The Los Angeles-Minnesota game will now be played in a stadium named after an insurance company that ended some fire insurance policies in the LA area.
The National Football League’s home office did the correct thing by moving its Minnesota Vikings-Los Angeles Rams playoff game to Glendale, Arizona in a facility whose name on the building was purchased by an insurance company that cut thousands of homeowners’ fire insurance in the Los Angeles area. NFL media partners probably are not going to point that out during the game’s broadcast. Sports owners using publicly financed facilities usually keep all of the naming rights money. Local governments give the cash away as part of a lease agreement. Corporate names have been on stadiums since 1927 when MLB Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley, who sold Wrigley chewing gum, renamed his park Wrigley Field. Crosley Field in Cincinnati and Briggs Stadium in Detroit also had corporate names. The Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick would not approve the name change of St. Louis’s Sportsmen’s Park to Budweiser Stadium after Gussie Busch bought the Cardinals franchise in 1953. Busch purchased the business and was planning on using the team as a promotional vehicle to sell beer. The St. Louis brewery got around Frick and National League owners by putting out Busch beer. The stadium was named after the team owner. There was nothing Frick could do to stop that.
By the 1970s, corporate sponsorships of sports started to take hold. The women’s tennis tour was sponsored by a cigarette, Virginia Slims, there was the Marlboro Cup horse race, the John Hancock Sun Bowl, the Nabisco Masters Tennis Tournament, Arco Arena in Sacramento, the Carrier Dome in Syracuse. In 1988, Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss sold the naming rights of the Forum in Inglewood to Great Western Bank. That move was the start of something new. Selling naming rights and owners followed. It has never been proven that buying naming rights to a stadium or an arena is a worthwhile investment however.
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