Even Outside of Kansas City, the Chiefs are Everywhere

I don’t live near Kansas City. I live in Indiana, 500 miles away from Arrowhead Stadium.

I’ve always lived in Indiana. I’m a Cincinnati Reds fan, so I do know what it’s like to live within the normal borders of a team’s fanbase. Baseball isn’t as visceral as football, though, and the Reds have sapped all the life out of the fanbase over their last 30 years of being the Reds. So there isn’t a particularly intense passion behind Reds fans like there is with the Chiefs.

The only experiences I’ve had being physically among the Chiefs fanbase came from visits to my mom’s side of the family in KC. As a kid, it was always a bit surreal to walk into any gas station, grocery, or department store to find the shelves lined with Chiefs merchandise and advertising tie-ins. I was (and still am) used to being surrounded by Colts, Bengals and Browns logos at every turn.

Being a fan of a team far outside your area makes being a fan of that team a defining personality trait to those around you. If you’re from the KC area, “is a Chiefs fan” isn’t going to be listed among your quirks when your friends or coworkers talk about you. In Kansas City, it’s assumed.

The Chiefs in particular have a historically insular fanbase. You’re not going to find Chiefs fans all over the country in the numbers you’ll find Cowboys, Packers, or Steelers fans.

From childhood all the way until a couple of years ago, people finding out I followed the Chiefs reacted with either a chuckle or a sympathetic apology for my suffering. Regardless, it would always be followed by genuine curiosity about how I ended up a fan of a team so far away and so nationally unpopular, but in the patronizing way you’d ask similar questions of someone you just found out was in a UFO cult.

I could be wrong, but it feels like today team loyalties are much less tied to region than they were a decade or two ago. Even among my coworkers, there are fans of the Falcons, Dolphins, Saints, Eagles, and Broncos. From kindergarten all the way though high school, it felt like 95% of my classmates fell into the Colts/Bengals/Browns southeastern Indiana jumble.

I’d guess having more and more football fans who’ve grown up on Madden and the internet is causing that shift. It’s easy to experience the best of every team, so you can fight back if your family is trying to make the Bengals or Browns your birthright.

I work retail, so I spend the wide majority of my days interacting with strangers. I wear a Chiefs helmet pin on my shirt at work. Over the last year, reactions to it from customers are a stark contrast to what I’m used to.

Nearly every shift I have at least one customer ask me if I’ve always been a fan of the Chiefs, or if I only started when Mahomes showed up. In only two years, the reaction has leapt from “Oh, that’s cute” to accusations of bandwagoning. I’ve resorted to saving a folder of photos on my phone of me as a toddler in Chiefs gear so I can prove my status as a lifelong fan. Just the other day, I got the ol’ “Oh, you’re a Chiefs fan? Then name 10 Chiefs players not from the last three seasons!” routine.

From 2018 to now, the Chiefs have gone from national obscurity to being so prominent and saturated in the NFL zeitgeist that people are already becoming exhausted by them. I’m even occasionally seeing Chiefs merchandise in Meijer and Wal-Mart next to the Colts, Bengals and Browns. Anyone who sees me wearing Chiefs regalia talks about Mahomes with reverent awe or guttural disgust at knowing they’re stuck dealing with him in the league for the next decade-and-a-half.

Everyone around here used to know nothing about the Chiefs. Now it feels like everyone has an opinion about them the way you’d expect everyone to have an opinion about the Cowboys and Yankees, or LeBron James vs. Michael Jordan.

It’s kind of bittersweet for me. It’s like my favorite indie filmmaker is suddenly making a new Star Wars. Everyone knows who they are now, and they’re having so much success, but liking them can’t be one of my personality traits anymore.

All this is, really, is me being a tiny bit sad over losing something that felt like it was just mine. I’ve always been far enough away from KC that the Chiefs felt like they belonged exclusively to me. I was the only one who cared about them in my corner of the world. Now they’re hot and famous everyone is talking about them. But they’re going to win a bunch of Super Bowls, probably, so I’ll get over it.