By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
The Kansas City Chiefs play pretty good football.
But the NFL franchise wants to branch out to tell pretty good stories.
Chiefs President, Mark Donovan, says a new venture – Foolish Club Studios – grew out of a request the team got from a production company to track its 2024 season. Donovan says the team had a counter proposal in mind.
“We went back to the folks who did Michael Jordan’s ‘Last Dance’ and said, what if we did it with two parallel paths?” Donovan tells reporters during Chiefs Training Camp in St. Joseph. “One being tracking the season with access we’ve never given before. And then a parallel path of charting the history of the Kansas City Chiefs and Lamar’s (Hunt) impact on sports.”
Donovan acknowledges he wishes the ending of last season would have been different.
“We had to make a decision going into this process that we were going to tell a story. And we were going to hopefully accomplish history, which we did by being the first team ever to be in three straight (Super Bowls) with a chance to win the third in a row. But also tell the story of this franchise,” Donovan says. “I think the way they combined the two is going to be really, really interesting for our avid fans as well as our worldwide fans.”
“The Kingdom,” the official title for the upcoming ESPN Original Series on the Kansas City Chiefs, from ESPN, Disney+, and Skydance Sports set to premiere later this year.
The Chiefs state Foolish Club Studios will create scripted and unscripted programs that extend beyond the football field. It builds on the success last year of the Hallmark Channel production Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.
Foolish Club Studios will operate alongside the club’s existing 65 Toss Power Trap (65TPT) Production group, the in-house production arm of the team.
Donovan says the NFL club simply is taking advantage of opportunities.
“Think about what the NFL has done with the Chiefs and how they’ve increased and gone global. When you look at the first ever worldwide streamed game, it’s Kansas City Chiefs. When you look at this year’s game in São Paulo; the fact that it will be on You Tube worldwide for free,” Donovan says. “It’s an amazing opportunity for the NFL and we’re right in the middle of it. There are a lot of reasons we’re in the middle of it, but, for us, it’s a great opportunity.”
The name Foolish Club Studios is a nod to the Foolish Club, the name the original AFL owners, which included the Chiefs Lamar Hunt, gave themselves when they formed the league in competition with the entrenched NFL.
You can follow Brent on X @GBrentKFEQ