This NFL owner must think his fans are very stupid.
that characterizes so much of American pro sports. The franchise has been in Kansas City since the founding season of the American Football League in 1960. In the nearly 65 years since then, the Chiefs have turned a huge swath of the lower Midwest into Chiefs Kingdom 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.
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.
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.