Away from Arrowhead: Chiefs had reasons for surrendering home game to London

Sunday marks a home game for the Chiefs, and fans of the team will congregate in a public place, ready to party.

But instead of packing Arrowhead Stadium by the carload as the sweet smell of barbecue wafts through the air, a portion of them will assemble indoors at a much smaller venue — a team watch party at Johnny’s Tavern in the Power & Light District — to see the Chiefs play the Detroit Lions on TV in a “home” game at London’s historic Wembley Stadium.

A number of fans have embraced the move, some even traveling to London for the game. But others have voiced their displeasure about losing one of eight regular-season home games at publicly funded Arrowhead Stadium. Chiefs home games have value both financial and sentimental.

The Chiefs say the decision to play this game overseas, and not in Kansas City, did not come easily.

“I understand why our fans are frustrated,” Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said last fall, when the announcement was made. “Frankly, I don’t expect them to be happy about it … they’re so passionate, and they want to spend their Sunday afternoons cheering the team on.”

“It’s hard (to do),” Chiefs president Mark Donovan said last week. “You’re giving up a home game, and rightly so, a lot of our fans feel like they own that game — that’s their game, and you shouldn’t be able to give that up — and I get that.”

In London, the Chiefs on Friday held a “pub party” in Trafalgar Square. The team bought beers there for about 400 Chiefs fans. Saturday’s “NFL Fan Forum,” where Chiefs fans from America and England had a chance to interact with Hunt, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and former Chiefs greats Will Shields and Christian Okoye, was also well attended.

When the announcement of the London game was made last November, one justification was that the game should also satisfy a key Super Bowl bid requirement. But being host to a Super Bowl at Arrowhead is far from a slam-dunk: Hunt has maintained that first, the league must decide to bring the game to another cold-weather city, as it did in New York/New Jersey in 2014. Also, Kansas City needs to add more hotel rooms to improve its candidacy.

Another reason to play abroad: International exposure is good for the league. Hunt chairs the league’s international committee, which plays a key role in expanding the NFL’s footprint overseas. And the Chiefs themselves stand to recoup any lost revenue at Arrowhead from the league.

Such reasoning has done little to soothe frustration on the home front. A poll on the Arrowhead Pride website shortly after the announcement was made found that 83 percent of fans disapproved of the decision. Just 17 percent were in favor of it.

“I don’t care if the NFL grows their brand,” said Steven Wood of Camdenton, Mo., who has been a season-ticket holder since 2005. “I’m not responsible for seeing Roger Goodell make another $24 million.

“Right now I’m paying for 10 games, and two of them are preseason games that are basically worthless.”

Events at the Truman Sports Complex certainly generate economic activity. Fans ponied up nearly $1 million just for parking at Chiefs games last year, according to the annual report of the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority. And the team paid more than $1.6 million in rent.

Visiting fans spend money at the stadium, restaurants and area hotels, all of which adds to the local economy and local tax tills. The authority did an analysis last year showing that the Chiefs and Royals combined for $34 million in state, county and city taxes. That total includes sales taxes, earnings taxes, withholding on wages, property taxes and other fees.

How much one game is worth remains a mystery, said Jim Rowland, the president of the authority who did the analysis. He doesn’t get separate numbers for Chiefs and Royals games. County and city officials and others who look at such things declined to put a number on what one Chiefs game played at Arrowhead is worth.

One economist offered a guess of perhaps a few million dollars. Jesse David, a partner at Edgeworth Economics in Washington, hasn’t studied Kansas City’s football economics, but he has looked closely at the financial impact of NFL games in a dozen other markets. He also did the work for a 2010 report to the NFL Players Association, when there was threat of a lockout and both sides were trying to determine the potential damage.

The average NFL game, David found, generated $22 million in economic activity. Games had the biggest impact in Houston, $40 million, and the least in Indianapolis, $12 million. Kansas City was not part of his review.

Moving one Chiefs game to London won’t sacrifice nearly that much to the economy, David said. Players and team personnel still will be paid, he noted, because there still is a game. And that’s roughly half the impact of games.

“A vendor or a security guard might lose out if a game is skipped,” David said.

And area businesses would miss the influx of visitors. Combined, however, David said that amounts to a relatively small part of the total impact.

“I’d be surprised if it’s a quarter” of the $22 million average, he said.

Financially, the Chiefs will not lose money by skipping a football Sunday. An NFL spokesman confirmed that the league reimburses teams the amount of money they miss out on by losing a home game, though he declined to go into detail about the procedure, citing the league’s policy against discussing individual clubs’ revenues.

“That’s part of the deal,” Donovan said, referring to the league’s ability to make every host team whole. “That’s the way they make it make business sense for everyone.”

Sunday’s silence at the sports complex won’t hurt the stadium authority, either.

Rowland said funding comes through the three-eighth-cent sales tax voters approved in 2006.

“We don’t get any revenue from game days, whether it be parking, tickets, anything like that. There’s no economic impact for the Sports Complex Authority,” he said. “It’s zero. Period.”

But Donovan understands what surrendering a game at Arrowhead meant for local businesses.

“Yeah, that’s a real impact, and it is something that we considered through the whole process,” Donovan said.

So why do it? Why play in England? Donovan offered two reasons, the first being that it’s good for the league.

In recent years, the NFL has made establishing a strong global footprint a major priority. The league has been staging games annually in London since 2007, and the 32 owners recently approved playing more international games through 2025.

Mark Waller, the league’s executive vice president of international competition, said recently that playing games in Mexico City is also a priority.

“(Mexico is) our biggest fan base outside the United States, and it’s our most vibrant market,” Waller said. “Our business is really good there; ratings in Mexico City are good, and you’ve got locked-in synergy with the U.S. Hispanic growth and population here.”

Donovan said the league’s booming popularity in America makes it logical for owners to explore how much they can make the game more popular internationally by exposing the NFL to new fan bases.

“No matter how you measure it, (football) is an immense sport,” Donovan said. “But if you look at Premier League soccer, and you look at the World Cup of soccer and just how big that is, you look at cricket, you look at some of these other worldwide sports … (their games) are more international because we’re so domestic-focused. You’ve got to grow that in order to continue to compete — that’s why this is so important to the league.”

Donovan added that the Chiefs understand how much football means to Kansas City, but it’s important for them to do their part in the grander scheme of things ... even at the expense of a home game at Arrowhead. In the eyes of Chiefs officials, what benefits the league also benefits their team.

“From a season-ticket base to a ratings base, from every way you look at it, a market this small shouldn’t do as well as we do in an organization,” Donovan said. “But we’ve got to continue to give back to retain that place, and that’s what’s going to continue to grow the entire brand, the entire NFL, and that’s going to benefit us as a franchise.”

The second reason the Chiefs believed they could surrender a home game is that they were optimistic they could do some things to make up for it.

When asked what they could do to aid local businesses, Donovan said the increased number of big-ticket events at Arrowhead Stadium this year helps make up for the loss of football for one Sunday.

“What we like to talk about around that question is Mexico versus Uruguay (international) soccer, the Rolling Stones, One Direction, Kenny Chesney, Missouri-BYU, American Royal,” Donovan said. “Those are events (where) those same (business) people are impacted by that.

“It’s still that Sunday you’re going to miss,” Donovan acknowledged. “But there have been a lot of Sundays that have happened (this year) because we put something in that building. There have been more than enough events that have more than made up for that.”

Hosting more entertainment events again speaks to the Chiefs’ desire to grow their own business.

“Those (are) events, across the board, the Kansas City Chiefs took financial risk on,” Donovan said. “So nobody else came in and said, ‘OK, I’ll put this on to make it make sense for these guys who are selling parking or restaurants or hotels.’ We did that.

“And we didn’t do it because we were going to lose a game, we did it because it’s part of our business — it’s what Arrowhead Events is and why we started the business. But it is a good year, in terms of timing.”

There’s a football side of this equation, too, of course, and there’s no question that in hindsight, with the season going the way it has, the 2-5 Chiefs and their fans might have been better off playing this game at Arrowhead.

On the field, Chiefs are in a daunting early hole — only four teams in NFL history have come back from a 2-5 start to make the playoffs. A true home game against a 1-6 opponent like Detroit would surely be a better alternative than what will amount to a neutral-site game.

Donovan knows the Chiefs need to continue winning — he likes to say the success of the Chiefs’ business and football operations are reliant on one another — but he’s also aware that hindsight is 20-20.

“I don’t think it’s a good practice to get into the what-ifs,” Donovan said. “When it first came out, (and) you’re giving up this game, (you know) it may have a huge impact on your season. Well, yeah. But who would have predicted the Detroit Lions were 1-6 going into this game? Who would have predicted we were 2-5?

“We did look at — and I’ve said this publicly — we did look at division games and big matchups ... and we had good discussions with the league about (how) those aren’t games we’d want to give up if we’re going to have to give one up.”

That essentially scratched off all three AFC West games, plus showdowns against Chicago and Pittsburgh — teams whose fans travel in droves — leaving this game and the Chiefs’ matchups against Buffalo and Cleveland as possible London candidates.

Given those three options, Detroit is probably the preferable outcome: The Cleveland and Buffalo games theoretically could have tie-breaker implications.

“This is an NFC opponent that doesn’t really get to Kansas City that often, so we felt like if you’re going to take one, this would be one of the ones on that list,” Donovan said.

With all that said, Chiefs officials hope their fans have come to understand the situation.

“A lot of people (are) questioning, criticizing, (asking), ‘Why would you ever give up a home game at Arrowhead?’ ” Donovan said. “And the reality is because we’re going to play more games, more teams are going to give up home games in the future, and we feel like it was the right thing to do now.

“It was the right thing to sort of get our place in line and get that box checked.”

If the Chiefs are to play another international game in the future, and they almost certainly will, there’ll probably be one important difference.

“I feel very confident that will be an away game, and not a home game, because we don’t want to give up a home game, either,” Donovan said. “You’ve got homefield advantage, which is real. You’ve got our season-ticket members, and losing that game is real, and we appreciate that.

“But this is going to happen across the league, and it’s just a matter of time for other teams.”

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 7:39 PM with the headline "Away from Arrowhead: Chiefs had reasons for surrendering home game to London."