KC sports stopped short in 2025. Can ‘26 revive Chiefs, Royals, other area teams?

For the better part of a generation, you may recall, the regional sports scene largely had become a fusion of futility and torment.

Sure, there were fleeting exceptions, like the Kansas men’s basketball team winning the 2008 national title, Sporting KC claiming the 2013 MLS Cup and Mizzou football winning the SEC East in 2013 and 2014 and topping The Associated Press poll for a week after the epic win over KU in 2007.

But in the most visible, widely followed and galvanizing forms of the Chiefs and Royals, it was easy to become bereft of belief. Even hope itself seemed surprisingly scarce when I moved here in 2013, though I got a quick lesson in why when the Chiefs stupefyingly blew a 38-10 lead to the Colts to lose 45-44 in that season’s AFC Wild-Card game.

Since the Royals won the World Series in 1985 — coincidentally the same year the NBA’s Kansas City Kings moved to Sacramento — they hadn’t so much as qualified for a postseason until 2014. In that span, the Chiefs won just three playoffs game, and none since the 1993 season … and put an exclamation point on it by suffering so many postseason indignities along the way.

Then came 2015 — the year everything began to change.

KC Royals’ World Series breakthrough

Starting with the Royals winning the World Series as an encore to their abrupt surge to the brink of the championship in 2014, it’s been a decade like no other in Kansas City sports history.

You could make the same case a year ago or even going back to 2013, when Andy Reid took over the Chiefs. But it’s only more so now, with another Super Bowl appearance added in 2025.

Since 2015, the Chiefs went on to play in seven straight AFC Championship Games (after appearing in just one since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970) and five Super Bowls (starting with their first in 50 years) and won three league titles. It got to the point where you had to reserve space in the calendar for yet another return, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, Kansas City became the smallest city ever to win a bid to become a 2026 FIFA World Cup host. The KC Current was born via the vision of Angie and Chris Long — and became an international story by commissioning the world’s first stadium purpose-built for a women’s pro team.

KU’s men won another basketball title in 2022, and K-State’s went on its most recent Elite Eight run in 2023. That same year, Mizzou’s won its first NCAA Tournament game in more than a decade since joining the Southeastern Conference.

Like about never before all at once, the football programs at all three of those major local schools were succeeding in the last few years with nationally well-regarded coaches: K-State won the 2022 Big 12 title, MU combined to win 21 games in 2023 and 2024 and KU football ended a horrific stretch with back-to-back bowl berths in 2022 and 2023.

The Royals in 2024 engineered one of the most remarkable turnarounds in MLB history, going from 56 wins a season before to 86 and winning a series suggesting immediate better days ahead. And the Current played for the NWSL title and were on course to do so again with a record-setting 2025 regular season.

But what by all appearances figured to be a prosperous 10th-anniversary bookend year, another year on a seemingly ever-upward trajectory, became something entirely different.

Instead, it was a year of anticlimax.

The year it all stopped short, braking fast enough to cause whiplash.

Instead of more time to flex, it became a time of flux.

A return to a dry January, at least in terms of the enthralling seven previous Chiefs seasons. They’ll miss the playoffs altogether for the first time since 2014.

Is this the new reality in KC sports?

The Chiefs’ disorienting year perhaps was best embodied in their plummet (from getting blown out by the Eagles while seeking an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl triumph to 6-10 entering their finale at Las Vegas) and their announced intention to leave Missouri and iconic Arrowhead Stadium in 2031.

The prospective move feels like a “divorce,” Chiefs fan Dwight Carter told me as he set up for a Christmas Eve sleepover outside Gate 5, ahead of the team’s home season finale at Arrowhead, and that notion seems about right.

The year of disillusionment also was epitomized by the Royals failing to return to the postseason … while still leaving us pondering their stadium future into a fifth calendar year now since owner John Sherman raised the possibility of leaving Kauffman Stadium.

It’s personified in the departures of ever-present fixtures like Sporting KC’s Peter Vermes, the Current’s Vlatko Andonovski (who remains with the organization in a broader but less observable role) and K-State football coach Chris Klieman — whose emotional retirement was underscored by a news conference at which KSU athletic director Gene Taylor lamented the chaos in college sports.

And it was punctuated by KU and MU losing first-round NCAA tourney games — with K-State failing to quality for a second straight year.

All three of those football programs seemed to plateau, albeit at different levels, and the Current dominated the NWSL only to lose in the first round of the playoffs.

For all of that, this isn’t intended so much as an obituary for the (at least) pause of an era as an homage to what it’s been.

I wrote recently about how the contrast of this season helps clarify the absurd run the Chiefs have been on, and why that’s worth appreciating. Seems to me the same applies more widely: After all, who’s had it better in sports than the KC area over the last 10 years?

Maybe more to the point, who’s had more to celebrate after a longer drought? Enduring the depths of the past, the darkest hours before this dawn, is what gives true meaning to the resurgence.

Moreover, nothing actually says this golden time has to be over as we embark on 2026.

At the risk of being overly optimistic, there’s a lot to look forward to in 2026.

Having the World Cup here figures to make lifetime memories for many, including hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Even as quarterback Patrick Mahomes rehabilitates a devastating knee injury and tight end Travis Kelce’s return is uncertain, the Chiefs logically figure to regain form and remain formidable under Andy Reid — the fourth-winningest coach in NFL history.

Despite their dip last season, I like what the Royals have been putting together overall and anticipate a return to the postseason. The Current will be compelling again, Sporting’s makeover will be intriguing and, hiccups notwithstanding, it sure seems like the athletic administrations at MU, KU and K-State — and coaching in the most conspicuous sports — are in capable hands.

Just the same, only time will tell whether this is an inflection point or a blip in the bigger scheme.

In the meantime, no wonder this interruption feels hollow and strange in the interim after so much so fast in the wake of so little for so long.

Vahe Gregorian

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4868

Vahe Gregorian has been a sports columnist for The Kansas City Star since 2013 after 25 years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has covered a wide spectrum of sports, including 10 Olympics. Vahe was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his master’s degree at Mizzou.