Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce is once again weighing his future with the organization as retirement looms as a possibility. But while he evaluates what comes next in his career, he’s also dealing with a bit of controversy regarding his nonprofit.
Just last month, Kelce was named the Kansas City Chiefs’ club recipient of the 2025 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award, an honor recognizing his charitable work through the Eighty-Seven and Running Foundation. Since then, however, the foundation has found itself under intense scrutiny.
Based on federal tax documents reviewed by the Arizona Republic during a recent investigation into the charity, Kelce’s nonprofit reported to the IRS that only 41 cents of every dollar raised from 2021 through 2024 went toward charitable causes.
Rather than being directed straight to charitable programs, the Arizona Republic’s investigation revealed that the Eighty-Seven and Running Foundation paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to A&A Management Group, a firm co-founded by Kelce’s longtime business managers, brothers Aaron and André Eanes.
The report also noted governance concerns, finding that the foundation lacked an official president, secretary, or treasurer and had only two board members—short of the minimum three required to meet standard governance guidelines.
Needless to say, experts were not exactly thrilled about these findings, as one expert did not hold back in criticizing Kelce.
“It appears to function more as an extension of the management company versus as an independent public charity,” said Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch, an independent charity watchdog organization that examined the nonprofit’s filings for The Arizona Republic. “That’s not how charities work. It’s wrong.”
In response to these findings, Aaron Eanes pushed back, saying the figures stemmed from filing errors and that steps are being taken to improve the foundation’s governance structure.
Eanes told the Arizona Republic that expenses tied to charitable initiatives were “mistakenly reported under management rather than allocated adequately to program services.” Because of that, he argued, the publicly available records fail to give an accurate “indication of where the resources were truly directed.”
“We have since corrected this: Management fees decreased significantly in 2024 and dropped to zero in 2025,” Eanes said.
“Looking ahead, we are expanding our board of directors, bringing on advisers with nonprofit expertise, and restructuring our reporting processes to better reflect our actual program work. We are dedicated to ensuring this foundation operates at the highest standards,” he added.
Regardless of whether the discrepancies were the result of mistakes, the existing figures still show that only 56 cents of every dollar spent has gone toward charitable efforts since the nonprofit’s inception.
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