Mahomes has boosted Kansas City's Super Bowl odds and its confidence

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — He’s the King of Kansas City, and his kingdom is having a moment.

In five years, Kansas City’s star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, has led the Chiefs to three Super Bowl appearances— including Sunday’s — and five consecutive conference title games, and he just won his second National Football League most valuable player award. Along the way, the once-in-a-generation talent has attracted outsize attention — and investment — to this quiet Midwestern city previously known mostly for its barbecue and pleasant living.

On playoff game days, the small downtown airport has been choked with private jets. He casually mentioned he missed his home state’s Whataburgers and the Texas-based company began planning to expand into Kansas City, with Mahomes an eventual investor. In the last three years, Mahomes has purchased stakes in all three of the city’s other professional sports franchises, the Kansas City Royals and the men’s and women’s prosoccer teams.

The young quarterback is so lionized that the city lit up its iconic Union Station when each of his children were born — first in for baby girl Sterling, then blue for baby boy Bronze.

“It’s kind of like that ‘Jerry Maguire’ saying — he completes us,” said Chad Boeger, the president of Union Broadcasting, which owns Sports Radio 810 WHB, the largest sports radio station in the region, where online listenership has tripled in the last five years due to the Chiefs success.

Civic leaders say Mahomes’s presence has given the city a much needed jolt of confidence as it prepares for a number of high-profile events in the coming months. The city’s long awaited new $1.5 billion airport terminal opens later this month. Kansas City will host the NFL draft in April and World Cup soccer games in 2026 — the smallest among the 11 American cities chosen as hosts.

“I think there’s no doubt Patrick Mahomes and his talent and what he’s done professionally with the Chiefs has put us on the map across the country and arguably around the world,” said Joe Reardon, the chairman and chief executive of the Greater Kansas City. “I think our image had been a nice town in flyover country — another city out there in the middle of the country. That has completely changed with the success of this team.”

The mayor, Quinton Lucas, echoed these comments, with bit more reserve: “I think he has made us a little more interesting that we were perceived to have been before.”

The city of 508,000 along the Missouri River — part of a larger metropolitan area that spans two states — has a proud history as an American crossroads of railways and stockyards that dates to the 1800s. But its inferiority complex is nearly that old, said journalist Mark Dent, the co-author of the book “Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin’ Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback” which will publish in August. Dent notes that a New Republic writer visiting way back in 1928 clocked it, writing of the “wholly unnecessary inferiority complex” of its citizenry.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said sports podcaster Kevin Kietzman. “Kansas City is a great place to live and we all think it’s a neat little secret but it’s never been the cool place — and now it is. As far as Kansas City is concerned, we’re cool because we’ve got Patrick Mahomes.”

No. 15 jerseys proliferate, kids mimic Mahomes’s hairstyle and Kietzman says there is even a crazy counterculture of people dressing up their dogs to look like the quarterback, painting No. 15 on the animals “with pet-friendly paints of course!”

Kansas City has always had an outsize love for its professional football team alongside its fear of not measuring up, Dent said. The city is blanketed in red on “Red Fridays” before game days and its Arrowhead Stadium holds the Guinness World Record for the loudest sports roar anywhere. But the Chiefs — or, their performance anyway — did not always love them back.

That all changed in 2017, when the Chiefs drafted Mahomes out of Texas Tech. In short order he was named the league’s 2018 MVP, and led the team to victory over the San Francisco 49ers in the 2020 Super Bowl, the team’s first such win in fifty years.

From the beginning, Mahomes, 27, exhibited the kind of personality traits that Kansas Citians admire. He is relatively humble, hard-working, devout (kneeling in prayer before every game) and family-oriented (his wife, Brittany, was his high school sweetheart). He has so far been able to handle the pressures of his immense fame with poise — a skill he says he learned as a child watching baseball greats Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez at games with his father, Pat Sr., a former Major League Baseball pitcher.

OnJan. 29, he set up the game-winning field goal against the Cincinnati Bengals to send the Chiefs to the championship by hobbling his team into range on a sprained ankle, again endearing himself to hometown fans. In a postgame TV interview, he was in the middle of earnestly describing how God healed his body when he was interrupted by crowing teammate Travis Kelce dunking on the Bengals, who had made the mistake of calling Arrowhead “Burrowhead”— suggesting Bengals’ quarterback Joe Burrow “owns” the stadium — in the walk-up to the game.

As the child of a Black father and a White mother, Mahomes has also spoken out on issues of race, particularly after the death of George Floyd in 2020, whenhe joined other Black athletes in a video calling on the NFL to do more to support racial justice. His charitable foundation helped fund voting machines at Arrowhead for the 2020 presidential election and upgraded the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Park in a predominantly Black neighborhood. His helmet bumper reads “Choose Love.”

Yet he’s remained silent on one of the most persistent controversies dogging the team, its fandom’s continued use of the tomahawk chop and fake war cry during games, which Native American groups have said is offensive and divisive.

“I wish he would say something,” said Rhonda LeValdo, the founder of Not In Our Honor, a group that advocates against cultural appropriation by the Chiefs. “You would think like he would be a little understanding because we’re both minorities. There should be some kind of understanding about how we’re both stereotyped.”

The Chiefs declined to make Mahomes or its senior leadership available for interviews for this story.

In 2020, Mahomes signed a record-breaking $503 million contract extension that will keep him in the city through 2031. The value of the Chiefs franchise has grown 76 percent since Mahomes was drafted, from $2.1 billion in 2017 to $3.7 billion in 2022, according to Forbes.

But even before that, he and his then-girlfriend were exploring putting down permanent roots. The couple are building a home in a golf course development in one of the southern suburbs that he said will have a half-football field for workouts.

“I’m a Texan and a Kansas Citian, for sure,” Mahomes said in a postgame news conference last year. “I'm building a house here. I'm going to be here for a long time. … I think that's just because I appreciate the people so much and how they've taken my family in and made it a part of this community.”

Kansas City seemingly had everything Mahomes needed — except for his favorite fast food, Whataburger, he in 2018. Two years later, the San Antonio-based chain announced it was ready to expand into Kansas City, and people began lining up at dawn when its first outlet opened in 2021. Whataburger has also made sure local Walmarts are stocked with its ketchup — Mahomes’ favorite.

Mahomes later bought into a franchise group that plans on opening 30 Whataburgers in Kansas and Missouri in the next several years.

Even before his contract extension was finalized, Mahomes’s team had reached out to the Royals about becoming a part owner of the Major LeagueBaseball franchise, according to John Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Kansas City Royals.

“I took it as his way — as young as he was, and very astute — of doubling down on Kansas City,” Sherman said. Mahomes eventually bought a minority stake in the Royals, becoming one of the youngest owners in Major League Baseball, the league said.

Mahomes is also part owner of the men’s soccer team, Sporting Kansas City, and recently followed his wife, who played both professional soccer overseas for a year and in college, into an ownership stake in the Kansas City Current, the women’s soccer team. The couple frequently attends Current matches, and they’ll be important boosters as the franchise builds its new $70 million stadium in a prominent riverfront locale, said Current co-owner Chris Long.

The scrappy city got another soccer-related ego boost this summer, when the international soccer federation, FIFA, chose Kansas City as one of its 11 American World Cup sites for 2026, with Kansas City winning out over far bigger places like Orlando and Denver. Mahomes was the celebrity chosen to help announce Kansas City’s unlikely selection to the world.

“The quote that FIFA used — publicly — was that ‘no one wants it more than you,’” said Katherine Holland, the director of the city’s World Cup bid effort.

Over the weekend, at a pre-Super Bowl event at the city’s bustling Union Station, Kansas City residents Kim Ramsey, 57, and her sister Karen Satterwhite, “60-plus,” waited in a throng to take photos before a mural of Mahomes and two of his signed jerseys.

“We’ve always had team spirit, but Mahomes has amped it to the 10th power,” said Satterwhite.

“He’s the man,” said Ramsey. “He’s always positive, never negative. He never complains, not matter how hurt he is.”

It’s inspirational, she said. “If he can do it, we can all do it.”