NBA Approves Advertising on Jerseys for 2013-14 Season

       The NBA is making an extremely controversial change for the 2013-14 season.
For the first time in a major modern American professional sport, advertisers will be allowed to invade the sanctity of the uniform that players don.
According to an Associated Press report (via Sports Illustrated), it’s expected that the league as a whole would gain up to $100 million in additional revenue by selling small patches on the jersey of each team.
The practice, nba jerseys long associated with European soccer leagues, has been fought tooth and nail by leagues in the United States, with the notable exception of the WNBA and MLS.
Grantland’s Michael Kruse wrote a piece on the issue entitled "The Coming of the Goldman Sachs Yankees" back in May. It seems the country collectively sees uniform advertisements as an invasive and obstructive measure that violates the purity of the sport. But it’s time to get with the times.
Remember, this is a league that had to borrow $175 million for 15 of its teams back in 2009 and isn’t exactly printing money. Unsuccessful franchises on the court tend to be a losing investment for owners.

Silver (left) is the brainchild behind the advertisements on the NBA uniforms
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

By adding another stream of revenue,nba jerseys the league will be more profitable and should theoretically cost less and reduce the skyrocketing prices for fans to attend a game, purchase a jersey and involve themselves with their favorite teams financially.
While the NBA does not have a lot of “detection opportunities” due to the pace of the game and standard TV camera angles, the league still stands to profit immensely from placing these advertisements on their jerseys, according to a 2011 study by Horizon Media.

NBA Jersey Ads Likely in 2013

        Get ready for LeBron James and Mickey Mouse coming to a city near you. Or Jeremy Lin and the Jolly Green Giant. At a press conference yesterday in Las Vegas, NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver said that team owners were broadly in favor of a plan to put 2.5-by-2.5-inch sponsor patches above the heart on team uniforms. nba jerseys The plan still awaits formal approval, but Silver said he expects guidelines to be in place by the start of the coming season so that teams have a year to sell the patches and Adidas, which makes NBA uniforms, has time to add them to jerseys sold in stores.

       In March we wrote about the likelihood of the NBA becoming the first of the four major U.S. sports leagues to put ads on game uniforms. (We also provided some fun scenarios for team and sponsor matches.) Silver gave a “loose projection” that the patches would generate $100 million per season for the league’s 30 teams. Eric Smallwood of Front Row Marketing Services, who has studied the television exposure of various on-jersey ads, says that number may be closer to $125 million. Smallwood anticipates an average annual price of between $4 million and $4.5 million for patch deals,nba jerseys with a range of $1.5 million to $7.5 million depending on a team’s market and players.
    
      “That’s a fantastic location,” he says of the proposed patch. While smaller than the cross-chest treatment on uniforms for soccer teams in England’s Premier League, he says, it’s better for TV cameras, which tend to capture the upper chest and above. Not to mention the fans who will become walking billboards: “Where does your eye go? To the top part of a body.”
And just in case New York Knicks fans needed more reason to regret the team’s recent decision to let Jeremy Lin go to the Houston Rockets, Smallwood figures the patch will be an attractive property for a sponsor looking to piggyback on Lin’s celebrity for exposure in Asia. “All of a sudden in Asia there’s a pop-up of Rockets jerseys everywhere, and there’s a brand on there,” he says. Thanks to Lin, he anticipates Houston to be in the top five for patch deals.