On Super Bowl Sunday, a day on which non-NFL sports leagues go out of their way to avoid scheduling around the biggest television event of the year, nobody would reasonably expect teams in other sports to say anything at all. The St. Louis Cardinals, for instance, tweeted happy birthday to assistant hitting coach Brandon Allen, noted that Hall of Famer Chick Hafey was born on that date in 1903, and stopped posting on social media for the day—a completely reasonable thing for a sports team that was not playing nor making transactions to do. For instance, the Chicago Blackhawks didn’t tweet at all. The Pittsburgh Penguins, a team which plays in a state with a team in the Super Bowl, tweeted a late-night game story for their Saturday night, West Coast game and then posted a link to a fan event—the kind of bland social media fodder one might expect. It probably wasn’t the highest traffic day for a hockey team, but benignly continuing about their business was the expectation of the day.
The St. Louis Blues, however, were not silent on social media on Sunday. But while they made a handful of tweets about the previous night’s game, during which they secured their first victory in 23 days after blowing a three-game lead to a team that got kicked out of their home arena days after trading one of the best half-dozen players in franchise history because they have playoff odds currently lower than the odds of them securing the #1 overall draft pick, the true attention-grabber came when they wished good luck in the Super Bowl to, and later congratulated on their victory, a team which plays its home games 241 miles away from their arena.
Although the Kansas City Chiefs are not the closest NFL team located to the Dome at America’s Center, the former home of the St. Louis Rams (that title belongs to the Indianapolis Colts, though the margin is so narrow that it could be reasonably deemed immaterial), that they became a popular choice for spurned NFL fans in St. Louis is hardly surprising—they were a reasonably nearby team, and although the St. Louis Rams and Kansas City Chiefs were ostensibly rivals, competing on six occasions during the NFL regular season for the Missouri Governor’s Cup (the Chiefs won all six meetings), the blood was never so bad that most St. Louisans took particular glee in the shortcomings of Kansas City’s NFL team.
But the arguments for St. Louisans to root against Kansas City with increased or newfound fervor were ample. In 2015, Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt was the lone vote on the NFL’s committee on Los Angeles opportunities to support the relocation of the Rams to Los Angeles, as opposed to the Chargers and Raiders, and in 2016, Hunt voted for the relocation of the Rams; before the dust had even settled, the Chiefs were already marketing themselves in St. Louis, the NFL’s equivalent to if Lee Harvey Oswald had made a move on Jacqueline Kennedy. There was a family history of this—in 1988, Clark’s father Lamar happily voted for the relocation of the St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix. Although the Chiefs have succeeded wildly since 2016, winning the AFC West each season and amassing two Super Bowl titles plus another appearance, led in large part by Patrick Mahomes, one of the sport’s most exciting players, the culture of the Chiefs—shielding star wide receiver Tyreek Hill after multiple credible domestic violence accusations (not to mention drafting him less than four years after Jovan Belcher’s violent murder-suicide) and their repeated insistence on using Native American imagery and racist chants (the Super Bowl broadcast showed a crowd of Chiefs fans in Munich doing the Tomahawk Chop—consider, for a moment, that the franchise has managed to export racism to Munich) during an era in which both Washington’s NFL team and Cleveland’s MLB team were successfully pressured to change their nicknames, has made rooting for Kansas City a non-option for those who harbor similarly negative feelings about the Atlanta Braves, whose use of the Tomahawk Chop has received even more aggressive criticism, presumably because of the city’s proximity to the Mason-Dixon line.
Ultimately, it is not unreasonable for St. Louis sports fans to not harbor a great resentment against Clark Hunt for his votes. After all, the final vote for the Rams’ relocation was 30-2, which considering one of the 30 “yes” votes includes the franchise with over 500,000 owners (the Green Bay Packers) means there are too many grudges to potentially hold at once, and even one of the “no” votes, from the then-Oakland Raiders, was simply made so that Mark Davis could rip out of the hearts of his own fans, so hardly a sympathetic gesture (I tend to gravitate towards rooting for the Cincinnati Bengals because of Mike Brown’s far less egregious “no” vote, but it is not as though the penny-pinching failson who has shown a greater proclivity for donating money to faceless Republican politicians than to his own football team is exactly innocent). But aside from Stan Kroenke, the real estate baron and part-time NFL team owner whose franchise value increased overnight when the Rams relocated (there’s a reason Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno insisted on branding his baseball team with “Los Angeles” rather than their actual home city of Anaheim), nobody profited more from the pain and suffering of St. Louis than Clark Hunt.
Third on the list of Rams relocation profiteers, however, might be the St. Louis Blues. From nearly the moment the NFL approved the removal of St. Louis’s NFL team, the Blues have marketed themselves as an alternative to the Rams. At the first St. Louis Blues home game following the relocation vote, the Blues held a ceremonial puck drop featuring St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III and Blues owner Tom Stillman, each wearing jackets representing the other team, which received widespread media acclaim, particularly after the fans erupted into the now-familiar chant of “Kroenke sucks”. In February 2016, the Blues offered ticket and merchandise promotions to former St. Louis Rams season ticket holders. In March 2016, the Blues parlayed this jolt of attention into clinching a bid to host the 2017 NHL Winter Classic, a lucrative outdoor hockey game with over double the ticketed capacity of a typical game and with much higher ticket prices. Throughout the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs, which saw the Blues make their deepest postseason run—to Game Six of the Western Conference Finals—in three decades, the Blues stood as the anti-Rams in ways that the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team never could. The Cardinals are ubiquitous, an international brand with clusters of fans well beyond the Greater St. Louis area; the Blues, like the Rams before them, did not have a large national or international following, but they belonged to St. Louis.
But in a more literal sense, the St. Louis Blues belong to Tom Stillman. And while Tom Stillman has demonstrated himself to be a far more palatable owner from a fan perspective than Stan Kroenke, or than most, the Blues are ultimately subject to his whims and the whims of SLB Acquisition Holdings LLC. The St. Louis Blues came to life because Chicago Black Hawks owner James D. Norris owned St. Louis Arena and wanted to earn more income from his place in the NHL by virtue of having an expansion team play there. The St. Louis Blues nearly collapsed under the weight of Ralston-Purina’s ownership, with the local company so angry that they were not permitted to relocate the franchise to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that they refused to send representatives to the 1983 NHL Entry Draft as some sort of ill-fated protest. And three years after the Rams left St. Louis, the St. Louis Blues took $70 million in public subsidies in order to renovate Enterprise Center, a project which may indeed serve some sort of intangible good for the area but which primarily exists to make the rich richer.
To be clear, I’m not offering any suggestions of a conspiracy. While Tom Stillman and company may have secretly been excited for the marketing opportunities that came with the Rams exodus, they were not the ones who turned it into reality (while Chiefs ownership can at least be reasonably considered an accessory to the crime). But the Blues undeniably benefited. In the year following the Rams’ departure, their value increased by 45%, and it has more than doubled in the years since, outpacing increases across the National Hockey League.
Certainly, when the St. Louis Blues Twitter account posted support and congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs, it was not done at the direct behest of ownership, nor was it when the Blues tweeted such messages to the Chiefs in 2020 and 2021. But the relationship is not reciprocated even by the Chiefs themselves, who have tagged the Blues on Twitter three total times, twice via replies (thus avoiding annoying their own fans who do not also follow the Blues, which is most, because St. Louis and Kansas City are more than three and a half hours apart) and once when they posted a link showing Blues goalie Jordan Binnington wearing a Patrick Mahomes jersey, which hardly removes the feelings of Blues subservience. When the Blues tweeted positively towards the Chiefs yesterday, the response was largely negative not because it matters if some individual social media manager cares who wins the Super Bowl but because it represents St. Louis buying into the Hunt family’s despicable strategy of segmenting heartbroken sports fans. Clark Hunt decided that St. Louis was ripe for the picking; the strategy has been plenty successful, though the Blues would suggest the strategy was far more successful than it actually was and that St. Louis is firmly, unanimously Chiefs Territory. Instead, St. Louis is a city where there are more fans of the Chiefs than of any other individual team but where there is hardly unanimity.
On June 12, 2019, the Kansas City Royals offered the lone tweet they have ever issued about the St. Louis Blues, congratulating them on their Stanley Cup victory, and most of the replies are from Kansas City fans annoyed that their favorite team is celebrating the victory of a different city. And they were right to do so—if Kansas Citians want to root for the Blues, that’s their prerogative (and unlike with regards to St. Louis and the NFL, the Blues are by far the closest NHL team to Kansas City), but the Blues are not a Kansas City team. They aren’t a Missouri team. They are a St. Louis team.
After Jackson County voters approved a tax increase to pay for $850 million in stadium renovation in 2006, the Chiefs signed a lease which will keep the team at Arrowhead Stadium (you know, the stadium named after Native American imagery since they are named the Chiefs, a reference to the city’s former white mayor) through 2031. But Kansas City’s sports teams have dangled relocation, if not out of the metropolitan area than at least to different stadiums, religiously. Persistent rumors have been that the Royals may seek a new downtown stadium (Kansas City’s shared Truman Sports Complex is located in the city’s outskirts) and that the Chiefs, like many NFL teams (Giants/Jets, Rams/Chargers, Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Commanders, Dolphins, Cardinals, Raiders, Bills), may seek to build a stadium in the suburbs, where ample parking revenue can be more easily found. These proposals have included ones to move the Chiefs to the Kansas side of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, a move which, if the Chiefs cared whatsoever about their status as Missouri’s Team, would be deadly. But it isn’t, because despite what the St. Louis Blues embarrassingly seem to believe, the Kansas City Chiefs are not, and barring relocation will never be, St. Louis’s NFL team.
