A while back, we did a Freakonomics Radio program asking why the NFL hasn’t (yet) put advertising on its players’ jerseys. One person we spoke with was Michael Neuman, then of Amplify Sports and Entertainment and now of Horizon Media. Neuman and Horizon have just released a report that tries to put a firm dollar figure on jersey sponsorship. SportsBusiness Journal has the writeup:
The four big stick-and-ball leagues are leaving a total of more than $370 million on the table annually by not selling jersey advertising, according to new research from Horizon Media.
The NFL, with its unrivaled ratings and concomitantly higher ad rates, topped the list for jersey valuations at nearly $231 million, or 62 percent of all potential big four jersey ad sales. However, the nature of football – with players more crowded together and with less static time facing the camera – means that the NFL offers the least of what the study terms “detections” among the four leagues, with 28,560 calculated over the course of a season. Baseball, meanwhile, with its typical center-field and behind-the-catcher camera angles, scored more than 314,000 detection opportunities.
The total jersey valuation for MLB teams came in at more than $101 million. The NBA total was $31 million, and the NHL at $8 million, according to the report.
The article covers some of the complications that we addressed in the podcast as well — for instance:
“If I’m an owner, I’m saying that’s my real estate. And if I’m a network with league rights and I can’t sell it, then I’m paying less for those rights,” said Chris Weil, CEO of marketing agency Momentum Worldwide, whose client list includes heavy sports spenders like Coca-Cola and American Express. “You also might run into a problem if you ask a player to take a pay cut, as they are in the current [NFL] labor negotiations, and then sell space on what a player might consider his jersey.”
By the way: next week, our Freakonomics Radio podcast and Marketplace segment will both explore the hidden side(s) of those NFL labor negotiations. You’ll hear from a variety of the principals involved, ranging from the league to the teams to the players’ union to the players themselves.
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Interesting comparison of cultures. In Australia, in all the football codes and in one day cricket, there is advertising on jumpers, shorts and on the grass. Everything from road safety to retirement funds to well known US brands of take away food. Even the stumps and sight screens in cricket and goal posts in football have advertising on them. It’s all pretty ho-hum.
Can we solve the NFL impasse this way? The players from each team split whatever money they get from advertisements on the jerseys?
Try asking grown men who play a kid’s game for a fortune to go back to wearing jerseys with ads on them like they did in the peewee leagues, see what happens.
Soccer teams worldwide have had advertising on their uniforms for years. Most teams have an exclusive relationship with a single sponsor, with contracts usually running several years. However, unlike American sports leagues, there is no collective element to international soccer….each club is generally free to do as it wishes. FC Barcelona for years refused to carry advertising on its uniforms before recently relenting and developing a relationship with UNICEF.
Professor Dubner,
Unmentioned and critically important to this discussion is the factor international markets play in U.S. sports today.
I’m not sure what Horizon’s data set parameters are, however, for a sport like basketball where the largest maket is China (not the U.S.), it seems to be a strange and glaring ommison that revenue from overseas isn’t so much as even awknowledged.
Perhaps you should explore why Soccer hasn’t evolved stoppages to allow for television network ads? In any rational world if someone offered hundreds of millions of dollars to stop play every so often to show some ads the league’s first response would be “how long and how often”.
I feel that if the nfl was to creat more modern quality jerseys that they would sell more. The fact that most teams have had the same jerseys for years at a time, some never changing at all. Other professional sports are constantly making uniform modifications and producing new logos and such. This is why other leagues make more money for there merchandise. Fans attract items that appeal to the eyes.
The National Facebook leage should put advirtisements on there jerseys for sure. there missing out on tons of profit. they could seriously benefit from the money