FRANKFURT, Germany — Technically, anyway, the Chiefs are playing host to the Miami Dolphins on Sunday. So the environment will be steeped in familiar home flourishes such as the game day music production, Chiefs cheerleaders and mascot KC Wolf. As usual, chairman and CEO Clark Hunt anticipates most of the fans will be wearing red.
But any real resemblance to playing in Kansas City will be purely coincidental when they kick off at 8:30 a.m. Central Standard Time on Sunday at Deutsche Bank Stadium in Frankfurt, Germany.
Because they’ll be some 5,000 miles away on a hybrid field in a retractable-roof stadium about two-thirds the size of their regular home capacity of 76,000-plus. Not to mention playing at considerable logistical inconvenience and likely fighting sleep deprivation after traveling overnight Thursday.
So it might reasonably be asked why it’s worth bidding to surrender a true home game, one that would have marked the return of Tyreek Hill to Kansas City, as it happens, and to have to contend with all the attached commotion and extra investment.
The answer essentially is that it’s not about Sunday but about the future. And it’s all about an ambitious next phase of a long-term NFL initiative — already decades in the making — on which the Chiefs never have been better positioned to capitalize.
“From a long-term perspective for the league, for the Chiefs, it’s important to grow the brand on an international basis,” Hunt said Tuesday. “There are only so many fans that can be had in North America.”
And, seemingly suddenly, so many in Germany.
By the NFL’s estimate, as it reiterated during a conference call with the media on Monday, some 18 million Germans can be identified as NFL fans and approximately 3.6 million could be considered avid.
The Kansas City Star will be exploring what that looks and feels like in Frankfurt over the days to come.
But it’s safe to say that Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce (surely amplified by his relationship Taylor Swift) and the rest of the Chiefs already are such a draw that the game sold out in minutes as more than a million people were in the online cue hoping to get ahold of some of the fewer than 50,000 tickets.
When former Chief Tim Grunhard went to Germany last year as part of an ambassadorial effort, he recalled by telephone Wednesday, he couldn’t believe the fervor for the Chiefs: People were begging him for his Chiefs hat, he said, and about anywhere he went he’d hear, “We love the Chiefs; we love Mahomes.”
Some of this is what aptly can be called the Mahomes Effect, which includes tales we’ve directly heard of him being a star in such far-flung lands as Iran, Nigeria and Qatar.
Among numerous other sites, to be sure. Most to the point here is the German couple I wrote about last week who recently came to Kansas City to get married largely triggered by their fascination with Mahomes.
But it also goes back to before Mahomes was born. Back to NFL global initiatives that included the so-called “American Bowl” series of preseason games held outside the country starting in the late 1980s. The Chiefs played in four of those, including twice in Japan, once in Mexico … and in a particularly historic outing in Berlin in 1990.
Albeit in the preseason, their game against the Rams in August 1990 was the first NFL game played in Germany — an event amplified by the fact it came less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
