JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

It’s a mystery to me how Chris and Angie Long made their money, but it’s damned impressive that they are using their own money to build an 11,000-seat, $70-million soccer stadium on the south bank of the Missouri River.

Today’s announcement was even more impressive in light of the fact that the Longs announced a few weeks ago that they would be building a $15-million training facility in Riverside for their National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team, which is likely to become a huge success when it moves to the new stadium.

I haven’t paid any attention to the team or news about it, but it certainly snapped me to attention this morning when I read the couple was investing $70 million of their own money into a stadium in Richard L. Berkley Riverfront Park.

Another thing that struck me about the announcement was how it contrasted with KC Royals’ owner John Sherman’s recent launch of a fishing expedition for a downtown baseball stadium. Great idea, he said, but not a word from him about how a downtown stadium would be paid for, by whom or exactly where it might be.

I wrote at the time that taxpayers in most big cities are now wise to the new-stadium scam, which some football and baseball franchise owners have used to get cities to throw millions of taxpayer dollars at new stadiums to kill threats of the home team packing up and moving elsewhere.

Anyway, today’s announcement got me interested in who the Longs are, how they have made their money and who they’re associated with.

Here’s what I found…

:: They own a hedge fund called Palmer Square Capital Management, which has its office in the 1900 building on the northwest corner of State Line road and Shawnee Mission Parkway in Mission Woods. I’ve never quite understood hedge funds, so I looked up the term in Wikipedia. Wiki describes a hedge fund as “a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling leverage and derivatives.” After reading that, I still didn’t understand hedge funds, but I did comprehend the next sentence: “Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing to institutional investors, high net worth individuals and others who are considered sufficiently sophisticated.” What I gleaned from that is it’s not for me.

:: Angie Long grew up in Mission Hills and graduated from Shawnee Mission East. She then went to Princeton University, where, I am presuming, she met Chris. After graduating from Princeton, the Longs worked at JP Morgan Chase, where Angie rose to the rank of managing director by age 29. Chris founded Palmer Square in 2009. He is chairman, and Angie is chief investment officer. Now, just 11 years after the firm was founded, it manages about $18.6 billion in fixed income and credit investments “for a wide array of institutional and high net worth investors,” according to the company’s website.

:: In late 2020, the Longs bought the former FC Kansas City soccer team after it had moved to Utah and gone out of business. The team has played its home games this season at Legends Field in Kansas City, KS, and will play its next two seasons at Children’s Mercy Park, also in Kansas City, KS. The Longs are projecting that the new stadium will be ready for the 2024 season.

:: Obviously pretty sharp operators, the Longs cut in Brittany Matthews, Patrick Mahomes’ fiancee, as a part owner of the team. That was a brilliant marketing move, and it also makes sense on its face because Matthews played soccer in college and professionally for a team in Iceland.

:: The Longs have a daughter — I don’t know how old — and whitepages.com indicates they live in Mission Hills. (In case you didn’t know, Patrick and Brittany live in KCMO, just east of State Line Road, but they’re building a house in Loch Lloyd.)

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Now, while I’m poking a little fun at the hedge fund business, I’m very serious when I say it’s admirable and refreshing that the Longs are using their own money to build the training complex in Riverside and the stadium in KCMO.

You never know what’s going to happen with people who come into big money relatively quickly. Sometimes they go on to become solid civic leaders, and sometimes they go bust. Time will tell if the Longs are flashes in the pan or extraordinary business people and franchise managers.

For now, we should give them the benefit of the doubt and hope the soccer gals flood the net with goals over the next decade or so, before sellout crowds.