Kansas City’s small market overshadows its big-time success on the field, leaving it nearly $2 billion behind Philadelphia in Forbes’ NFL team rankings.
By Brett Knight, Forbes Staff
The Kansas City Chiefs had the best record in the NFL this season, and two seasons ago, and a couple of years before that, and across the last seven years in aggregate. They won championships in the 2019, 2022 and 2023 seasons and, with a victory on February 9, can become the first team in NFL history with a Super Bowl three-peat.
But while the Chiefs are 1.5-point favorites for next Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, they are longtime financial underdogs.
On Forbes’ most recent list of the NFL’s most valuable teams, Kansas City ranked 24th at $4.85 billion—16 spots and $1.75 billion behind Philadelphia (No. 8, $6.6 billion). The disparity would be even more glaring going off the Eagles’ sale of an 8% stake last month at a reported $8.3 billion valuation (with the caveat that prices of small slivers of teams generally do not translate to the numbers in control stake transactions).
Regardless of which big number you use, the Chiefs have not won the two teams’ head-to-head financial battle since 2001, two years before Lincoln Financial Field opened in Philadelphia and transformed the Eagles’ economics. And despite building a dynasty over the past decade, Kansas City has fallen below the average NFL valuation every year since Forbes began ranking pro football teams in 1998.
That might be a surprise to anyone who knows the Chiefs primarily for the star power of quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce—marketing darlings who each earned a place among the NFL’s 10 highest-paid players this season—or has watched Kansas City steamroll its on-field competition, with 10 straight playoff appearances and five trips to the Super Bowl in the last six years. In the NFL, however, winning doesn’t guarantee big numbers on the financial scoreboard, and losing isn’t always bad for business. Look no further than the Dallas Cowboys, who last won a title 29 years ago but are the only sports team in the world worth more than $10 billion.
“Some revenues are going to be sensitive to team performance,” says Steve Vogel, managing director of the sports finance group at U.S. Bank, “but the model that the NFL has enables there to be less volatility. And so teams can absorb the bad times a lot easier than you might experience in other leagues.”
Last season, according to Forbes estimates, each of the NFL’s 32 teams took home more than $400 million from the league’s national deals, including sponsorships and a media rights package that should pay out more than $126 billion over 11 years. For every team except the Cowboys, that figure represented more than half of its total revenue.
NFL teams are also limited in how much they benefit directly from postseason success because the league collects the vast majority of revenue from playoff games and redistributes it in equal shares. The stipend may not cover all of the expenses that come with a deep run, either. “Typically, when teams win the Super Bowl, for a short period of time, they actually have a net-negative financial result,” notes Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp, who is often called the NFL’s “33rd owner” because of his close ties to football’s decision makers.
Game Changers: During a dominant seven-year stretch led by Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs have made five Super Bowl trips and more than doubled in value.
Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Over the longer term, winning produces a larger and more enthusiastic fan base, with the added demand enabling the team to raise ticket prices and attract a broader pool of sponsors. But it actually requires sustained success, like the New England Patriots’ dynastic stretch from 2001 to 2019, which featured 17 playoff berths and six Super Bowl victories. “During that successful period, sure, you’re seeing some growth,” says Edwin E. Draughan, a partner at sports investment bank Park Lane, “but the longstanding valuation creation will be towards the tail end and afterwards.”
For now, the Chiefs have more than doubled in value since Mahomes took over as their starting quarterback in 2018, and climbed 1,790% across the 26-year history of Forbes’ valuation list, more than three times the S&P 500’s growth in that time. But Kansas City still lags behind the Eagles with its team-specific revenue ($187 million vs. $246 million last season, according to Forbes estimates). And the 8.2x revenue multiple behind Forbes’ valuation of the Chiefs trails the Eagles’ 10.2x, showing that potential investors are less keen on the franchise and its revenue growth prospects.
By Forbes’ count, Philadelphia has the edge in every major revenue stream—from sponsorships to ticket sales to concessions and more—and ranked in the top third of the NFL almost across the board last season. The Chiefs, meanwhile, were ninth in stadium naming rights, merchandise and parking but were generally below league average otherwise.
“It’s the market,” Ganis says. “The Philadelphia market is so much larger, financially stronger, more diverse than the Kansas City market that the Eagles can sell everything from suites to naming rights to advertising, sponsorships and even tickets for a significantly higher price.” With Philadelphia ranking eighth nationally with a metropolitan statistical area population of 6.2 million, compared with 2.2 million for No. 31 Kansas City, the City of the Brotherly Shove also has the upper hand in Forbes’ team valuations for MLB (No. 7 vs. No. 28) and MLS (No. 12 vs. No. 16).
In addition, the Eagles “have invested in huge ways in their stadium,” Vogel says. “The Chiefs have been a little bit more limited just given how old that stadium is.” Only two NFL home fields have been around longer than Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, which opened in 1972.
The Chiefs are, naturally, trying to do something about that. Last year, they laid out plans for an $800 million Arrowhead upgrade, but Jackson County taxpayers in April rejected a sales tax initiative that would have funded the project. As the Chiefs consider alternatives for a renovation or a new stadium altogether, they sent an email survey to fans last month seeking feedback on potential features and amenities.
From the team’s perspective, the upside is clear: a revenue lift from luxury suites and communal clubs, areas where Kansas City collectively ranked 25th in the NFL last season, according to Forbes estimates. The Chiefs have jumped on an industry-wide trend by creating eight new clubs in recent years, but ultimately, “they can only do so much” with the space they have, Draughan says.
In the meantime, the Chiefs have been thinking about how to transcend their stadium and their market. Over the last three years, they have acquired marketing rights in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Mexico from the NFL, which regulates teams’ international efforts. “We have a first-ballot Hall of Fame head coach, a first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback, a first-ballot Hall of Fame tight end,” Chiefs president Mark Donovan told Forbes last February. “If we don’t aspire to be the world’s team, then we’ve failed. We have to take advantage of that.”
To this point, the returns have been in brand expansion and awareness. Donovan said last year that Kansas City’s revenue in the three European countries had been roughly $1 million for 2023 and that the Chiefs were hoping to reach break-even there in 18 months.
But even if that initiative doesn’t pan out—and even if the Chiefs remain football’s 24th-most-valuable team forever—they’re still in a good spot. Only 15 non-NFL sports teams are more valuable, and only 18 were more profitable, according to Forbes estimates. And the combination of the scarcity of teams and the prospect of even more lucrative media rights deals down the line has Vogel bullish about the NFL’s growth.
“From my seat, working with front offices and with owners, no one is too caught up in where they stand from a ranking perspective,” he says. “Owners are working together on the macro growth.”
Additional reporting by Justin Teitelbaum and Justin Birnbaum.
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