KCUR | By Dylan Lysen
Published February 6, 2025 at 3:00 AM CST
Super Bowl LIX will likely be the last time Missouri bettors will need to visit Kansas to place a bet on the hometown Kansas City Chiefs to win the big game. Sports betting is expected to launch in Missouri later this year.
The Kansas City Chiefs are returning to the Super Bowl for a historic chance to win the league’s first three-peat.
The game also marks a three-peat for the Kansas Lottery, which has offered sports betting throughout the state for all three championship games that feature the local team.
But it may be the last time Kansas will provide gambling services on the biggest sports betting day of the year without competition from its next-door neighbor – the real home of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Missouri is in the process of launching its sports betting operation after voters last fall approved a state constitutional measure that made sports gambling legal. Missouri Gaming Commission officials said they hope sports betting is up and running this summer.
That could mean the Kansas City, Missouri, residents who regularly cross state lines to place bets will no longer need to, which may cause a dip in revenue for Kansas.
Cory Thone, a spokesperson for the Kansas Lottery, said it’s too early to know whether Kansas sports betting revenue will be hurt by Missouri jumping into the action. Still, Thone said the Kansas Lottery is not worried.
“There’s enough people going over the line consistently,” Thone said, “that we may not notice too much of a dip in usage.”
Once it launches, Missouri is expected to outperform Kansas in sports betting revenue. Covers, a sports betting news site, reports that a study commissioned by a group lobbying for legalized sports betting in Missouri predicts the state will generate about $3.4 billion of bets in its first year. That would outpace Kansas, which oversaw $2.5 billion of bets in 2024.
It’s unclear how much Missouri could take away from Kansas. However, Kansas may be spared from a significant drop in revenue because the amount of wagers in the state rises each year. In 2023, the state earned a total revenue of $10 million. In 2024, the yearly revenue jumped to $12.7 million, a 27% increase.
“Sales have been solid. We’ve had a couple months that have been higher than previous months,” Thone said. “Overall, we’re still pacing with our projections.”
The Super Bowl may not even be much of a financial boon for Kansas anyway.
Each year, the Super Bowl is expected to attract more bets. The American Gaming Association estimates that a total of $1.39 billion of bets will be placed on the game this year.
Yet, Super Bowl Sunday has not been a safe bet for the Kansas Lottery. That’s because the local team keeps winning.
In 2023, when the Chiefs won the title, the state made a paltry $1,300 — the lowest amount of revenue of that year. Part of the reason was that the vast majority of those bettors picked their local team to win the Super Bowl, meaning the casinos ended up paying out a lot more than it collected after the Chiefs won. The revenue was also likely small because the casinos had offered many free promotional bets in the first year of operating in Kansas.
A year later, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl again, and the state collected just $305,000 — again the lowest amount of revenue for the year. Kansas may again see February produce the lowest amount of sports revenue for the year if the Chiefs complete their historic three-peat on Sunday.
Conversely, that also means if the Chiefs lose on Sunday, the state will likely see a massive revenue bump.
Thone isn’t betting on that.
“(There are) a lot of bets being made for the Chiefs to win, which is great because all of us here at the Lottery are big Chiefs fans,” Thone said, “but not so great for our bottom line.”
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Dylan Lysen reports on social services and criminal justice for the Kansas News Service. You can email him at dlysen (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
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