alt Hacker NewsSports teams are an interesting one because often times these things go on the ballot and people vote for that. So it looks like people and municipalities have varying reasons for keeping a team. That said sometimes it just doesn’t make business sense for a team to stay and other times a municipality decides it’s not worth the cost to keep a pro team.
In the case of the Chiefs, Jackson Co., MO voters voted not to fund a new stadium.
The reasoning was pretty simple: the Hunt family is worth $25 billion [0]. They could likely pay for any sort of improvements to Arrowhead, or to replace it altogether, without taxpayer funds, which comes from people in a metro area where the average income is on the lower side of things in a time when costs for everything keep going up.
On the other side of the state line, Kansas lawmakers specifically targeted the goal of moving two professional sports teams to the state using public funds called STAR bonds.
The end result is that the Kansas City metropolitan area will be spending, in total, about $3-4 billion to give the Hunt family a new place for their sports team to play, likely far away from the city center, and that Arrowhead needs to be torn down, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars, once again, at taxpayer expense.
$3 billion could probably build out a real public transit system for the KC metro.
[0] https://sports.yahoo.com/meet-25-billion-hunt-family-2024104...