Is There Room for Sports to Get Even More Commercialized? – The Atlantic

While Sutton predicts that fans won’t be bothered by another instance of sponsorship in sports, the true test of jersey advertisements will be when teams with iconic, minimalist uniforms, such as the Lakers or the Celtics, announce sponsorship deals. “Those are the ones that are going to draw attention, because those are the fabric of American sport,” Sutton says, adding, “If there’s going to be a large outcry, it’s going to be about the New York Yankees.”

So if jerseys will likely make way for sponsors, what will be next? Sutton, who calls jerseys “the last untapped frontier of revenue in U.S. sports,” says that this is the end of the line. “If you put it on the uniform, the only thing left is the skin,” he says. (This is not a cheeky comment: The NBA has actually established the precedent—necessitated by a forehead tattoo planned, but not undertaken, years ago by the Chicago Bulls star Dennis Rodman—that for the purposes of regulation, a player’s skin is part of his uniform.)

Sutton may well be correct that after jerseys, there’s nowhere else to go, and he certainly knows a lot more about sports marketing than I do. But I would be surprised, from what I know about capitalism, if marketers ran out of clever ways to make their way into fans’ lives.

Last month, I wrote about the Philippine Basketball Association, a league whose commercialism makes American sports sponsorships look like they’re stuck back in the era of Ty Cobb and the Chalmers Motor Company. In the PBA, teams are owned by corporations and are used as marketing vehicles for their owners’ products, which leads to some dazzlingly strange team names: Over the years, one franchise has gone by, among other things, the Purefoods Hotdogs, the Purefoods Tender Juicy Hotdogs, and the Purefoods Corned Beef Cowboys.

Given that there is an MLS team named the Red Bulls, I can’t help but wonder if team names represent another “untapped frontier.” Sutton shot that theory down, arguing that in major American sports, there is too much brand equity built up in teams’ names and logos for this to happen. Still, considering that the past century of American sports has seen an expansion of commercial presences that would probably have alarmed previous generations, there is always the possibility that someday, we will all be Corned Beef Cowboys fans.

This article is the first installment in a week-long series about the business of sports.