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Missouri's $1.5 billion stadium grift
Put simply: Missouri's plan is dumb. Put with more nuance: it's costly, inefficient, and a bad use of taxpayer money.
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On four different occasions now, I’ve mentioned in passing that government subsidies for professional sports stadiums are a terrible use of taxpayer money.
But Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe doesn’t listen to me,¹ and today he called back Missouri lawmakers for a special legislative session to provide up to $1.5 billion² in subsidies for Kansas City stadiums: a new stadium for the Royals, and renovations for the Chiefs.
Missouri should reject this effort. It wastes taxpayer money, provides few tangible benefits, and keeps money from being spent more effectively—which is a low bar, because just about anything would be a more effective use of money.
For those of you in Missouri: please forward this email to your friends and to your state legislators; they’re voting on this proposal as we speak. Here’s where you can look up who your state legislators are and how to reach them.
Representatives use [email protected] and Senators use [email protected] for their official email addresses.
Article summary:
Kansas Citians already voted down public stadium funding. The evidence is overwhelming that it’s a bad use of taxpayer money.
The jobs being created and supported by the Chiefs are, in reality, less than 10% of what the Missouri Governor’s Office is claiming.
This money could be used to address teacher shortages or provide health care for children for nearly a decade. We could use the money to functionally solve the budget crisis at rural hospitals. Instead, we risk wasting it on glitzy stadiums.
Missourians know that the money can be better spent
Let’s start with the baseline here: Kansas Citians were already asked to vote on a ballot measure that would increase their sales taxes to support stadium funding. And it was emphatically defeated, by a 58%-42% margin.³
I know respecting the will of voters isn’t always the forte of the Missouri Legislature, but we should appreciate that they probably know what’s best for their city.
Now, the Governor is asking Missourians to pay $1.5 billion in subsidies for new and improved stadiums.⁴ That’s a lot of money! For context, here are other options for how we could spend the money.⁵
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We could solve the state’s teacher shortage for eight years. We could make sure every child in the state has health insurance for 6.5 years. We could address nearly half of the state’s crumbling road and bridge infrastructure. We could keep money-losing rural hospitals open for more than two decades!
Or we could piss the money away and dump it into two glitzy stadiums. With all of the state’s issues, it’s an outrage that this is a serious proposal.
The Governor’s projected job data is complete nonsense
The Governor’s Office claims that the Kansas City Chiefs support over 4,500 jobs in Jackson County. At best, this is actively misleading; at worst, it’s an outright lie.
Even if you include every player, coach, trainer, nutritionist, front-office employee, etc., you’re looking at about 310 full-time employees.⁶
On game days, an NFL team might hire another 2,000 temp workers for about six hours of work. But an NFL stadium gets used, at the very most, 20 times per year.⁷
Yes, it’s great to hire 2,000 people. But:
Even if you generously assume that Arrowhead Stadium gets used 20 times per year, the staff there is only working 120 hours per year.
That’s about 115 FTEs, which is not worth $100s of million in subsidies.⁸
So where on earth does 4,500 come from? If we want to be really generous, maybe they’re counting all of the short-term construction jobs and all of the very-part-time stadium jobs on game days.
But construction jobs only benefit workers who would’ve otherwise been unemployed. Neither construction nor stadium funding create any lasting, per-capita income growth.
In reality, it’s more like 425 sustained FTEs—less than 10% of what the Governor is claiming. If we want to create jobs with taxpayer money, almost anything else would be more efficient.
Promises of incremental tax revenue don’t ever materialize
Roger Noll, a Stanford professor of economics who has written about public stadium funding, says it most clearly: “NFL stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, and the incremental tax revenue is not sufficient to cover any significant financial contribution by the city.”
The St. Louis Fed has written about how little incremental tax revenue stadiums generate. This is especially damning:
Of the 30 metro areas where the stadium or arena was built or refurbished in the previous 10 years, only three areas showed a significant relationship between the presence of a stadium and real per-capita personal income growth. And in all three cases—St. Louis, San Francisco/Oakland and Washington, D.C.—the relationship was negative.⁹
Even the National Council of State Legislators, at the front lines of stadium subsidies, is unambiguous: “Much of the research indicates that the economic impact stadiums have on cities is negligible.”
Other reasons why this is a terrible use of taxpayer money
To the extent that stadiums create jobs, they really just move them from one part of the metro area to another. It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Taxpayer-funded stadiums increase franchise value, which allows owners—who are by definition fabulously wealthy—to sell their teams at substantial profits. The taxpayers pay, but the owners reap the (billions of dollars in) benefits.
Because of the way that stadiums are financed, cities—including St. Louis—often end up paying for stadiums long after they close.
The Hunt family does not need our money
The Chiefs are owned by the Hunt family. Their family net worth is about $25 billion—they’re the 12th-wealthiest in the U.S.,¹⁰ and they’re willing to offer up less than half of their proposed Arrowhead Stadium renovations.
Not for nothing, it’s not like the Hunts have ever acted like they really care that much about Missourians: they didn’t want the Rams moving to St. Louis in 1994, and they voted for the Rams to leave Missouri in 2016.¹¹
Clark Hunt and his half-brother Lamar Hunt, Jr.¹² both claim in their official bios to care about Kansas City. It’s hard to take them seriously when, by threatening to leave, they’re basically extorting the state to the tune of $100s of millions.
Where’d all the concern with efficiency go?
All of this is happening because the state of Kansas is dangling tax breaks of its own to entice the Chiefs and the Royals across State Line Road. (It should be noted: these teams would still be in the Kansas City area even if they do move!¹³)
But there’s already question of whether Kansas can even afford the subsidies it’s offering. I don’t know why Missouri is so keen to engage them in a race to the bottom.
Missouri has all sorts of problems with efficiency. But this sort of rob-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich policymaking would take things to a new level.
Look, money alone doesn’t fix our problems. But with St. Louis still dealing with the impact of tornado damage, and with the state comparing as poorly as it does to the rest of the country on health and crime and education and road safety, how can we seriously consider spending almost 10% of the state’s general revenue on something so clearly inefficient?
Our legislators have to vote this down.
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Maybe he should—I voted for him! (In the primary, that is.)
The math here is (unfortunately) quite simple: “But the highest profile piece of Kehoe’s special session agenda is his plan for the state to pay up to half the costs of a new stadium for the Kansas City Royals and renovations to Arrowhead Stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs — projects estimated to cost up to $3 billion.” (Emphasis added; here’s the source.)
For context, Joe Biden was closer to beating Donald Trump in Missouri in 2020 than this ballot measure was to passing. And Joe Biden came nowhere close to winning Missouri.
To be specific: the funding would be for a new stadium for the Royals and significant improvements to Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Chiefs.
I want to be explicit in providing my sourcing and math here, because it really is outrageous that we’re thinking about doing this with the state’s (limited) budget:
Missouri’s share of projected stadium costs
$1.5 billion, per Footnote #2, above.
Hire enough teachers to solve Missouri’s teacher shortage (1 year)
As of 2023, “Missouri has the equivalent of more than 3,500 full-time teacher vacancies.”
The average salary for a teacher in Missouri is $52,481.
3,500 × $52,481 = $184 million
Notes: This assumes that every teacher hired makes the average salary, which is probably not true—in all likelihood, they’d probably be making less, as teachers earlier in their careers. So in practice, $1.5 billion would go even further in offering a sustained solution to the state’s teacher shortage.
Provide insurance for every uninsured child in Missouri (1 year)
There are 6,245,466 people in Missouri.
22.2% are under 18, per the same Census data.
5.4% of Missouri children do not have health insurance.
Nationally, Medicaid spending per child is $3,023.
6,245,466 × 22.2% × 5.4% × $3,023 = $226 million
Notes: This is all oversimplified—a lot of this might ordinarily come from the federal government, for instance. Health care spending, and who is actually responsible for it, is complicated.
Address all of Missouri’s deferred road and bridge maintenance
There are 8,518,767 road miles in the United States, of which 268,201 are in Missouri. So, 3.1% of U.S. road miles are in Missouri.
“State and local governments face $105 billion in deferred maintenance for roads and bridges,” according to Pew.
$105 billion × 3.1% = $3.31 billion
Notes: This assumes that the need for road repairs are equally distributed by state and by road mile, which probably isn’t true. But for our purposes, it’s close enough.
Balance the budget at every money-losing rural hospital in Missouri (1 year)
There are 23 rural hospitals in Missouri running deficits.
Data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform outlines each hospital’s total expenses and total margin.
How much they’re losing was calculated from their data. I added up the sum-total of deficits at those hospitals to get to $68.7 million.
Notes: The policy wouldn’t play out exactly like this—you’d want the support to be a bit broader than this, and it doesn’t account for impending Medicaid cuts—but again, it gives us a rough sense.
There are a bunch of assumptions and simplifications in all of this; the exact figures would, of course, vary in the end. But it’s clear that there’s a lot of social good that could be done if the government were willing to spend this money in a more reasonable way.
The math of this involves some guesswork, but let’s use this:
There are 53 players on an NFL roster.
Teams have about 20-25 coaches, though this varies.
According to The Athletic, there are 175-220 people who travel with the team to each game, but some of them probably aren’t employed by the team (e.g., spouses), since teams can only travel with 110 staffers, at least as of a couple of years ago. That includes coaches, so all in, that’s another 85 people or so.
The typical NFL team employs 125-175 full-time people in its front office. There’s probably some overlap between this and the people who travel, but let’s assume for the sake of being generous that there isn’t.
53 players + roughly 25 coaches + roughly 85 staffers + roughly 150 front-office personnel is, very roughly, 313 people. I’m rounding to 310 just for ease of numbers.
Here’s the math of how I get to 20, which is a super generous assumption.
An NFL team can play at home, at most, 14 times per year, assuming they don’t host the Super Bowl. (That source didn’t include preseason games.) For most teams, it’s only their eight or nine annual home games, plus a possible preseason game or two.
Let’s say you include six stadium concerts on top of that, which is another super generous assumption. (For context, Arrowhead Stadium only hosted three concerts in 2024.)
Because these assumptions are so generous, in reality, the job creation data is actually even worse—most NFL stadiums are only being used 13-15 times per year. I’m sure some of these stadiums get used for other things—high school football state championships, maybe—but having been to one of those games (and getting to watch Ezekiel Elliott) at what was then the Edward Jones Dome, they’re operating with a pretty bare-bones staff.
“Only” $100s of millions because another big chunk of the money is going to the Royals and their prospective new stadium development.
This is, in fairness, a study from 1994. But no one is suggesting that any of the underlying economics have changed.
It should be noted that Clark Hunt wasn’t categorically in favor of relocation, and he actually voted against the Chargers relocating from San Diego. What it suggests is that he didn’t want to share Missouri’s media market, and he doesn’t particularly care about what’s best for Missourians.
At least as of 2015, Lamar Hunt, Jr. owns a substantial portion of the Chiefs.
That’s part of what makes all of this so ridiculous. They’d be moving, at most, 15 or 20 miles. This isn’t going to have any impact on the vast majority of Chiefs or Royals fans.
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