Will the Chiefs return with the warm weather?
By NewsPress Now
A win’s a win, but last Saturday’s playoff game didn’t look like much fun for those fans who braved ice-bowl conditions at Arrowhead Stadium.
Maybe those who endured the Lambeau Field-in-January experience could draw comfort in looking six months into the future. On a blessedly hot, humid day in July, many of these same Chiefs will enter the campus of Missouri Western State University for another few weeks of training camp.
Just thinking about it is enough to make you feel warmer.
Every year in late summer, the arrival of players, ESPN crews and thousands of fans provides a significant public relations boost for St. Joseph. The actual economic impact has proved harder to measure, but the training camp is clearly something St. Joseph should want to keep for the long term after 2024.
The next round of negotiations takes place amid a shifting sports landscape that creates new risks for those seeking to cement the training camp’s presence in St. Joseph for the long term.
A few weeks ago, the Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals vowed to remain in Jackson County as long as voters approve a sales tax extension that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars for renovations to Arrowhead Stadium and a new downtown baseball stadium. This news was interpreted mainly from the context of the games and where they’re played: baseball at a new downtown stadium and football at Arrowhead.
Good news for Jackson County.
Not so fast. When viewing both franchises as entertainment businesses, Jackson County officials have reason to get nervous.
The Royals aren’t leaving Kauffman Stadium because they think they’ll field a winning team downtown. That won’t happen anytime soon with the economics of baseball. What the Royals want is a stadium nestled inside an entertainment district that provides options for eating, drinking and general fan-bonding even if the team stinks.
The Chiefs don’t stink, but they want a fan experience beyond tailgating in a vast parking lot on game day. The Chiefs want to borrow from the playbook of the Cowboys and Vikings and offer a training complex that becomes a destination with merchandise, team memorabilia and other amenities for fans and their pocketbooks.
The risk for Jackson County is that the state of Kansas is waving around its revenue from legalized sports gambling as an incentive. If Kansas can’t get Arrowhead, a training facility might be more lucrative because it isn’t limited to 10 or 12 games a year.
It’s a risk for St. Joseph because there’s no reason, if such a practice complex is built, that the team couldn’t eventually hold summer training camp there. Some teams do, but notably, the Cowboys still have training camp way out in California despite a 91-acre complex in Frisco, Texas, that serves as a year-round practice facility and theme park for its fan base.
But the Cowboys need to avoid the soap opera of Big D a few weeks a year. No such escape hatch is needed in Missouri, where the Chiefs are bathed in love as long as they’re winning.
At the local level, policymakers have never taken training camp for granted and have always provided an NFL-caliber facility, but they need to be on their game.
Chiefs camp is not a given. St. Joseph will need to become more of a destination and less of a place where there’s a practice field located conveniently close to the interstate exit ramp.
