With Stadium Dark, Kansas Athletics Expects Revenue to Fall $16M Short of Expenses in FY 2025

The University of Kansas Athletics board of directors on Friday approved a budget for the ongoing fiscal year 2025, anticipating that revenues for the year — a predicted $122 million — will fall short of expenses by $16 million.

“That’s as expected,” said Pat Kaufman, the athletic department’s chief financial officer, according to a Henry Greenstein at KUsports.com. “We knew this would be a year where we would have to dip into some of our liquidity sources to kind of make it through the year, knowing that when the [renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium] comes on next year and the year after that and starts generating some serious revenues, we’d kind of catch up and move ahead in a great way.”

The department more or less broke even in the 2024 fiscal year , Kaufman said, with a surplus of just $438,000 on the budget it had approved in June 2023 (approximately $127 million).

Per Greenstein, the board did not present or approve its fiscal year 2025 budget at this year's June meeting, Kaufman said, because it wanted to see how several factors played out: the impact of taking football games off campus to Children’s Mercy Park and GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, the new stadium operations partnership with Oak View Group and the recent completion of renovations to Allen Fieldhouse.

The result is a projection of $138 million in expenses for the current fiscal year that ends on June 30, compared to $122 million in revenues.

“This is a very unique year with the stadium dark and really no revenues to speak of generated out of that facility,” Kaufman said, “and the impact that has.”

"So revenues are lower, and meanwhile expenses are higher due to investments in football staffing, deferred maintenance and everything that goes into temporarily relocating to a new stadium: busing, stadium rental costs and so on," Greenstein wrote.

Kaufman said the department will cover the $16 million from a line of credit that it established during the pandemic. It then expects to generate surpluses from the newly renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium that will replenish its resources “over the next two, three, four, five years, and then we’ll start generating unprecedented revenue levels of all kinds.”

KU athletic director Travis Goff again reiterated Friday that the stadium project remains on time and on budget for its 2025 opening when the Jayhawks host Fresno State on Aug. 23.