Sports Leagues Can’t Stop Putting Ad Revenue Ahead Of Fan And Player Interests
I recently rewatched the famous Mets vs. Red Sox 1986 World Series game 6 broadcast to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
If you’re not familiar, perhaps you recall the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode that plays on former Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s inability to field a ball.
As a Mets fan who wasn’t alive in 1986 and has never seen a World Series victory, this particular game is part of the lore I grew up with. But until this rewatch, I had never been so keenly struck by how much the fan experience of sports has changed.
The 1986 World Series broadcast obviously had no digitally superimposed brand banners behind home plate and along the field walls; nor was the pitcher’s mound virtually branded with a sponsor logo. The broadcast also runs for tens of seconds at a time with just fan noise filling the air.
Today, the silence would be occupied by announcers doing sponsor integrations, picture-in-picture-style ads overlaid on the live broadcast, pop-up marketing along the lower bar of the TV, maybe even an entire commercial break inserted into the action.
There is a powerful undercurrent of disaffection and outright anger from the American populace toward US sporting institutions right now. Often, that manifests as frustration over how complicated and expensive it is to find and watch a game, or private equity ownership of kids’ sports leagues and equipment that drives up the cost to play.
Against this backdrop, griping about advertising taking over sports almost feels quaint, like a throwback to a less-commercialized era.
But this isn’t just about logos cluttering the playing field. Sports leagues and teams are making decisions that sacrifice player safety and the enjoyment of their own fans in various bids for marketing revenue.
Whose welfare?
The biggest example of sporting greed in recent memory has to be the World Cup “hydration breaks” introduced this year.
Let’s call these what they were: 3-minute-long commercial breaks inserted into the first and second halves of each game.
FIFA proposed World Cup hydration breaks ostensibly on player welfare grounds, since high temperatures were forecasted for some of the games. Never mind that players and coaches blasted the breaks for messing with the usual flow of a soccer game.
During the World Cup, FIFA denied that it was profiting from the breaks. But post-tournament, FIFA has been unabashedly bragging about the breaks’ successful sponsorship haul. FIFA will now require them as part of future World Cup broadcast deals, regardless of whether the host nation’s weather calls for water breaks.
The shameless cash grab of hydration breaks is just one example of how pro soccer leagues prioritize sponsor interests. And the ploy of calling it player welfare is an affront, considering there are real player safety issues that clash with sponsor interests. And the leagues always defer to ad revenue.
Consider those waist-high walls of advertisements – sometimes made of brick or concrete but increasingly composed of LED screens – which are now omni-present around pro soccer fields.
Having just played DIII NCAA soccer, I am shocked by how closely hedged pro soccer fields are by these walls of ads. Players run full-tilt just feet away from these things. And they’re wearing metal-tipped cleats, so any jump over or atop the wall is fraught with accidental danger.
“Players must get hurt all the time,” I’ve often thought. Turns out, they do.
British midfielder Jordan Henderson was forced out of the World Cup with a broken wrist that needed surgery after toppling over a sideline ad board. The Paraguayan men’s team coach called for a reassessment of the practice when his striker was hurt crashing into an ad screen during a game with Australia. Togo international player Samuel Asamoah had his neck broken in a collision with an ad board a year ago. (He’s alive but partially paralyzed.) That incident came not long after Billy Vigar, a young British player coming up with the Chichester City club, died in a similar headfirst tumble.
For years now, players and lower-level leagues without major broadcast sponsor demands have called for reviews of what’s dubbed “pitch perimeter safety.”
The fix is simple. Just move the boards back a little bit. There’s often a huge expanse of space available between the ads and the stadium seats.
But the rationale for having ads hug the perimeter of the field is because that’s how you create viewable inventory for TV. Sponsors are paying for constant on-screen presence, and that’s not feasible if the screens are backed up to a safe distance.
Bad influence
And the problem goes well beyond international fútbol.
The US Open tennis tournament this year made the marketing decision to give many social media creator-influencer types free tickets. Which sparked backlash from players and fans.
The stadiums were full of influencers doing their livestreams and vlogs, not bothering to watch the tennis. And the niceties of tennis etiquette (as in, quieting down during play) were largely lost on the creator crowd. At least one player even stopped midmatch to complain about the smell of weed wafting from the audience (lol).
Whether it’s social media tweenagers muddying the experience of the US Open or a pointless stoppage of World Cup play brought to you by Powerade, it can feel like the wearisome beat of progress or modernity that’s changing these games.
But, actually, the only thing that’s inevitable is sports leagues putting advertisers’ interests above that of fans and players.
Look at the NFL, which is already the most lucrative and heavily saturated sport when it comes to advertising, since it’s a game with plenty of natural stoppages and downtime. But even the NFL can’t resist the temptation to cram in more ads any more than FIFA.
The NFL RedZone channel, created in 2009, for years had the tagline “seven hours of commercial-free football.” But commercials arrived in 2024, and now the show has some 16 ad breaks per Sunday. Relatedly, ESPN acquired the NFL Network and distribution rights to RedZone last year.
For bettor or worse
And none of the above even approaches the most insidious aspect of modern sports marketing: partnerships with sportsbook apps and prediction markets.
All of the big five US sports leagues – the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS (sure, we’ll go ahead and count MLS) – have partnerships with gambling companies and feature them prominently during TV broadcasts. Top players endorse the gambling apps, and the leagues provide live, in-broadcast marketing integrations for betting lines, prop bets and insights from DraftKings, Fanatics, FanDuel, et al.
And yet, these five leagues recently formed a new lobbying coalition to advocate for state laws cracking down on sportsbook app users who threaten or harass players. Call it a stopgap against the inevitability that some fans are going to lose their shirts betting on the games and blame the players.
No wonder sports gambling marketing integrations are mostly loathed by players (presumably aside from those who are paid endorsers). Athletes have to weigh the chance to be the next generation’s childhood hero against being constantly lambasted by young or middle-aged men who’ve lost their paychecks to an app.
Standards have been slipping
The leagues would prefer to offload the issue to state legislatures. But what if the problem is coming from inside their own house?
It is the leagues and their broadcast partners that time and again have failed to uphold standards of quality and, frankly, decency when marketing revenue is in play.
Some of the biggest Super Bowl advertisers of the past few years have been the sportsbooks themselves. DraftKings and Fanatics advertised during this year’s Big Game, while FanDuel ramped up its marketing in the lead-up to the event.
But before the sportsbook apps, there were back-to-back years when the Super Bowl was taken over by Temu – which, not to put too fine a point on it, is a malicious Chinese government infosec data-capture vehicle that also sells shoddy merchandise. The NFL and CBS let that company buy six Super Bowl ads in 2024.
Before Temu, multiple crypto exchanges, including the now-infamous pyramid scheme FTX, were big NFL and Super Bowl sponsors.
That list seriously calls into question the judgement of the NFL and its Super Bowl broadcasters (primarily NBC or Fox, depending on the year).
Is there seriously no interest in live sports from quality advertisers? Or are more reputable sponsors just being outbid by brands like FTX, Temu and DraftKings?
More worryingly still, do the NFL, CBS, Fox, NBC and the rest no longer know the difference between good and bad brand associations?
The answer can be “Yes all around,” by the way.
But while the leagues might be missing the picture, some of their brand partners aren’t.
Despite the smashing ad monetization success of this year’s World Cup from FIFA’s perspective, its biggest brand sponsors were nonplussed. McDonald’s is pulling its 32-year World Cup sponsorship, which “underperformed our expectations,” CFO Ian Borden told investors during a quarterly earnings report last week.
And other publicly traded brands like Adidas, Visa, Hershey and Coca-Cola are all hard-pressed to justify their sports marketing investments right now.
As those well-known global consumer brands reconsider their sports budgets, they send sports leagues into the open arms of sportsbooks, GLP-1s, crypto exchanges and other forms of cynical advertising.
As always, the losers are the fans and the players.
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