To this day, there is a persistent and very wide-reaching opinion that the Second Golden Age Royals of the mid-2010s ended because a small market team like Kansas City could never keep up with the big market teams, and that their eventual fall from grace was just how these things happen, especially with the trades for Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto.
This is flatly untrue.
First, we have seen teams succeed with far less financial resources than the Royals did. In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays made the World Series with the fourth-lowest payroll in baseball, a payroll only three fifths the median payroll at the time.