The Kansas City Chiefs would appear to be a poor candidate to participate in the stadium financing extortion scheme that characterizes so much of American pro sports. The franchise has been in Kansas City since 1963, shortly after it helped to found the American Football League.* In the more than 60 years since then, the Chiefs have turned a huge swath of the lower Midwest into Chiefs Kingdom (their term) and cultivated fan passion that’s extreme even by the NFL’s standards.
They sold out every game from 1990 to 2009, including in a bunch of years when the team was bad. After winning three Super Bowls in the past five seasons, the team is now a legitimate dynasty, and Arrowhead Stadium is not just packed every week but is universally regarded as one of the most raucous stadiums in football. The Chiefs are always in the league’s top 10 in attendance, and that was the case even before Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Andy Reid started winning championships.
However, none of this has stopped the team from threatening recently to abandon the city for elsewhere if voters don’t give the team half a billion dollars. The Chiefs are hoping, it seems, that voters are either very dumb or very scared.
The franchise wants to facilitate $800 million in upgrades to Arrowhead Stadium, which would help the Hunt family that owns the team make more money. The Hunts, who are worth at least several billion dollars, say they’ll kick in $300 million. That leaves taxpayers to cover the other $500 million, before any cost overruns. The Chiefs hope that voters will OK a 40-year extension of a three-eighths-of-a-cent sales tax in Jackson County, one that costs a resident 38 cents per every $100 they spend in the county. According to the Kansas City Star, taxpayers are still paying back hundreds of millions of dollars from the last time Kansas City’s football and baseball stadiums were renovated. Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals are also helping to get a new ballpark out of the tax extension.
Chiefs president Mark Donovan told the city’s NBC affiliate last week that if voters didn’t extend the tax, the Chiefs “would just have to look at all our options.” A reporter asked if that meant leaving the city the team has always called home, and Donovan said, “I think they would have to include leaving Kansas City.” He then said the team would be “willing to accept a deal” to stick around its home city.
There is one region in the world where the Chiefs can maximize their business: the one they play in now. They will never, ever—ever, in a zillion years—leave the Kansas City area. They are not the other Missouri franchise, the Rams, that stopped over in St. Louis for 20 years before migrating back to a bigger market, Los Angeles, where it had previously spent half a century. And with the Rams and Chargers both taking up residence in Southern California again and the Raiders in Las Vegas, there just aren’t other American cities that lack an NFL team and would give the Chiefs the level of support they enjoy now. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is a third-generation oil scion who inherited the team. He may or may not have any personal business acumen. But he is smart enough to know he isn’t going anywhere.
The Chiefs are making one of the least credible attempts in the history of stadium strong-arming. Not only are they are not going to leave the Kansas City area; they are unlikely even to leave the site of Arrowhead Stadium, a certainly profitable venue that is already one of the envies of the football world. Jackson County voters should tell the football team to pound sand and pay for the upgrades themselves. The Chiefs have been so successful in their hometown that they will make perfect guinea pigs for a necessary American experiment: Can taxpayers win a game of chicken against a sports team owner who is clearly bluffing?
The bluff’s flaws begin with the fact that there is nowhere in the United States for the Chiefs to go, at least nowhere distant. At most, the franchise could try to find a sugar funding deal a few miles across the border in Kansas, still within KC’s metro area. Other NFL owners are voracious about protecting their territories, and there is not a single swath of American land that does not already have a team (or two) with an entrenched foothold. Other major pro leagues have put successful teams in non-NFL cities like Portland, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Oklahoma City, and San Antonio. But the NBA teams in those cities don’t dominate regional fandom the way, for instance, the Dallas Cowboys do in Texas. And even stepping into another NFL team’s extended turf would be hugely expensive.
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