Both the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals made their homes in Missouri in the 1960s. The teams won a combined six titles in the decades that followed, making Kansas City one of the most successful “small” sports cities in the United States.
But there’s an economic fight brewing over the teams, a fight between two cities of the same name: Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas.
The historic Kansas City sports franchises currently play in two of the oldest stadiums still used by professional sports teams. The Chiefs’ famed Arrowhead Stadium opened in 1972, and the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium opened a year later. But decades of the Chiefs and Royals playing at Arrowhead and Kauffman and calling Missouri home are at risk of coming to an end as plans have been drawn up for the teams to move just across the Missouri River to Kansas City, Kansas — and Kansas lawmakers are actively seeking to bring the teams across state lines.
On Monday, what promises to be a heated special session began in the Missouri State Legislature. The special session will, in part, address ways to keep the teams in the state, such as funding for improvements to the Chiefs’ stadium and a potential new ballpark on the Missouri side of the border for the Royals.
Missouri’s Republican Governor, Mike Kehoe, is fighting to keep both teams in Missouri, as their neighbors in Kansas have offered big stadium incentives for the Chiefs and Royals to move across the Missouri River.
But the Chiefs and Royals — and the stadiums that they call home — come with an eye-popping cost, a cost that requires help from government handouts. According to the Kansas City Star, a new stadium for the Royals could cost over $1 billion, while renovations for Arrowhead could come with a pricetag of $800 million.
The cost is worth it to the governor. According to Kehoe’s office, the Chiefs “contribute $575 million annually in economic value and over 4,500 jobs in Jackson County alone, bringing the State of Missouri nearly $30 million in annual tax revenue,” while a “new Royals ballpark district is expected to support 8,400 jobs and generate $1.2 billion in economic output annually.”
In a statement to The Daily Wire, a Kehoe spokeswoman said that the governor “has been working for months to develop a competitive package to keep both the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs in Missouri where they belong.”
Conservative Republicans in the Missouri Freedom Caucus, however, don’t buy the governor’s economic estimations and don’t want to use taxpayer dollars for the benefit of billionaire owners. Instead, the Freedom Caucus Republicans argue that the state should focus on helping average Missourians with tax cuts.
“I hate the thought of billions of taxpayer dollars going to fund bread and circuses, to be honest with you,” Republican State Senator Rick Brattin told The Daily Wire. “And that’s exactly what this is, especially when you see the Royals posting the ‘Pride’ stuff and totally disconnected from reality.”
Brattin added that the Royals can “move to Kansas for all I care,” saying that the team’s games are “sparsely attended.”
The state senator said his colleagues are prepared to negotiate with the governor to come to an agreement on tax cuts for all Missourians in exchange for stadium funding. He argued that incentives offered to the billionaire sports owners should be matched with tax cuts for average citizens.
Some Democrats are also questioning the stadium funding, arguing that more money should be allotted for disaster relief after a major tornado struck St. Louis in May, killing five people and injuring dozens more.
Paying for major stadium upgrades — or a new stadium — is a major cost for even the billionaire owners of sports franchises. In most cases, cities and states will chip in by offering government subsidies and tax incentives. The return on such a massive investment, however, is minimal for state and city governments, according to John C. Mozena, the president of the Center for Economic Accountability.
Mozena told The Daily Wire in a phone interview that the economic projections on the stadiums touted by Kehoe’s office are “incredibly flawed.”
“There is virtually nothing that economists agree on more than the idea that stadiums are terrible investments for governments and terrible economic development tools,” Mozena said. “The reason for that is really simple, it’s that stadiums spend almost their entire lives dark, empty, and silent. Most of the time, there’s nothing going on there.”
Mozena added that a baseball stadium might draw up to three million people in a good season, which is “about what a single good-sized Walmart Supercenter might do.”
“These are big facilities with a lot of infrastructure around them that barely ever get used and end up being economic black holes,” said Mozena.
The stadium funding battle reignites a familiar fight, one that Missouri and Kansas once fought over Applebee’s. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, Applebee’s moved its headquarters from Missouri to Kansas and back to Missouri, lured by competing tax incentives. The economic “border war” over Applebee’s ended when the restaurant chain moved to Southern California in 2023.
The governor is positioning the war over the Chiefs and the Royals as another battle to keep jobs in the state.
“Governor Kehoe views these efforts as important economic development retention projects, and believes Missouri’s proposal must be competitive to keep these major economic engines in the state, while also being a good deal for taxpayers,” his spokeswoman told The Daily Wire.
Andy Roth, the president of the State Freedom Caucus Network, said the economic argument doesn’t add up.
“What’s particularly nuts about this whole thing is, by the governor’s own admission, they’re worried the Chiefs and the Royals are going to move 10 miles to the west,” Roth told The Daily Wire. “It’s not like they’re going to Seattle or Florida or New York. They’re literally just going across the road.”
The economic border war over the two franchises likely won’t come to an end until at least the end of June as Missouri lawmakers seek to work out a deal with the governor. Kansas’ offer for the Chiefs and Royals is also coming off the table at the end of June, according to Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, the Kansas City Star reported.
“If one of them wants to — or both — wants to come to Kansas, we’d love to have them,” Hawkins said. “We have the tools.”
