Sporting Kansas City is used to pretty much having its way public relations-wise in Kansas City.

The club has a brand new stadium has been the only pro team in KC that actually wins most of its matches. The team sends out a flurry of news releases that KC media outlets all but run “as is.” It has been a perfect PR world.

All that seemed to change this week as the soccer club received two negative PR hay-makers that have not reflected well on it. Maybe the Emperor really is not wearing clothes.

First, the Livestrong foundation went public that Sporting KC had only paid about $250,000 of the million dollars it had pledged to the organization for cancer research as part of its stadium naming rights.

Sporting KC did not deny that it had short-changed the group, but instead promptly tore the Livestrong name off its soccer complex and pretended it was taking the action because of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.

And, as it has done so successfully in the past, Sporting KC promptly sent out a news release announcing that it had sold an ad featuring “Ivy Funds” on its jerseys. KC media outlets acted as if it was huge news. It seemed as if the entire Livestrong controversy was forgotten.

A Pitch story incorrectly reported how Sporting KC had given the “heave-ho” to Livestrong and breathlessly “revealed” the new sponsor on the team uniform complete with a photo. Stop the presses!!

But now former Kansas City Star columnist-turned-reporter Mike Hendricks has revealed in a front-page story that Sporting KC has also welshed on a promise it made in 2010 that it would build nearly two-dozen youth soccer fields in Wyandotte County, including ones for urban youth.

According to Hendricks, the stadium deal was signed in early 2010 in exchange for $230 million in state and local tax subsidies. The promised soccer fields were part of the deal.

“Zarate (Jose Zarate, president of both the KCK Soccer Association and statewide Kansas Youth Soccer Association) and others characterize the youth fields as the forgotten element of the stadium deal, the only one partly intended to address the shortage of places for kids to play a sport that, for many of them, is ingrained in their culture,” wrote Hendricks.

The fields were supposed to be completed by 2011 as part of a $35 million commitment made by Sporting KC. In 2010, Sporting Club CEO Robb Heineman had said the complex would likely attract more than 2 million visitors a year.

After the Livestrong embarrassment and now the welshing on promised soccer fields for inner city youth, Sporting KC is not the bright sports star it was just a few months ago.

Two black eyes in one week can change perceptions very quickly.