
"They were the perfect pair for each other. They really gave us a compass as we took on the responsibility of running these franchises. At the end of the day, it's not about us. It's not really about the coaches or players. It's about our fans."
The following morning, Clark would fly to Kansas City for the first day of the NFL draft. The Chiefs have appeared in five Super Bowls this decade, winning three.
And the Hunts these days are spending many hours planning the Chiefs' $3 billion domed stadium that is scheduled to open in 2031 and likely will be a Super Bowl site.
Globetrotting every four years
On this night, though, Clark and Dan filled the suite's air with World Cup travel tales. And laughter.
Clark's first, and the first of many to which the Hunts attended with Dallas Tornado co-founder Bill McNutt and his family, was West Germany in 1974.
"My dad was trying to promote the Tornado, so he took four journalists from the U.S., driving all over West Germany with us in vans."
One of the journalists was on-his-way-to-sportscasting-stardom Verne Lundquist.
"That was just like our dad," Clark said. "Such a creative marketer and promoter.
"Another thing I remember from that trip was maybe the first fan fest at a World Cup, which was completely organic, in a square in Dusseldorf."
There, father and son Hunt took turns trying to kick a soccer ball through a wooden cutout.
The Hunts scrapped plans to attend the 1978 World Cup in Argentina because of a spate of oil company executive kidnappings.
Dan's first World Cup was 1986, which was supposed to be in Colombia but was moved to Mexico City.
His enduring memory, besides Diego Maradona's infamous "Hand of God" goal, was seeing Mexican flag-waving fans filling streets and bridges.
Then there was the infamous Hunt-McNutt meal at a restaurant called Pyramid Charlie's.
"It was the food that made the Aztecs great," Dan said. "It did not make the Hunt family or McNutt family great."
The 1990 World Cup in Italy was made special by Team USA's first Cup appearance in 40 years. That's when it became a Hunt family tradition to see at least one USA match every World Cup.
That tradition was set to continue Friday, when Clark and Dan and their families are scheduled to be in Los Angeles for USA-Paraguay's group stage opener.
Perhaps the Hunt brothers or their children will find themselves in a pickup soccer match in the streets, as did Clark and Dan in Milan in 1990.
"Let's just say USA came out on top, 5-4," Dan said. In 2014 in Brazil, the brothers and two of Clark's teenagers played a four-on-four match on Copa Cabana Beach, again winning 5-4.
"But we both came off the pitch, injured," Dan said.
Quadrennial World Cup family trips also give the brothers a chance to pass down Hunt family lore, many of them involving Lamar's determination to keep alive streaks.
In Italy in 1990 it was eating gelato for 34 straight days. And making sure that at each hotel, Lamar swam in the pool at least once.
"A lot of nights you're getting to a hotel after a game at 1 a.m.," Dan recalled. "The number of fences he and I climbed together so we could keep our streak going - unbelievable."
Lamar certainly personified his lifelong nickname: Games.
And what about Clark and Dan? Did they inherit Dad's competitive gene?
Let's just say they don't mind pointing out that Arlington and Kansas City will host a combined 15 World Cup games. As Dan notes:
"That's more than Canada (13) and Mexico (13)."
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This story was originally published June 12, 2026 at 2:44 AM.