Chiefs owner calls recently renovated stadium “great,” “state-of-the-art,” maybe falling down, depending on whether he wants new one or not

One of the challenges of being a sports team owner, in addition to finding the right swim trunks to go bathing in your money bin, is figuring out how to disparage your current stadium as obsolete so you can demand a new one, while also not disparaging it so much that people stop going. (This is not a challenge for owners like the Oakland A’s John Fisher and the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Stu Sternberg, who seem happy enough to discourage fans from going to games so long as there’s a pot of subsidies at the end of the road; but we digress.) And when future historians want an archetypal example of a team owner talking about how much he loves his stadium while also declaring that he needs a new one, maybe, they need look no further than Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, who gave a remarkable talk to the media on Friday in which he said:

“We’re very happy in Arrowhead. We still think it’s one of the great venues in the National Football League.”

And:

“One of the most important things that we’ll learn is whether, structurally, Arrowhead can go another 25 or 50 years.”

But:

“It still is a state-of-the-art stadium.”

However:

“It’s a cement stadium that’s been around for a while now, and we’ve got to make sure that it can go beyond the end of the lease.”

Plus:

“From a personal standpoint, it’s something that will be very challenging for me and the family, right? Because we have so many great memories at Arrowhead — obviously, it was a special place for my dad (Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt). In fact, he mentioned that he could pick one vacation spot in the world, it would be Arrowhead. So it’s not a decision that we’re going to take lightly — and it’s something that will be very tough emotionally… I actually remember being at the opening game. I don’t know that I exactly understood what I was looking at, but I remember being there for that — and some of probably my fondest memories from being a child were being down on the field kicking field goals with my dad with Jan Stenerud coaching me, so those are special memories for sure.”

Now there is some next-level having-it-both-ways-ism! The takeaway, if you can keep your head from exploding entirely from the cognitive dissonance, is that Hunt loves his stadium very much, but maybe it’s time to send it to a farm in the country where it can enjoy its declining years running free with the other stadiums, and sure, maybe we can visit sometime.

Not mentioned by Hunt, but eventually mentioned by Arrowhead Pride, the SBNation Chiefs fan site that wrote all this up: Arrowhead Stadium just got a $375 million renovation 12 years ago, most of which was paid for by a county sales tax hike. I wrote at the time, “One hopes that this time, Jackson County negotiators were smart enough not to give them another ‘state of the art’ clause that could let them play the move-threat game again before 2031,” but apparently Hunt — who not long ago asked for tax breaks on his purchase of a giant bronze statue of his dad, so clearly shame is not in his vocabulary — has figured out that with his new lease expiring in only nine years, it’s time to start talking about how his recently renovated stadium is a dump and needs to be replaced. Or is state-of-the-art and beloved he would never think of replacing it! Definitely one of those, please hold while I check to see what the real estate accountants say will make me the most money.