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Last year, the Chiefs announced they’ll be relocating to Kansas after deciding to abandon the stadium they’ve called home for over five decades. Missouri will subsequently be without an NFL franchise for the first time in more than 70 years, and a salty legislator has introduced a measure to make a UFL squad the state’s “official” football team.
In 1960, the state of Missouri welcomed an NFL team for the first time when the Cardinals moved from Chicago to St. Louis. A second one arrived three years later after the Dallas Texans rebranded as the Kansas City Chiefs, and while the Cardinals fled to Arizona toward the end of the 1980s, St. Louis was welcomed back into the fold when the Rams arrived in 1995.
That era came to an end when the Rams returned to Los Angeles in the wake of the 2015 campaign, and in 2019, the Missouri legislature passed a Senate resolution that Governor Mike Parson signed to make the Chiefs the “official NFL football team” of The Show-Me State.
However, as things currently stand, Missouri will no longer be home to an NFL team when 2031 rolls around. In December, the Chiefs announced their plans to abandon Arrowhead Stadium (where they’ve played since 1972) in favor of a new venue that will be constructed across the Missouri River in the Kansas City that is actually located in Kansas.
The decision was the culmination of a fair amount of political drama in Missouri, and one lawmaker has treated us to some more by drafting a petty resolution in response.
A Missouri state senator wants the UFL’s St. Louis Battlehawks to replace the Chiefs as the state’s official football team
The Chiefs did what they could to get taxpayers in Missouri to help foot the bill for a new stadium, but a proposal that would have generated an estimated $2 billion for the team (as well as the Kansas City Royals) was rejected by 58% of voters in 2024.
The Hunt family did what it could to put the pressure on by making it clear they were very willing to explore their options if the measure didn’t pass, and they ultimately followed through on that threat before agreeing to a laughably friendly deal that will see the state of Kansas fork over $1.8 billion in public funds for a stadium that will cost an estimated $3 billion to construct.
Missouri reaped the benefits of the Chiefs being in Kansas City due to their impact on the local economy (they also pay Jackson County $1.1 million a year to lease Arrowhead). The state will still get some table scraps after they move to Kansas, but it’s easy to understand why some politicians are less than thrilled with that development.
That includes Nick Schroer, a Republican state senator who currently represents Missouri’s 2nd District. The district in question is located in the northwestern part of St. Louis, which helps explain why Schroer has introduced a resolution that would strip the Chiefs of their current status as the state’s NFL team and name the St. Louis Battlehawks of the UFL “the official professional football team of the state of Missouri.”
The Battlehawks played their first season in St. Louis as a founding member of the XFL, and they head into the upcoming UFL season coming off back-to-back playoff appearances.
Schroer’s resolution is still in the early stages of the legislative process, so we’ll have to wait and see if it actually manages to get any traction.