As Kansas lawmakers try to wrest the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs away from Missouri, a 170-year-old rivalry is erupting despite economists long ago deciding that subsidizing professional sports wasn’t worth it.
Top leaders in the Kansas Legislature approved helping the Chiefs and professional baseball team the Kansas City Royals fund new stadiums in Kansas ahead of a special session scheduled for Tuesday. The plan would authorize the state to issue stadium construction bonds and pay them back with sports betting revenue, Kansas Lottery revenue and additional taxes generated inside and outside the new venues.
The state border passes through a metropolitan area of about 2.3 million people, with teams only having to move about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west.
Decades of research have concluded that professional sports franchises do not add much, if any, boost to the local economy because it largely captures existing spending elsewhere in the same community. But for Kansas officials, spending is at least leaving Missouri and coming to Kansas, and a rising Missouri has its own appeal.
“I’ve wanted to see the Chiefs in Kansas my whole life, but I hope we can do it in a way that enriches these communities and doesn’t put an additional burden on them,” Democratic Rep. Jason Proub said. Jason Probst said.
The rivalry between Kansas and Missouri dates back to before the Civil War, before Kansas became a state. Missourians came from the east in the vain hope of founding another slave state like their own. Both sides looted, burned and killed across the border.
There is also a century-long athletic rivalry between the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri. Over the years, both countries have spent hundreds of millions of dollars luring businesses seeking jobs on one side of the border or the other. They reached an uneasy truce in 2019.
Missouri officials have pledged to be equally aggressive in retaining the Royals and Chiefs, and not just because they view them as financial assets.
“They are a source of pride,” said Missouri Rep. John Patterson, a suburban Kansas City Republican expected to be the next state House speaker.
Kansas lawmakers believe the Chiefs and Royals are playing because Missouri voters in April refused to extend a local sales tax to maintain their side-by-side stadiums. Lawmakers also believe one or both teams could leave the Kansas City area if action is not taken, although economists have expressed doubts about the veracity of the threat.
While the stadium’s lease runs through January 2031, Kansas officials believe the team must make a decision soon so that a new or renovated stadium will be ready by then. They also promised the Chiefs a stadium with a dome or retractable roof that could host the Super Bowl, college basketball’s Final Four and large indoor concerts.
“You’ve got this asset and all the businesses that have moved there or been created there as a result,” said Rep. Sean Tarwater, R-Kansas, a Republican on the state’s suburban fringe of Kansas City. Party member and leader of the relocation effort. “Every day you get business from that area.”
About 60 percent of the region’s population lives in Missouri, but Kansas’ population is growing faster.
Despite a strong push for legislation in Kansas, Missouri lawmakers are in no rush to come up with an alternative. Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson told reporters on Thursday that his state was “not just going to flip over,” adding that “we’re only in the first quarter of the campaign.”
Both states hold primaries on Aug. 3 and have the most legislative seats on the ballot this year. Missouri’s April vote on a local stadium tax showed that subsidizing professional sports teams could become a political loser in the state, especially given the conservative-leaning voters in the Republican primary.
“In Missouri, the Republican Party used to be led by business people who might support this kind of thing, but that’s not the case in the Trump era,” said David Kimball of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Louis Politics Study professor. “The more conservative, the more Trump-leaning, they’re less supportive of spending taxpayer dollars on anything.”
Kansas Republicans are facing pressure from the right to avoid electing economic winners and losers in the state. For Probst, a Democrat, his concern is using government to “make the rich richer,” meaning team owners.
Economists have studied professional sports teams and stadium subsidies since at least the 1980s. J.C. Bradbury, a professor of economics and finance at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, said research shows subsidizing stadiums is “a terrible conduit for economic growth.”
While Kansas supporters cited a report indicating a huge positive economic impact, Bradbury said “false” reports were a staple of stadium activity.
“Sports stadiums are poor public investments, I would say that’s almost unanimous consensus,” said Bradbury, who has reviewed studies and conducted them himself.
However, more than 30 lobbyists have signed up to push Kansas lawmakers for a stadium financing plan, which the CEO of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce called a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to attract the Chiefs.
Not only have the Chiefs won three Super Bowls in five years, but they also have an especially strong fan base that continues to grow thanks to tight end Travis Kelce’s romance with pop star Taylor Swift .
Host cities find the NFL attractive because franchises are worth billions of dollars, said Judith Grant Long, associate professor of sports management and urban planning at the University of Michigan and director of the U-M Center for Urban Planning. Wealthy owners and celebrity players receive media attention.
“All of these factors come together to create a powerful force for politicians, civic officials and local business interests who want to use their influence,” she said.
