Florio: NFL jersey ads are ‘just a matter of time’
Mike Florio explains why he believes corporate ads on NFL jerseys are inevitable, pointing to new multimillion-dollar patch sponsorship deals in college football and the league's constant search for additional revenue.
Video Transcript
It's just a matter of time, folks, until you turn on an NFL game and the jerseys will have a corporate logo.
It's just a matter of time.
I was asked the question last week on PFT PM about the union pushing the league to use jersey patches to generate more revenue.
It's just a matter of time.
And if you look at the Super Bowl jerseys from this past year, it's an alphabet junkyard.
Logos, patches, they're all over the place, and they're not making any money off of those.
The USA 250 patch was a, a gratuity to the federal government.
It was a gift.
They could have put something else there.
Think about that.
For the Super Bowl, look how, how big that patch was.
You put something else there that's a corporate logo, how much are you making that day?
And maybe that's where it's all gonna start, I don't know, but it's coming.
Here's why it's coming.
Here's the biggest reason why it's coming.
It's happening elsewhere, and once we see it in college football, and we're going to this year, and today, coincidentally or not, two major deals were announced.
Ohio State has a deal with JPMorgan Chase that will pay more than 15 million a year to put a Chase patch on the jersey of the school's sports programs.
Well, Notre Dame has seen the 15 million and raised it to 20 million.
SoFi, which already has the naming rights of the stadium in LA, although it wasn't SoFi Stadium during the World Cup, Notre Dame's gonna have the SoFi patch.
That They recently unveiled this special Packers-themed uniform for their first game ever at Lambeau Field.
I don't think the Acme Packers had a SoFi jersey patch.
Notre Dame will.
So, people are gonna see it, and here's, here's how, here's what'll happen.
Football fans that aren't paying close attention to the drip, drip of the off-season, they're gonna turn the games on, week zero, week one, Labor Day weekend, and they're gonna say, "What the hell?
What is this?
Oh, I don't like this.
Hey, look at that.
Oh, man."
Get on Twitter.
"Oh, these jersey patches have to go.
Is there no end to the greed?
This is horrible.
This is awful."
And they'll keep on watching.
They'll huff and they'll puff, and they ain't boycotting shit.
That's the way it'll go.
And when the NFL sees that, what do you think the NFL's gonna do?
It is lost opportunity.
Every game the NFL plays without the patches on the jerseys is lost money that's never coming back.
I'm not advocating for it, but I recognize that the NFL is business.
Football is family?
No.
Football is business, but we say football is family because it's good for business to say football is family.
It's a business.
I used to hate that when I was a kid.
I used to hate hearing that football was a business, and I used to hate hearing that pro wrestling was fake.
Both are true.
And the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can understand it.
And as I said last week, it's not like you can see the patch during the primary shot during a game.
So accept it.
Accept it.
It's just a matter of time before it happens.
