When the brilliant James J. Patterson started SportsFan Magazine roughly a decade ago, one of the cornerstones of its foundational ideology was outrage: fans upset about the ethics, ethos and, most importantly, the economics of professional sports in modern times. That led to cover stories about everything from fans suing teams to the art and science of ticket scalping. It also led to a reoccurring theme throughout the magazine's print run, which was how corporations had successfully purchased the fun in all American sports and stored it under lock-and-key in some kind of underground vault.
Advertising and other assorted corporate whoring has crept into every facet of sports, from the way they're presented to the way they're funded to the way they're remembered. Stadiums have sponsors. Highlights have sponsors. Athletes have sponsors, and those sponsors have sponsors. It's a small miracle that other professional sports have somehow avoided the blatant advertising on uniforms and equipment that NASCAR trail-blazed.
A great litmus test about the over-commercialization of sports is the way the game is presented on the radio. Take baseball, for example: the differences between coverage today and, say, 25 years ago are startling. Every single occurrence in games seems sponsored today, from the first pitch to the last moments of a post-game show. Back in the day, sponsorship seemed obvious, folksy and quirky: the local food market sponsoring a home run, or the homer announcer doing a live-read between innings. Today, it's engrained and, in many cases, nearly subliminal.
In the words of one of most popular pieces in the halls of SFM HQ: where's the outrage? Has the complete assimilation of sports by corporate culture caused us to give up the fight? Do we all just accept naming rights, constant sponsorship, and the undeniable ability of corporations to usurp the integrity of our games as unavoidable and irreversible?
I remember, in the not-to-distant past, a fan culture that was outraged over the fact that college bowl games had become de facto commercials for its sponsors instead of distinct experiences for college athletes and fans. Or maybe I'm the only idiot who'd rather tell his grandkids about playing in the Peach Bowl rather than the Chick-fil-A Bowl.
See, it used to be the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, but then the grilled chicken ate the peach. Now we have bowl games that have never been anything but corporate advertising ventures, like the PapaJohns.com Bowl.
Now obviously, the argument for all of this corporate whoring is that it subsidizes college and professional sports. Papa John's helps create a bowl game for deserving college players, and that bowl game raises revenue for the schools and their conferences and the NCAA. ESPN Regional Television, according to Wikipedia, "owns and manages the bowl's operations, sponsorships and marketing."
So everybody wins, right? Well, not always. According to FOX Business News, there have been no less than 19 deals for over $100 million for stadium and arena naming rights over the last decade. A recent story by FBR quoted Jim Grinstead — publisher of Revenues From Sports Venues, "a Nashville-based company that tracks how stadiums and arenas make money" — as saying that "fans do better when those deals are struck because the team has the cash to invest in the players without it coming out of the ticket prices."
"Fans do better?" Players, and their agents, do better. Teams do better, if they're not criminally mismanaged despite their high-priced talent. But fans? Grinstead mentions ticket prices, which is sort of ironic: for all the corporate whoring in professional sports, can you remember an announcement that a team had signed on with a major sponsor at the same time it announced ticket prices would decrease?
Me, neither. But much like the infiltration of commercialization in sports, I guess the continued fleecing of fans is just implicit these days.
Greg Wyshynski is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].
July 4, 2009
Sabre:
The Rose Bowl, brought to you by AT&T, with limited commercial interruption? That moniker as a sop to the history of the game, which usually isn’t very good. PAC speed and finesse usually buries Big Ten lumbering giants. Switch the game to East Lansing a couple of times, or Columbus, and see how the PAC 10 fares.
The FEDEX Orange Bowl in Miami has settled in fine with that sponsor. Hosted the BCS title game won by Florida last year, Gators crawling out from everywhere in Cane Country.
The Miami Dolphins original Joe Robbie Stadium just underwent another name change two weeks ago.
Joe Robbie Stadium, to Pro-Player Stadium, to Dolphin Stadium (where then Fins owner Wayne Hueizinga dropped $300 million on the expensive club level area with the idea it would host weddings, Bar Mitvah’s, parties, etc.).
LOL - he spent $300 million to make the place look great - and went 1-15 with his Dolphins, losing 1/3 of the Dolphins ticket base.
Can you imagine any guy actually suggesting to his future mother-in-law, that their daughter’s wedding take place at a football stadium, in a parking lot in Miami Gardens, a rundown suburb 25-miles from downtown Miami and Miami Beach’s South Beach? Never going to fly, but when you have money to burn, you can throw it away on crazy ideas like that. Heck, the stadium doesn’t even hold HS graduations.
They haven’t got over 63,000 into that 75,000 seat capacity stadium for NFL football since, except for the playoff game last year. Even as the Dolphins rallied to the AFC-East championshipm, that 1/3 paying the extra dollars, who abandoned their season tickets, didn’t return.
Place is now Landshark Stadium, new owner signed a deal two weeks ago with a brewing company owned by Florida’s music god Jimmy Buffet, to rename the stadium. Of course, Jimmy will make two concert appearances in the stadium, and it isn’t built for concert going fun.
BTW, while they are at it, the Miami Dolphins should go ahead and become the first “corporate team” and rename them the Miami Landshark’s. Instead of having the docile “Flipper” with the stupid logo on the helmets, the “Landsharks” sounds a heck of a lot more like a football team name.
Offend the fans or betray them too often (Florida Marlins case in point), and they are capable of staying away in droves.
I don’t really have a problem with corporate sponsorship at the pro or college level. It’s NEW Comiskey Park in Chicago for me, never whatever it is called. Cincinnati is the Great American Ball Park, have no idea what the Giants are calling theirs, the Pirates are PNC (whatever that stands for), and with their fan base, nobody will have to learn what the Mets new park is called. BTW - what is it called - it’s the Mets - who cares.
Wrigley Field and Fenway Park have easily maintained their identity in MLB’s corporate sponsored jungle. The Orioles play in the most beautiful baseball stadium ever constructed, Camden Yards, so some teams haven’t gone the bubble gum, commercial route.
Everyone looked at the numbers NASCAR was putting up, with their boring traveling billboard show (go fast - turn left), heck they have those 650HP cars slowing down to 35mph to enter pit road. Regulation and restrictor plates have taken all the competition and fun out of the stock car circuit. But, they still pull in tv viewers, enough to rival the NFL, and are the biggest draw for live fans anywhere.
Think most fans learn to identify with their teams, not their sponsors. As for lowering ticket prices anyplace, or spending all that extra corporate money on player salaries? Well - they don’t call them the “Club Seats” for nothing……………Sabre