A new report finds that the average professional sports team sponsorship deal across seven featured North American markets is nearing $1 million for the highest-earning leagues, a sign that brands are paying more to align themselves with local franchises.
On Wednesday, released its first “State of the Market Marketing Partnerships,” and its research shows that the average team sponsorship deal cost $935,000 in 2023. The average, of course, pulls in a wide range of dollars and locations—for example, a deal in Austin, Texas, goes for less than 40% of what a similar pact would cost in Los Angeles.
The report reviews seven markets across the continent—New York City; L.A.; Chicago; Charlotte, N.C.; Austin; Las Vegas; and Toronto—as well as London and Madrid, two of the biggest sports markets in Europe. The North American cities that are analyzed cover dozens teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS; SponsorUnited suggests that brands are missing out on opportunities to sponsor WNBA and NWSL teams, as attendance and viewership for women’s sports continue to grow.
The selection of cities may appear random, but each city has a unique sponsorship footprint based on the population and industries of note. This is especially the case for Austin, where local businesses are far more prominent sponsors of the city’s MLS franchise, Austin FC, than would be the case in larger cities such as Chicago, L.A. or NYC.
“It’s not seen as uniquely important for a national advertiser to be in that [smaller] market unless it has a certain industry that’s important to them—like Nashville and healthcare,” Bob Lynch, SponsorUnited’s founder and CEO, said during a Zoom interview. “Whereas if you go into Indianapolis or some of these other places, they can have Fifth Third Bank, for instance, to be able to come in and be the exclusive bank of the team because they’re not competing as much with Bank of America as they might be like Boston or L.A. When you are the [major] bank or the grocer in a market, the long-term relationships are much tighter in my opinion than they are in a larger market.”
SponsorUnited’s methodology included observing brand placements in the stadium and during live broadcasts, on team websites and in official team announcements. Counting all those assets instead of the number of deals means that marketers can see the number of placements they can take advantage of and how they could play out in-person and on screen.
Some of the major brands with sponsorships in the tracked markets are Adidas, Verizon, Hyundai, Ford, Toyota, Bud Light, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Ticketmaster and American Express. Each of these brands support more than 100 different sponsorship deals, but the money and impressions are not spread out evenly throughout all markets.
Regardless of market size, brands big and small are currently missing out on opportunities when it comes to women’s sports, specifically with the WNBA and NWSL. The two leagues continue to experience “hockey-stick growth” in ticket sales and TV viewership. As those leagues add more expansion teams, the newer entrants, such as the Golden State Valkyries and Boston’s future NWSL franchise, have more time to pick up lucrative deals before they officially begin play. This differs from the founding clubs and early expansion teams, which had minimal runway to garner support and land lucrative sponsorships before starting play.
“We saw it in MLS where teams that had been around since the founding days, they [launched] almost too early for relevance,” Lynch said, adding that newer clubs such as Inter Miami CF “were able to grab new dollars. … new clubs benefit in a way that the established sort of original clubs might not.
“Sponsorship often trades on relevance. It’s aligning with what’s hot, and my brand aligning the perception of [what’s hot] as much as it is about the delivery of eyeballs.”
The report singled out NJ/NY Gotham FC, the 2023 NWSL champions, as a team with a paltry number of sponsorship deals (eight) compared to their local sporting siblings, making them ripe for partnerships.
“In New York, there’s a saturation of pro sports teams,” Lynch said. “If I’m a NWSL team, and I’m reaching out to a brand, I’m naturally going to get in the door probably at this point a lot easier in some ways than traditional men’s sports because I’m different, I’m relevant.”
(This article has been updated in the first paragraph to clarify that the study covered the highest-earning leagues in seven North American markets.)
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