In 1959, a 26-year-old Texan, frustrated by his unsuccessful attempts to gain a pro football franchise in the National Football League, embarked on an alternate course that was to drastically change the face of pro football forever. The young man was Lamar Hunt, who founded the American Football League that season and served as the league's first president when its eight new teams began play in 1960. Hunt's own team, the Dallas Texans, was located in his hometown where he would face direct competition from the NFL's newest expansion team, the Dallas Cowboys. In spite of this opposition from the established NFL, the Texans quickly made their mark as one of the new league's strongest teams. In their third season in 1962, they won the AFL championship with a 20-17 win over the Houston Oilers in a 77-minute, 54-second, two-overtime game, the longest pro football game ever played up to that time.

Although the Texans fared well in Dallas, Hunt decided that, for the good of the league, it would be best to move his franchise to Kansas City in 1963. There the team was renamed the Chiefs and it continued to enjoy the success the team had experienced in Dallas. The Chiefs won a second AFL title in 1966 and was the first team to represent the AFL in Super Bowl competition.

When they first moved to Kansas City, the Chiefs played in 49,002-seat Municipal Stadium. But in 1972, they moved into their current home, 78,097-seat Arrowhead Stadium, considered to be one of the worlds finest.

The Chiefs won the AFC Western Division title in 1971, but their Christmas Day double-overtime playoff loss to Miami that year marked their last playoff appearance until the 1986 Chiefs captured a wild-card playoff berth. The Chiefs were perennial playoff contenders under coach Marty Schottenheimer from 1989-1998. In 2001, former Philadelphia Eagles and St. Louis Rams head coach Dick Vermeil took over the reins as Chiefs head coach. All of Kansas Cities early success has carried over after all of these years and made Kansas City Chiefs football tickets a popular product.