I feel like I write some version of this topic every couple of years, only with a different sport and a different city. It might be St. Louis, or the Nets, or the Raiders. There’s some team in some professional sport that plays in some city that may or may not leave if the public doesn’t agree to help fund a new stadium. There’s too many examples to count, going back to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Baltimore Colts leaving in the dead of night. But the game of sports musical chairs has continued as long as buildings age and there’s another city council willing to make a deal.
This week’s example comes from Kansas City, who’s beloved Chiefs just won another Super Bowl and welcomed Taylor Swift as a part time resident. The Chiefs are one of those teams that everyone takes pride in. Or so we thought. Because the residents of Jackson County voted down a measure that would have given a 3/8-cent sales tax over the next 40 years for both an $800 million renovation of the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium as well as a new $1.3 billion baseball stadium for the Kansas City Royals. The questions failed 58 to 42%, meaning the ownership of both teams as well as the mayor of Kansas City will have to regroup and consider another strategy. One of those is to cross the state line from Missouri into Kansas, assuming Kansas City, Kansas, might be interested in showing up their cosmopolitan partners across the state line. And they could keep the same uniforms. Another possibility is that either team could find another city interested in building them a new home. Not to state the obvious, but St. Louis lost the Rams not that long ago. There’s also Oklahoma City, San Antonio, and likely other suiters in waiting, all of whom would have to fund a new stadium and get league approval. So sometimes these things sound better in theory than practice.
On the one hand, this story is confounded by the nature of a 2 for 1 deal. While the Chiefs stand as one of the nation’s most popular teams and are near deity in Kansas City, the Royals would have a hard time filling a high school bleacher – and their last World Series title in 2015 feels like a lifetime ago. It’s not Oakland bad, but it’s close. And they have a relatively new owner that’s made it abundantly clear they’re leaving Kaufman Stadium, where they’ve been since 1973, long before the least ends in 2030. I’m guessing that if they had separated these two proposals, Kansas City, Missouri, might see one stadium project instead of none.
There’s a few points to be made here, many of which have been made before. Some of those include the reality that stadium deals are often bad for city residents, a whole lot of people couldn’t care whether a team stays or goes, and these things often fall flat when you give the public a chance to vote. Buffalo is getting a new stadium because it was negotiated under the dark of night with a heavy thumb on the scale by the governor of New York. Remember, it’s hard to get tax payers to fund school projects for things like classrooms and books. So getting new luxury boxes for billionaires is a tough sell. And it’s usually a lot easier to get people to pay for a stadium to steal a team than to keep one. Because the new team is undefeated.
But perhaps one of the key constructs here is a simple matter of perception. One of the more convincing arguments in the game of build my ball park is to appeal to the public’s sense of pride, of being a big time, professional city. Not someplace like Toledo or Des Moines. That’s even easier when you’re a championship city, like Kansas City is with the Chiefs. That alone would have been enough to seal the deal in simpler times. But the fact that the Kansas City Chiefs, with titles and Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift couldn’t win the election of public opinion, that suggests the days of public subsides may truly be coming to an end, at least if the public has a say in the matter. So expect a lot more private deals and fewer public referendums if owners and mayors want to play ball.
Which means for now, the fate of Kansas City sports will remain up in the air.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.