Kansas City Chiefs move up in Forbes’ list of world’s most valuable sports franchises

NFL teams abhor ties, but Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt can’t be displeased about sharing a spot on one particular list.

Forbes released it annual list of the richest sport franchises on the planet and the Chiefs were tied for No. 43 with the NBA’s Houston Rockets and soccer team Paris Saint-Germain. All are valued at $2.5 billion.

That’s well behind the top three franchises: Dallas Cowboys ($5.7 billion), the New York Yankees ($5.25 billion) and New York Knicks ($5 billion).

As Fox Sports noted, those three teams haven’t enjoyed great success on the field/court.

“Interestingly, the top three franchises on this list did not win a single championship during the 2010s, with the Yankees being the last to do so when they won the World Series in 2009,” Fox Sports wrote. “This was the last time any of the top three even made it to the championship game or round of their respective sport.”

The Chiefs are slowly inching up the Forbes list each year.

In 2019, they were the 47th-most valuable team ($2.1 billion) and last year the Chiefs were 45th on the list at $2.3 billion.

The Chiefs’ five-year valuation change was calculated at 63%, Forbes reported this year. The magazine said 26 NFL teams are on the list of 50 teams.

Forbes’ Mike Ozanian wrote about the disparity of television deals among U.S. sports leagues.

“The NFL recently licensed a decade of TV rights for $10.3 billion a year starting in 2023, an 80% increase over the current deal,” he wrote. “MLB will get an average of $1.84 billion a year from its national media deals beginning next season, a 19% increase, while the NBA will take in an average of $2.6 billion a year through 2024-25 on its current deal. The NHL, meanwhile, inked media deals that will pay it just $625 million a year beginning with the 2021-22 season and has no teams in the top 50.”

You can read the Forbes story here.