After winning back-to-back Super Bowls in 2023 and 2024, The Kansas City Chiefs launched Foolish Club Studios last year to capitalize on the NFL team’s meteoric rise and break into the game of original scripted and unscripted content.
Foolish Club Studios is run by Gelsomina Picariello, who doubles as head of studio & development and the Chiefs’ senior director of media programming and development.
Growing up in New Jersey as the daughter of a soccer coach, Picareillo had a passion for both sports and storytelling at a young age. Prior to attending college at Montclair State University, she had the opportunity to work as a production assistant at ESPN for the World Cup in 2010 and would spend her summer and winter breaks in Bristol, Conn. After graduating, she worked as a sports journalist for ABC 7 and in various producer roles at ESPN. She would leave the network in 2018 to get her Master’s in business strategy and branding from New York City’s School of Visual Arts.
By 2022, Picariello decided to return to the sports industry on the team side and saw a LinkedIn job post from the Kansas City Chiefs’ chief marketing officer Laura Klug, who would become her boss.
“I thought the Chiefs would be a really interesting place to work. I’d never been to Kansas City,” she told TheWrap’s Office With a View. “I remember going to the front offices and talking to a few of the executives and my leadership team and they started out with their dream and ambition of becoming the world’s team. And I was like, ‘Well, I just came from a worldwide sports entertainment network, I can probably help build the world’s team.’
“They really wanted to start thinking like a media company. So it was just the perfect marriage of ‘I know where I want to go and I can help build this’.”
After four seasons with the NFL team, Picariellio spearheaded the launch of Foolish Club Studios in 2025. The name comes from Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt and the owners of the American Football League, who referred to themselves as The Foolish Club for taking on the NFL. Foolish Club Studios’ first project, which was led by Picariello, was Hallmark’s “Holiday Touchdown: A Chief’s Love Story.” At the same time, Foolish developed the Disney+ docuseries “The Kingdom,” which released in August.
Looking ahead, Foolish will expand beyond Chiefs-focused programming with a documentary about a team of Kansas City-based teen refugees as they prepare for the USA Cup, the largest international soccer tournament in the Western Hemisphere, in collaboration with Wavelength Productions and Trevor Noah’s Zero Day Productions. But longer-term, Picariello says that Foolish aspires to produce a scripted theatrical release.
“We’re going to tell stories of foolish dreamers,” she said. “When you think of it through that lens, it starts opening up your horizons that it’s more than just football and the Chiefs.”
Read on for the rest of TheWrap’s conversation with Picariello below.
How did the idea to launch Foolish Club Studios come about?
It’s been in the works for about three years. But what really propelled it and launched it was our collaboration with Hallmark.
We were fortunate enough to produce the first ever NFL Hallmark movie called “Holiday Touchdown: A Chief’s Love Story” and that was my project last year. I got to work directly with Hallmark programming and really show a sports team what it means to produce a project of that caliber. And I remember when we were in production, we filmed at Arrowhead in Kansas City, and there was like 300 people and PAs and people running. The team was like, ‘this is like a game day but on steroids.’ It takes a lot of people, but we were really fortunate to work with Hallmark.
When it landed and became the No. 1 cable movie of the year in 2024, I think it opened a lot of our leadership that was already trusting me with this vision to say, “Let’s go further.” And simultaneously we were also in development for what became ‘The Kingdom.’
How did that opportunity to collaborate with Disney on The Kingdom come about?
We were in a fortunate position that the Chiefs just came off of winning a back to back Super Bowl Championship around the May to June timeframe of 2024. It was very serendipitous. Our ownership group was getting calls from different producers saying, “we want to follow your family because you might be the first to ever three peat.” Our head coach Andy Reid was getting calls that a producer wanted to follow him. We were getting called at the front office, our quarterback Patrick Mahomes was getting calls.
To our president Mark Donovan’s credit, he was like “we can’t have four or five different camera crews. Access is very limited.” We also don’t want four or five narratives out there, because everyone will tell their own story. If we were going to give access and really do this at a global level, we needed to make sure that the story wasn’t dependent on the outcome of the field, because we don’t have control over that.
So [Mark, Laura and I] worked together to present the right creative partners. Coming from my ESPN days and knowing Connor Schell and what he’s been creating at Words + Pictures, that was my first call. It ended up being that Connor is a huge Chiefs fan from Kansas City, so him understanding the family and team and having the love for it just helped access and the doors open up. It took a lot of parties to make that happen, but I’m really proud of what we were able to produce and accomplish, especially as our first major project.
It took about 14 months to produce, from principal photography to post to working with all of the PR and marketing teams. For me, it will always be a career highlight, because I really got to take that from inception to completion. It’s the first time that I was there day in and day out, making sure that it was getting done in collaboration with all of our partners.
What were some of the major lessons you’ve learned over the course of your career that have helped you in your current role?
Be coachable. In this industry, especially where it’s changing all the time, it’s evolving and you’re moving with your audiences. The second is staying curious. If you want to know more about people and tell better stories, there’s no better way than asking great questions and staying curious. The last is it takes a lot of people to bring the types of projects we produce to life, so being able constantly collaborate with different people that might not think like you and bring different perspectives.
What advice do you have for young people looking to break into the industry or for professionals who are looking to advance in their careers?
Everyone has their own path and it’s not linear. But I also think there’s no greater time than now. If you have a story and a message to tell, if you can do that in 30 or 60 seconds, you can build a following on social media. It’s giving a microphone and a platform to people, filmmakers and storytellers who maybe would have never had that. Whether it’s starting an Instagram or a YouTube channel, you can quickly tell if a person has the vision and creativity to put a story together. So if you want to break in, I would say if you can show that you can package something, you understand what audiences want and they’re resonating with you and you’re able to create an audience, that’s the recipe for greatness that I look for.
If you’re already in the industry, it’s about not being shy. There’s so many cold emails and outreach you have to do until you get that one yes. Every no is one step closer to yes. Once you get to yes, that’s actually when the real work starts, because you want to be able to present your portfolio or reel. If you don’t have that, it’s being able to show your creativity and your storytelling and being able to back that in a way that anyone in a room would be like, “I don’t just want her, I need her on my team.” So making sure that you’re relentless in your pursuit and once you get there, being able to show up and show out.
Do you think more sports teams will launch their own production studios in the years ahead?
My perspective there is that where it makes sense for sports teams to invest, I recommend taking control of your narrative. If not, you’re going to have others that can do it great and all are doing it great, but I think it limits your reach and the audiences you can reach.
If we didn’t act the way we did, we probably wouldn’t be the first NFL team to create a Hallmark movie and reach those audiences. And when you think of mothers and daughters and the families that gather around for Christmas, I would say we would have never been in those conversations or in those spaces. So my recommendation is to do it if you’re a sports team and you have the capabilities and you want to invest in it.
What do you make of streamers’ increased focus on live event programming, including sports?
I feel like that’s only going to continue to expand. What live events are doing for most platforms is creating demand and frequency. We’ve had conversations with some organizations — I won’t mention names — that are looking for live experiences because they want to be in the events business and because of how much people are actually going to events now.
From a Chiefs perspective, I would say that’s league driven and we will continue to create the best entertainment experiences for our fans that come to Arrowhead, the loudest stadium in the world. My job is actually thinking about reaching fans nationally and globally. We only have 70,000 tickets and we only have about eight, nine home games, so when you think of what you’re able to do, how many people you can reach and how many people will actually travel into Kansas City to go to a game, you’re very limited. So you’re always going to have a mixed model and you have to balance that for your own company and programming slate.
What do you make of the rise of sports-focused creators and short-form content?
There’s always going to be different ways that people consume content. From a creator standpoint, there is an audience for almost everything. If that’s how people are choosing to consume their information, I think that’s a great platform to give someone that maybe would have never had the access or opportunity to become a sports analyst, because that’s a very different career path. So it’s giving people the opportunity and platform to build themselves and build an audience.
With everything comes the challenges of how do we make sure we put information out there that is credible and sourced and we’re fact checking? Now everyone has a megaphone. Before, there were very limited ways that you would get information and there’s journalism and rigorous ways that stories would get approved. So there’s going to be the balance of, ‘is this for entertainment or this is actually for information?’ I do think it’s a great way to find new talent, but there’s also the balance of making sure we’re continuing to nurture, grow and protect our craft.
What are some of the challenges you anticipate and goals you hope to accomplish as you look to expand Foolish Club Studios?
As we build the slate, we have a lot of projects in development right now. The one thing for me that I probably have to be a little more intentional about is we can’t only rely on the success of the team or the Chiefs. We have to continue to build our slate and an identity that’s a little broader than that while also staying true to the ethos of being a foolish dreamer.
Where I spend a lot of my time is being really intentional with our creative partners. We don’t have the in-house capabilities, so that’s why we have to be really intentional with who we’re partnering with. For us, we always go back to does it feel authentic and real and is it bringing something bigger to impacting people’s lives and inspiring them to pursue something greater than themselves? I think we’ll have stories, hopefully forever, to tell and keep sharing with the world.
We’re excited about being the studio that is the go-to studio for Heartland stories. Whether you’re in sports or in fashion, there is an ethos and value of where we are in the Midwest. We also want to be the NFL team that owns Christmas. This was the third Christmas the Chiefs played on Christmas Day and we’re really proud of that. So we’re really excited about continuing that. We have the first ever Hallmark movie and we’re aggressively pursuing conversations with Netflix and others, who are also spending a lot of time on their Christmas programming. We don’t have anything with Netflix right now, but we’re continuing conversations there.
The aspiration and goal that we’re pursuing aggressively is a scripted theatrical for a global release. That’s something that we’re really excited about, especially as flag football takes off and as football is part of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. We think there’s a lot of rich territory there to be a pioneer in that space.
How much has Taylor Swift’s impact on the Chiefs affected Foolish Club Studios?
The biggest impact it’s had is that now about 57% of our fans and audiences are female. So when I started about three and a half years ago, we were about 49% female, which was pretty great. I feel like almost a 50-50 split.
From a league and Chiefs standpoint, it’s really important for me to continue to cater to those audiences that have said, “Hey, I am a Chiefs fan,” and how do we make them stay within our ecosystem and serve up programming and content that gets them excited about being part of Chiefs Kingdom? There’s opportunities but it’s really how we approach and execute it that will make us stand out and continue to drive fandom and viewership.
Are there any specific projects with Swift in the works?
No, but if she calls, we’re always here.
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