Add ads to your favorite team's jerseys
North American teams will have advertising logos on their uniforms soon and nobody will care.
TWO predictions:
One, the day is coming, and soon, where North American teams will have advertising logos on their uniforms.
And, two, nobody will care.
Every sport is on a full-time mission to squeeze every buck it can out of the business. I mean, it has gotten to the point where the NFL is apparently considering moving the annual Super Bowl media day from Tuesday morning/afternoon to Monday night in primetime on the East Coast - apparently on the theory that if people will watch three days worth of draft coverage, and endless repetitions of players performing the shuttle run at the combine, they'll watch anything.
Anyway, the uniforms. There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when we all thought it would be somehow impure. For everyone who grew up on sports in the '60s and '70s, there was a certain aesthetic that was seen as modern and correct: clean lines, geometric precision, no garish advertising to cheapen the experience. It wasn't like that in the '40s and '50s, when outfield walls in baseball were plastered by signage, but times and tastes had changed and clean and uncluttered was the preference as television turned sports into SPORTS!
Now, though, not so much. They put advertising on the Green Monster at Fenway and it didn't fall down. Watch an old hockey video from the days before there was advertising on the boards and it looks sterile and, well, odd. Nobody thinks twice about ads slapped on anything, but the last bastion in North America is the players' uniforms, and that is probably about to change, too - that is, if the numbers in an espn.com story are true.
The numbers: Manchester United, the top team in the English Premier League, will bring in $195 million a year from its uniform advertising ($117 million from adidas, the manufactuer, and nearly $80 million from Chevrolet, the sponsor). As another example, Manchester City is fifth in the Premier League with uniform revenues of $81 million per year.
It's too much money to ignore any longer. It's coming - NBA commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged as much - and the only question is how soon. After which, the search for the next revenue stream will begin.