Billionaire Chiefs Owner Clark Hunt On Building A Dynasty — On And Off The Field

The son of franchise founder Lamar Hunt has guided Kansas City to the precipice of Super Bowl history: a three-peat that would cement a 65-year family legacy.

_{By Justin Birnbaum, Forbes Staff}

Clark Hunt was born into a dynasty. The Dallas Texans, founded by his father, Lamar, won an American Football League championship just before he arrived on the scene and then, after they became the Kansas City Chiefs, played in the first Super Bowl. Three years later, Hunt got to watch legendary quarterback Len Dawson lead the team to a title in a landmark game that immediately preceded the AFL-NFL merger.

Now 59, the Chiefs’ CEO and chairman isn’t quite old enough to remember that happy afternoon—and it took half a century for his team to recapture that early glory. But with a Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers in 2020, Kansas City began a run that ranks among the most dominant in sports history. Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles will be the Chiefs’ fifth appearance in the title game in six years, and a victory would give the team its fourth championship ring in that span, as well as the first Super Bowl three-peat ever.

Hunt isn’t taking anything for granted, telling Forbes this week in New Orleans, “Deep down, all of us know how hard it is and how special it is.” For him and his family, however, the meaningfulness of the Super Bowl streak goes beyond NFL records; it’s also about a different kind of history book.

Hunt’s father coined the term “Super Bowl,” and his name graces the trophy given to the conference champion, hoisted again and again by Kansas City. The family, meanwhile, has now retained control of the Chiefs for the franchise’s entire 65-year existence—something of a rarity in professional sports as team valuations skyrocket and estate planning for multi-generational ownership groups becomes increasingly complicated.

Today, the Chiefs are worth $4.85 billion, according to Forbes’ most recent NFL valuations. That leaves them a modest 24th in the league but still No. 39 among all sports teams worldwide, and it has made Clark Hunt and his three siblings—Lamar Jr., Sharron and Daniel—quite wealthy. They are all believed to have 25% stakes in the Chiefs, as well as shares of MLS’s FC Dallas and a small piece of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, and Forbes estimates their fortunes at $1.6 billion each.

Their wealth traces back to their grandfather, famed oil wildcatter H.L. Hunt, whose descendants are worth an estimated $25 billion and ranked 12th on Forbes’ 2024 list of America’s richest families. But the sports connection began with Lamar Hunt, who was eager to get into football as its popularity exploded in the 1950s.

In the years before the Dallas Cowboys existed, Hunt made a proposal to the NFL to bring an expansion team to the city, but the league denied him. So Hunt created his own team and, with seven other owners he assembled, his own league, the AFL. Each contributed $25,000 (or about $270,000 in today’s dollars), with play beginning in 1960. After three seasons, Hunt moved his franchise to Kansas City, and in 1966, he helped strike a merger agreement between the nascent league and the NFL. Their first joint championship game came seven months later—an event he dubbed the “Super Bowl” in a riff on a children’s toy, a Super Ball.

Clark Hunt wasn’t focused on following in his father’s footsteps or running the Chiefs. He studied finance at Southern Methodist University and took up investment banking at Goldman Sachs after graduating in 1987. When he joined his father a few years later, it was to work on the family’s non-sports holdings, such as building a family office and managing their energy business. By sheer proximity, however, Hunt found himself tagging along to Chiefs meetings, and when Lamar helped found Major League Soccer in 1996, he “drafted” his son into the endeavor.

“There was not some master plan, at least in the back of my mind,” Clark says. “Maybe he had one, and I didn’t know it.”

Those early years in MLS proved formative as Hunt steered two franchises alongside his father: the Kansas City Wizards (now Sporting KC) and the Columbus Crew. That number briefly rose to three teams in 2003, after the family bought the Dallas Burn (now FC Dallas), but they divested from Kansas City in 2006 and from Columbus in 2013.

As Lamar had learned decades earlier with the AFL, establishing a new league was no easy task. But it taught Clark the importance of catering to season-ticket holders and the economic strength that comes with designing a stadium specific to its occupant. MLS wanted to build home fields for its clubs, at a projected cost that was daunting at the time but would now seem laughable—$20 million each. The Hunts delivered the league’s first soccer-specific stadium, for the Crew in 1999, leading a charge that has resulted in 24 venues across MLS today.

“When all the other owners in MLS dropped out—except for the Krafts, the Hunts and, of course, Philip Anschutz—the three of them kept MLS together for many years,” notes Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp, who is often called the NFL’s “33rd owner” because of his close ties to football’s decision makers.

It was a difficult time for the Hunts behind the scenes as well. Lamar quietly began a battle with prostate cancer in 1998, and it became evident the Chiefs needed a leader to shoulder the responsibilities he no longer could. “We were all so concerned about my dad because he’d had cancer at that point for almost seven years and had been on the rollercoaster,” Clark Hunt recalls of his ascension to the chairman post in 2005, a year before Lamar’s death. “There were some days you thought they had it under control and he was going to live for a long time, and then days where you didn’t think that.”

Hunt adds: “I always knew that I was walking in some very big footsteps, and I really had to learn that it was going to be impossible to do and be everything that he was to our fan base, to the NFL and the other sports that he was involved with. And it was really important for me to lead in my own way, and that’s something that certainly took some time for me to really figure out.”

Ultimately, Hunt transformed the Chiefs over the next two decades. He poached future club president Mark Donovan from the Eagles in 2009, hired head coach Andy Reid in 2013 and promoted Brett Veach to general manager in 2017, with all three eventually reporting directly to him. And 2017 proved consequential for another reason—the Chiefs traded up in the NFL draft to select quarterback Patrick Mahomes at No. 10 overall. Since 2018, when Mahomes became the starter, the Chiefs have the best record in the NFL.

At the same time, Hunt has expanded his influence at the league level, taking inspiration from his father’s critical role in the AFL and NFL. Ganis recalls other owners praising Hunt’s rigorous reports during the league’s collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2011, noting that that “was the key labor deal that set the NFL and the players both on this meteoric path.” Hunt has also chaired the league’s finance committee since 2012, helping design the framework that now allows private equity firms to invest in NFL teams.

But while winning may seem to solve everything, Hunt’s tenure hasn’t been without criticism. The NFL Players Association’s annual survey of more than 1,700 players ranked the Chiefs poorly in nearly every category, including facilities and ownership. “You’re always glad to get feedback on everything related to your business, and sometimes it is not going to be positive,” Hunt says. Donovan, the team president, suggests that some of the assessments were unfair but says that the Chiefs’ leadership took the report card seriously and has taken action to remedy players’ concerns. For instance, the team spent $4 million on practice facility renovations last year and has “another probably $5 million” on the way, with the indoor field now outfitted with air conditioning and the cafeteria overhauled, alongside plans for a weight room expansion and a new players’ lounge.

Hunt has even more ambitious goals for his franchise, starting with renovating or replacing 52-year-old Arrowhead Stadium and becoming “the world’s team” through an international marketing effort. The Chiefs already have commercial rights in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Mexico, and Hunt says the team is exploring other potential markets, including Spain, despite profitability overseas remaining a ways off. Meanwhile, Kansas City has invested heavily in content, amassing a YouTube following of more than a million subscribers and announcing the launch of a production studio this week.

“We are not, nor will we be, a top-five market,” Donovan says. “So we look at opportunities like this that we’ve got to be a little bit different.”

Even as Hunt’s sports empire grows, though, he wants it to stay a family business, and preparing the next generation is something he discusses with his siblings “quite a bit.”

“Honoring [my dad’s] legacy is very, very important to us, and we have no plans to disengage from the sports business,” he says. “It’s central to who we are as a family.”

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