Decades after Chiefs helped sow seeds of NFL in Germany, they’re reaping the rewards

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 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.

“The takeaway from that trip that no one will ever forget is the wall coming down,” said Hunt, who as a young boy also had been to West Germany with his visionary father, Lamar, for the 1974 World Cup.

The Chiefs and Rams entourages traveled to the wall, with some taking sledgehammers or axes to it and some even collecting pieces of the wall to take home. Moreover, Chiefs players Jonathan Hayes and James Saxon posed in uniforms there with a young boy from East Germany for a photo that became the 1990 team Christmas card adorned with the sentiment: “Peace to you this and every season.”

The Chiefs also ventured through the disintegrating remnants of Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin, where they witnessed the foreboding world that had been forbidden for decades.

To then-president and general manager Carl Peterson, who also went to East Berlin to watch soccer with Chiefs and AFL founder Lamar Hunt, venturing into the other side was like entering “Gotham.” To Grunhard, the contrast to thriving West Berlin was stunning.

“So stark and so drab and just so depressed,” he said.

Also indelible were the memories of the Olympic Stadium and its echoes of the sinister history of Hitler’s Nazis and the 1936 Olympics, but also for the reverberations of American track star Jesse Owens and his four gold medals and, less famously, Missouri’s own Helen Stephens.

(The “Fulton Flash,” an amazing story in herself, won the women’s 100-meter dash and also earned gold on the 4x100 relay team. She rejected direct overtures from Hitler and responded to his Nazi salute with what she called “a good old-fashioned Missouri handshake.”)

That sort of scene, and plenty more the Chiefs took in through the trip as reunification was in its embryonic stages, made for quite a direct introduction to a world beyond the scope of most of the travelers.

But it also was a German introduction to a different world, too.

To a game that promoters there, according to The Star at the time, billed as “one of the main parts of the American way of life such as Coke, chewing gum and Cadillac.”

As Grunhard thought back, he remembered walking around and feeling like people “had no idea what the NFL was and what the Kansas City Chiefs were.” Moreover, traveling among a group of such large men, he even had the sense they were viewed as “kind of a freak show, to be brutally honest.”

During the game, at best two-thirds full including many American servicemen and women, fans didn’t know when to cheer or not cheer. The biggest cheers, he remembered, were for the ball simply being kicked off or punted.

Inauspicious as it might have been, it was part of the very foundation of what we will see this week and Sunday (and through a week later, when the Patriots will play Indianapolis in the same stadium).

A year later, what became NFL Europe, in which Grunhard coached in 2006 with the Cologne Centurions, was launched as the World League of American Football.

By the late 2000s, the NFL International Series had commenced — the Chiefs have played regular-season games in London and Mexico City — and has morphed into now scheduling four international games a year.

Now, Grunhard said, many Germans have gone from not knowing the name of any one player to seeming to know the entire Chiefs roster.

As for where it all goes from here? Hunt, who is on the NFL international committee, is skeptical that there one day will be NFL franchises in Europe.

But he believes the opportunities for branding and marketing and even a form of globalization will be accelerated through this.

And that’s a notion that the Chiefs naturally believe is worth it in the long haul — a haul that the Chiefs helped initiate decades ago.

“We sowed the seeds of American football there,” Peterson said.

Seeds that are sprouting now.