How the Kansas City Chiefs became this Super Bowl’s villains

Super Bowl LIX is upon us, and outside of Kansas City and Philadelphia, sports fans’ attitude toward this year’s matchup seems to be a collective groan. Ticket prices, though still exorbitant, are thousands of dollars cheaper than last year, and fans everywhere seem to be rooting for the asteroid. On its face, this makes sense: Eagles fans have a rather earned reputation, even if the team has a running back who is an explosive talent and genuinely one of the most likable athletes in professional sports. As for the Chiefs, they’ve fully entered their villain era, with fans loving to hate the NFL’s latest formidable dynasty.

Just five years ago, the Chiefs were largely celebrated for their win in Super Bowl LIV, the title that launched their dynasty. But a recent Economist/YouGov poll shows that more Americans are rooting against Kansas City than for them. It’s understandable that Americans are growing weary of seeing Kansas City in the Super Bowl; this will be the Chiefs’ fifth appearance in the last six years, they’ve won three of the last five, and they’re going for their third Super Bowl win in a row on Sunday, a feat that’s never been achieved. Every great team that reaches the level of perennial success the Chiefs have enjoyed eventually suffers this backlash, no matter the decade. Just ask the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Lakers, Golden State Warriors and most recently in the NFL, the New England Patriots.

Columnists everywhere have explored the various reasons for this phenomenon, where dynasties become more disliked the longer their run. There are certainly psychological and cultural factors at play: As sports fans, we like to root for the underdog, and when it’s not our team that’s constantly winning, we see that dominance as undeserved. The saturation of coverage certainly hasn’t helped either. And yes, politics might play a slight role here, though I tend to think that’s overstated. Liberal-leaning fans have taken issue with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ wife Brittany’s seeming support of Donald Trump on social media. Conservative-leaning fans aren’t fond of Taylor Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the past two presidential elections and is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

But I think another factor is at play here, one peculiar to football. As sports fans, we’ve all bought into this belief that the NFL is a bastion of parity, a shining example of fairness for other leagues to follow. But that belies reality. According to the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, of the four major North American men’s leagues, the NHL is actually the league that boasts the most parity. The NFL is third, just below MLB. And as The Athletic’s Jayson Stark noted Thursday, teams with Mahomes, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning at quarterback have appeared in 12 of the last 14 Super Bowls.

In baseball, when teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers win multiple championships, it’s easy to point to the perceived unfairness in MLB, which has no salary cap. Big-market and wealthier teams can afford the best players, so fans of small-market teams can simply blame the system. The NFL has a hard salary cap, so richer teams can’t wildly outspend others. When a small-market team like the Chiefs keeps winning, fans of other teams can’t blame the system.

A sportswriter friend who hails from Kansas City has an interesting theory: Part of the hate is really more frustration, annoyance and resentment, particularly from fans of other small-market teams, who see the Chiefs’ dynasty and think, “That could be us.”

We’ve been conditioned to think of football as the fairest sport — the sport of true meritocracy, not legacy and wealth-based success — so when one team constantly wins, it catches us off guard. How can a dynasty exist in a league with features meant to level the playing field, like revenue sharing and a hard salary cap?

That might be why fans have turned on the Chiefs so sharply. It also explains why, whereas the Yankees and the Lakers get accused of buying championships, the criticism this week is that the referees are in the bag for the Chiefs. That accusation has been so widespread that both the NFL referees union and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell felt compelled to respond.

But the Chiefs have built their dynasty squarely within the rules, thanks in large part to front-office savvy. Yes, Mahomes has one of the more team-friendly contracts in the league, restructuring his deal before the 2023 season to receive less guaranteed money and allow the Chiefs more salary cap flexibility. But the organization has also simply been better than most in continuing to build around him.

In 2022, Kansas City traded star wide receiver Tyreek Hill to Miami for five draft picks as Hill sought a massive contract extension. The Chiefs used two of those picks on cornerback Trent McDuffie and safety Chamarri Conner, both now part of one of the league’s top defenses. They’ve signed low-cost veterans like Kareem Hunt, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Mecole Hardman to round out their roster. The majority of their starters are homegrown — only two of their defensive starters weren’t drafted in-house — which speaks to just how well general manager Brett Veach and his team scout and develop talent. They’re winning because of great management — and what could be more meritocratic than that?

It’s easy to hate the Chiefs and to want to see them toppled, but their dynastic run deserves as much admiration as annoyance. I’ll personally be holding my nose to root for the Eagles — as a Giants fan, I’d like to see Saquon Barkley get a well-deserved title. But remember that every dynasty eventually becomes the villain simply because we don’t like to admit when greatness is due. We hate ’em ’cause we ain’t ’em.