St. Louis Missed Out on Taylor Swift Because Stan Kroenke Sucks

It's been hard not to feel a bit envious of Kansas City lately. It's not just that what was once a much smaller cow town now has a bigger population than St. Louis due to its clever annexation of outlying suburbs and our continued decline. And it's not just that it has a cool-ass streetcar connecting all the neighborhoods near downtown while we have the shitty Loop trolley that goes nowhere very slowly.

No, it's also that one of the biggest pop stars in the world is now hanging out in Kansas City thanks to her nascent love affair with one of its biggest NFL stars — and that dose of star power is sorely lacking in St.  Louis these days.

Can you imagine Taylor Swift hanging out at Vicia or paparazzi lying in wait outside the new 21C Hotel? That could have been us! That should have been us! We just, well, lack an NFL team. There's not a man here for Taylor to date.

And, it turns out, even when we had an NFL team, it was so shittily run we could never have landed Kelce, and therefore Swift.

As evidence, let us point to an older clip of Kelce talking that has garnered some attention online in recent days. It shows him speaking about when he first learned he was going to be drafted by the Chiefs.

"I finally get a call," Kelce says, "and it's a Missouri area code. In my head I'm like, 'St. Louis?!??! Come on! I don't even want to answer this! I don't ... like, St. Louis? Oh God."

Travis Kelce did NOT want to play for the St. Louis Rams lmao pic.twitter.com/guQzruuiq3

— Ryan (@The_Ryan_Shull) October 4, 2023

Now, you could take this as yet another insult to a city that doesn't deserve it (even if, sometimes, we kind of do deserve it). But it's important to remember the era Kelce was referring to. He was drafted by Kansas City in 2013. That was squarely in the midst of the years that one Enos Stanley Kroenke was systematically running St. Louis' NFL franchise into the ground, all with the dastardly plan of shitting on us on the way out the door to the more lucrative (and yet far less football-obsessed) market of Los Angeles Inglewood.

How do we know Travis Kelce didn't dread St. Louis the screwed-up city and instead dreaded the Kroenke-owned Rams? Simple! Travis Kelce is from Cleveland, and as any Clevelander could tell you, Cleveland is basically St. Louis with worse architecture, worse weather and a worse food scene. No Clevelander could be snobbish about St. Louis. They just couldn't.

So, it's all Kroenke. And so he remains one major reason we can't have nice things: He screwed up our NFL prospects so badly, now we can't get the good PR bump that comes from semi-regular Taylor Swift visits, at least until the inevitable breakup-turned-hit-song about how terrible that particular choice in men was.

We could have been a contender. Instead, we're envious of a city we once dismissed entirely.

At least we're killing them in soccer?



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