Kansas City Mo. ? The Kansas-Missouri football game is coming to Kansas City.

Officials from both schools planned to announce Monday afternoon that they will play the next two games at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, something that has been discussed for many years but resisted by merchants in the teams’ hometowns of Columbia, Mo., and Lawrence, Kan.

Several people close to the situation told The Associated Press on Monday morning that each team will play a home game in the series in Arrowhead, starting with the 2007 season. The people asked not to be identified because the formal announcement was not scheduled until 2 p.m. Central.

Arrowhead, a 78-000-seat facility and home of the Kansas City Chiefs, has hosted many major college games. Kansas also moved its home game against Oklahoma to Arrowhead in 2005, and drew a crowd of 54,109.

A massive $400 million renovation is scheduled for the 33-year-old facility beginning this spring.

Often referred to as the “border war” because passions date to Civil War days when Missouri was a slave state and Kansas a free state, the rivalry began in 1891 and is the second-most played in Division I-A. It is the oldest NCAA Division I series west of the Mississippi River.

Restaurants, bars, motels and similar businesses in college towns depend a great deal on football weekends to increase their business. Ted Creasy, the manager at Harpo’s, a popular restaurant-bar in Columbia, said he understood the schools would bring in a nonconference home game to make up the difference.

“If they would just take the game away, that would be awful,” Creasy said.

The first game between the Jayhawks and Tigers was actually played in Kansas City, and fistfights broke out in the crowd. It happened just 26 years after the Civil War ended, and passions were still inflamed on both sides of a border that had been the scene of many bloody skirmishes.

Southern sympathizers would clash with “Jayhawkers,” as Kansas’ Union militia came to be known. The most well-known conflict occurred when William Quantrill’s Raiders came riding out of Missouri on Aug. 21, 1863, and sacked and burned the city of Lawrence.

The two schools cannot even agree on their all-time record. According to the Jayhawks, they lead in the long series 54-52-9. But Missouri claims a 53-53-9 tie because Kansas was told by the NCAA to forfeit a 23-7 victory in 1960 for using ineligible players.