Hating the Kingdom: Sports fans will always hate on winning teams

No sports team has gotten more hate than the Kansas City Chiefs over the past 20 weeks. 

Every Instagram post related to the Chiefs or their players has a comment section full of hate for no reason. Whenever a Chiefs highlight is posted, fans flood the comment section with comments downplaying what happened. We didn’t do anything wrong, look at the Buffalo Bills. Their fans threw snowballs at Chiefs after Buffalo’s loss in the Divisional Round, but the Bills and their fans got no hate for this.

The Chiefs don’t deserve their online hate. There is no proof that the Chiefs have ever cheated, unlike the Houston Astros and New England Patriots. And while the fans can be crazy, they’re not crazy enough to be the sole reason for all of the animosity the team gets. Some of the hate could come from Patrick Mahomes’ family or just the team’s total dominance over the past six years.

You could point to Patrick’s brother and TikTok star Jackson Mahomes as the reason the Chiefs are so despised. Jackson gets hate from NFL fans due to how much attention he tries to get for himself. He has disrespected a deceased NFL player and danced in the background of Patrick’s Super Bowl interview for attention which is immature and obnoxious, but he’s not even part of the team and shouldn’t be a reason for haters online to bandwagon against the whole franchise.

It’s also unfair for Chiefs enmity to start with Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce’s girlfriend.

Many fans complain about how often Taylor Swift appears on screen. While the pregame segment before a week four game between the Chiefs and the Jets where NFL announcers compared parts of the game to Taylor Swift songs was painful to sit through, fans are overreacting. The New York Times measured how much screen time Taylor Swift gets, and they found that she gets about 25 seconds of screen time every game. That’s less than 0.003 percent of each game. So, any fan who hates the Chiefs because of Taylor Swift doesn’t hate the Chiefs, they hate Taylor Swift.

Another thing you could point to as a reason for the animosity is the team’s on-field behavior. In the AFC Championship game, Travis Kelce was constantly fighting with Raven’s players and was never penalized for pushing Ravens players, even though he should’ve been. 

Also, many NFL fans didn’t like how Patrick Mahomes reacted when Kadarius Toney was penalized for being offsides. Honestly, Mahomes overreacted, but he’s not the only player to do this. Tom Brady was a huge crybaby when he played, throwing iPads into the ground whenever things didn’t go his way on the sideline. But no one disliked the Patriots just because Tom Brady wasn’t a great sport, it’s the same for the Chiefs.

The only reason to hate the Chiefs is because they are simply too dominant. The Chiefs have had the best winning percentage of any major American sports team in the last 10 years according to an Instagram post from All Sports Culture. Since Mahomes became the starter the Chiefs have won two Super Bowls and are playing in a third in just a few days. They’ve been in every AFC Championship game since then and they have won four of six. 

Fans often get bored of seeing the same team playing in big games every year which can lead to fans disliking that team.

During their run, the Chiefs have crushed the souls of many opposing fans, especially Bills fans. It’s the same reason that people loathed the Patriots during their six Super Bowl win streak. They were unbeatable for 18 years, no matter what happened the Patriots were always an extremely difficult team to beat. The Chiefs are on the same trajectory as the Patriots.

I still remember watching Tom Brady drive the Patriots down the field against the Chiefs in overtime during the 2018 AFC Championship game. It was crushing, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to watch that for 18 years. But, I can still sort of imagine what it’s like for fans to watch Mahomes beat them again and again.

There are examples of this from other sports as well, the Golden State Warriors in the NBA won three NBA Finals in four years and won another in 2022. They were despised by millions of NBA fans due to their success. The Yankees in the MLB are despised by everyone who isn’t a Yankee’s fan because of their franchise’s history of endless success. The same can be said for any sports team that was ever dominant in any sport. 

Sports fans simply love to hate on success.