Patrick Mahomes is the face of the NFL and the ambassador for the league, a role he certainly embraces. Mahomes didn’t necessarily want a reworked contract after getting life-changing money from the Kansas City Chiefs three years ago, yet felt having a restructured deal would not only benefit him and his team.

The players around the league would benefit as well. Mahomes is the barometer, which many organizations will set when discussing contracts with their players.

“I think it’s just kind of a know that you’ve got to keep the bar going, you’ve got to keep it moving,” Mahomes said to reporters Wednesday, via a Chiefs transcript. “I don’t want people to be negotiated against me and so that’s a reason that you do something like I did this last week, just trying to keep the market moving in the right direction, trending in the right direction so not only me but other quarterbacks and other positions can get paid the money that they deserve.”

Mahomes is the second-highest-paid quarterback in the NFL in terms of average annual salary at $52.65 million. He was previously eighth at $45 million, the barometer he set when he rewrote the record books back in 2020 with his contract. Mahomes still has the most total money in a contract at $450 million, and his now second in fully guaranteed money at $210.6 million over the next four seasons.

The deal puts Mahomes back to a position where he is among the highest-paid players in the league, and gives the Chiefs financial flexibility to keep a talented roster around him.

“You get to watch and see what’s going on around the league and find that right spot,” Mahomes said. “And I thought we found a good one in this negotiation that we did that we’ll be able to still keep cap space for other guys to get signed but obviously, I got a little bit more money upfront and then we’ll kind of redo it and renegotiate it whenever we get to that mark that we talked about.

“It’s a special place and a special relationship that I have with the team to be able to trust them to be able to – even when I signed the last contract know that this was going to happen and then probably going to happen again at some point.”

The Chiefs and Mahomes will revisit the contract again in 2026. In the meantime, they can take care of other players with the cap space Mahomes created by being able to restructure the deal. The biggest priority for Mahomes is winning championships.

“I want to make a lot of money, but I also want to win,” Mahomes said. “I think when you look back on teams and players, you look back at how they won and the perception of how they did things, and so that’s what I try to manage and find the right median of getting the money but also winning football games.”