Spokane is feeling good about its chance at being selected as a base camp for one of the 48 FIFA World Cup national teams.
The tournament's match schedule was released this weekend. Seattle is set to host early games between Groups B, D, and G.
That includes the US, Australia, Iran, Belgium, Egypt, and Qatar.
But Spokane city administrator Alex Scott says the schedule release doesn't change much.
"It's really just a math problem—there's not a ton more base camp locations than teams in the field," he said. "So I think our chances of getting selected continue to be really high."
Teams with games in Seattle aren’t the only ones who could be eyeing Spokane as their home away from home during the tournament.
“There's not that many potential team-based camp locations on the entire West Coast," Scott said. "We're just in good proximity to any national team that has early matches really anywhere on the West Coast."
Qualifying national teams are already sending scouts to potential base camp cities.
In Spokane, they'll find Northern Quest Resort and Casino as the host hotel and Gonzaga University as the training facility.
Although teams could reach out anytime, Scott says he doesn’t expect to know if Spokane has been selected until March or April next year.
"Anyone that selects us, we will be incredibly enthusiastic about," he said. "But of course, if I was going to just pick, I would say ideally it would be one of the countries that we have a sister city relationship within that country. I think that would just be really special."
Spokane has sister cities in Japan, China, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea.
Japan and South Korea are already qualifying teams, in groups F and A, respectively. Ireland and Italy are two of the 22 teams still vying for one of the six spots left in the tournament.
If Spokane is selected as a base camp by any team, they would probably show up weeks before the World Cup starts.
"By and large, I've been led to believe that we can expect a national team to show up about a month before their first match," Scott said. "Depending on the national team, they often have openness to all sorts of different partnerships while they're here...Hopefully we're lucky enough to actually experience it ourselves."
