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Kansas City Chiefs’ tax returns provide rare look inside the business of pro football

Before the NFL’s 32 teams became the billion-dollar enterprises they are today, the Kansas City Chiefs were a break-even business with lots of overhead. Or so the Chiefs portrayed themselves.

“It’s an expensive operation,” the team’s chairman and chief executive, the late Jack Steadman, told The Star in 1992 after a rare trove of financial documents emerged in a lawsuit titled McNeil vs the NFL. The records showed that the league as a whole and the Chiefs in particular didn’t do all that well in the 1980s.



“There’s just not that much money to be made,” Steadman said.

Big television contracts changed all that across the league.

By 2010, the Chiefs were very much a moneymaker, according to the team’s tax returns from that year, which were recently obtained by The Star. Those returns show:

▪ There is little correlation between the team’s on-field performance and how much money it makes.

▪ That year, the grown children of team founder Lamar Hunt split nearly $40 million in gross operating income. A team executive said they reinvested more than half of it in the team.

▪ Some of the costs fans grumble about the most, such as parking, amount to a tiny fraction of the team’s overall revenues.

The Star examined three years of the team’s state and federal tax returns, the only ones that were available from a public database. The team had fought hard to keep those records private and they were subsequently sealed on orders of a state official. As of Jan. 30, they were no longer open for public view.


While the dollar figures in the tax returns are dated, the financial information within their 381 pages are instructive as they cover a crucial period in the history of the team and the NFL, the years 2008-2010.

The Chiefs and the team’s owners almost certainly make much more money today, thanks to television revenues that have been soaring ever since. But it’s hard to know for sure, because the finances of NFL teams are largely a mystery. Only the Green Bay Packers disclose their numbers, and then only because they are publicly owned.

“Team financial records rarely become public,” said Roger G. Noll, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University and an expert on the business of pro sports, “and I am not aware of any recent repeat of what happened in McNeil.”

But thanks to a rare public filing in a dispute between the Chiefs and the Missouri Department of Revenue, fans have a window for the first time in a quarter century into how the team makes money and how it’s spent.



Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/sports/nf...#storylink=cpy

Saints are no different. This is good insight for the intended outcomes of games too.