Naming rights can be a frothy proposition
Next month marks the fifth anniversary of one of my favorite sports business milestones of the past decade.
I’m sure you all remember vividly the late September day when the fledgling South East Hockey League announced that its Winston-Salem (N.C.) franchise would be named the Moosehead, following a marketing pact that the team had arranged with the Canadian beer maker.
The team's jersey was to sport the Moosehead brand's green, gold and red colors along with the same moose head found on bottles. The Moosehead brand had all but disappeared in the U.S., after many years of being considered a premium import. Team owner John Baker said his club was to run on a low six-figure budget, and the sponsorship was going to make up a double-digit portion of his revenue. "We were going to let the fans name the team, but there's no money in that," Baker said.
But there is money in team naming rights, relatively speaking. Nearly every minor league hockey and football team in the U.S. and Canada plays in a municipally owned arena, meaning their revenue streams are usually shared. The majority of minor league ballparks are also publicly owned. A team naming-rights deal can be structured so that the majority of the payments are based on a logo’s uniform presence — which the team controls — rather than a dasherboard or outfield wall that the landlord owns.
In the U.S. we have the MLS Red Bulls. Australia has the National Basketball League Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles and the National Rugby League North Queensland Toyota Cowboys.
It’s surprising that minor league teams, especially independent league clubs, with their low budgets and thin margins, haven’t signed such a deal.
A cry-in-your-beer postnote: Fans didn’t even have time to catch a buzz from the Moosehead deal, as the brewer changed its overall sports marketing
strategy just as the season began.
