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The Kansas City Chiefs are getting into the movie business. Current details are being kept under wraps, but the project has nothing to do with football. It’s an unusual move for a professional sports franchise. But for the Chiefs, it represents the next step in a strategy that began with a two-minute playoff hype video and has since evolved into the team’s own production company.
Foolish Club Studios, which was recently signed by United Talent Agency, has spent the past two years developing scripted and unscripted short- and long-form programming for the Chiefs. Now, after researching the entertainment industry and consulting with Hollywood executives, including Skydance Sports head of film and TV Jason Reed, Foolish Club is taking a financial stake in that film, along with several other high-profile projects.
“Whether you’re a brand like us or a distributor, everyone is looking for an audience,” says Chiefs EVP and CMO Lara Krug. “This allows for us to be in a lot more places.”
The idea for a studio grew out of a promo the Chiefs made in 2024. Before their wild-card matchup against the Miami Dolphins, the team created a short Hallmark movie parody about a woman who falls for a Chiefs fan, heavily inspired by the real-life romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
Chiefs president Mark Donovan had one goal for the video: “I want Hallmark to either be really mad because it’s too much like Hallmark and they’re offended,” he recalls to Front Office Sports, “or, ideally, they call us and say, ‘Hey, wait a second, we should talk.’” Ten months later, the two sides collaborated on a feature-length release: Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, which became the No. 1 cable movie of 2024, inspiring the jump into entertainment production.
As streaming and digital platforms multiply, teams and leagues are increasingly operating like year-round entertainment companies. The opportunity is rooted in something sports organizations already possess: world-class intellectual property, recognizable talent, built-in audiences, and passionate communities.
Trying Something New
Not every team has the same ambitions as the Chiefs, but reaching new demographics—especially Gen Z and female fans—remains a shared destination.
Manchester City has been leveraging its global brand since 2024, producing high-end documentaries on its own streaming subscription service. The New York Yankees have leaned on YES Network, their TV and streaming home, to develop HexClad Presents: Bronx Buds, a kid-focused animated baseball series that airs Saturday mornings, along with a documentary about their ballpark.
The Chicago Cubs have taken the biggest swing into a newer market. In the spring, their social department wanted to leverage their brand within fervent TikTok subcommunities like #BookTok and #RomanceTok. They began to brainstorm a “microdrama” (an increasingly popular format for young women) that could connect baseball with the interests of fans who might not be there for the game itself.
They landed on “Nine Innings to Love,” a 17-part scripted series about an aspiring romance writer who enjoys a day (and eventually finds love) in the Wrigley Field bleachers, created exclusively for the team’s TikTok channel. The project, which debuted Sept. 4, began with a script that was workshopped with young women in the marketing group, then filmed over several days with local actors in late May and early June (sometimes during live games) using the Cubs’ in-house production group and Chicago-based Coyote Sun Productions.
In just a few weeks, the series “exceeded expectations in terms of visibility and resonance with the right audiences on the right platform,” says Jennifer Martindale, the team’s EVP of marketing and communications. It racked up more than one million collective views and epitomized MLB’s interest in developing content “beyond standard social programming,” according to Uzma Rawn Dowler, MLB’s CMO and SVP of global corporate partnerships.
Martindale even notes the Cubs have already started receiving questions from executives at other teams who are curious about how “Nine Innings to Love” came together. “A fan who might not have ever visited Wrigley or gone to a Cubs game watches a series like that and then wants to go visit the ballpark,” Dowler says. “We’ll take that all day, every day, if it gets them to the ballpark.”
No ‘Propaganda’
Leagues are thinking bigger, too. MLB Studios, the league’s production arm, has collaborated with Hollywood on a few narrative baseball projects due next year—including an Emma Stone–led rom-com and a Netflix series about the Yankees—in addition to several in-house documentaries.
Most dramatically, the NFL partnered with Skydance Sports earlier this year to make an active investment in narrative storytelling around the game. The collaboration has already produced roughly 20 scripted and unscripted projects, including upcoming fall movies and series such as Madden, Mr. Irrelevant, and The Land, a new Hulu show centered on a fictional family inside the Cleveland Browns’ front office.
“We work so closely with the league that we have a deeper understanding of the game, the fans, and the priorities of the owners and the teams,” Skydance head Reed says. “It allows us to craft an overall content strategy as opposed to being reactive to what’s coming in from outside.”
Until the partnership, Reed describes the relationship between the league and outside producers as “disorganized,” lacking leadership and strategy around the kinds of scripts and filmmakers being green-lit. That’s why the NFL, though it initially thought about building its own content studio, opted to lean in to Skydance’s expertise when it comes to finding the right stories and talent. “One of the keys is working with great filmmakers and storytellers,” Reed says. “If you don’t give them the freedom to tell stories the way they want and need to tell them, then you’re making propaganda.”
Still, the studio is careful about how it portrays some of the league’s more difficult realities, including drug use, injuries, and domestic violence, aiming to depict them honestly without making them the focus. “We’re not here to whitewash anything. We’re here to tell real human stories. And real humans face a lot of challenges,” Reed says. “But we would be more likely to focus on the version of that story that’s inspirational to the audience or that helps them understand the mindset.”
Consider The Land, set for release later this year, which stars Christopher Meloni, Mandy Moore, and William H. Macy and is modeled loosely on the Haslam family. Showrunner Dan Fogelman, creator of This Is Us and Paradise, brought in NFL players as consultants to make sure the football details rang true, then turned to NFL Films camera operators to capture the games with the feel of a documentary.
“We’re not out there looking to be salacious,” Fogelman told the Los Angeles Times in the spring. “We’re not trying to do ripped-from-the-headlines, crazy, exaggerated versions of reality. We want things that really happen, done accurately and in a cinematic way.”
Skydance and the NFL hope the show will “mint Browns fans” and establish more interest in an otherwise woeful franchise. “I believe that it really connects you emotionally to them,” Reed says.
The hope for all these ventures is that something will resonate to reach new demographics. But some of the swings are certainly bigger than others. The Chiefs, specifically by investing in films without any team connection, are especially testing how far that business can stretch. “There wasn’t a blueprint,” Krug, the team’s CMO, says. “I think we’re now building the blueprint.”
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