The Kansas City Chiefs released the first concept renderings of their next home on Wednesday, confirming that the franchise will leave GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium — its home since 1972 — for a $3 billion, fully enclosed venue in Kansas City, Kansas, when the new building opens in 2031.
“Today we are excited to show Chiefs Kingdom a first look at our new home,” chairman and CEO Clark Hunt said in the team’s announcement. “From the beginning, our goal has been to build something that improved the gameday experience for every single fan.” Hunt added that the building “will hold 70,000 fans, it will still be the best place in the world to tailgate, and the whole building will be built for noise.”
That last line is the one that matters most to anyone who has stood through a January afternoon at Arrowhead. The Chiefs say the stadium’s size, shape and roof geometry were modeled by audio engineers specifically to preserve the crowd noise that has defined their homefield advantage for a half-century. The seating bowl is drawn to echo Arrowhead’s, complete with a Drum Deck for ceremonies and the Ring of Honor mounted above the bowl. A translucent ETFE roof will stretch more than 400,000 square feet of paneling over the field, enough to keep military flyovers visible through the enclosure.
The venue is planned for roughly 70,000 seats and more than 20,000 parking spots, with tailgating infrastructure built into the lots rather than treated as an afterthought. Outside, the club is promising a Lamar Hunt statue plaza, a Hall of Honor more than twice its current size, and a team store roughly four times larger than the one at Arrowhead, all anchoring a mixed-use development.
Kansas City-based MANICA was named lead design architect, ending a six-month competition against Populous, with fellow local firm HNTB serving as architect of record and CAA ICON as owner’s representative. “We look forward to working alongside both firms to refine these plans,” team president Mark Donovan said.
The project sits in Wyandotte County, Kansas, near the Chiefs’ planned practice facility and headquarters in Olathe, and is being financed through a public-private partnership. The public share draws on STAR bonds and the Attracting Professional Sports to Kansas Fund, both structured, the team says, to avoid new state taxes; the remainder is privately funded, alongside $1 billion in additional Kansas development. The Chiefs peg the construction-phase impact at $8.2 billion and, once operational, $1.5 billion annually and 8,500 full-time-equivalent jobs.
Wednesday’s renderings are concepts, not blueprints, and five years is a long runway. But the direction is now settled: the sound Kansas City spent decades building at Arrowhead is being engineered to move with the team across the state line.
