The NFL is the last holdout of the big four major leagues of North America. The NHL, MLB, and NBA have all gone in on jersey sponsors now, with the prevalence and amount of sponsors growing each season. So, presumably, NFL jersey sponsors will be on the minds of league executives and franchise owners.
However, the NFL has long been a late mover when compared to the other major leagues. Being the biggest sporting product in the United States, the NFL doesn’t need to be the trailblazer or innovator when it comes to bringing in revenues.
Yet, looking at the major league trends and revenues elsewhere, it’s tough to see the NFL staying to one side for too much longer. NFL jersey sponsors, having looked at the NHL, NBA, MLB, and revenue made in other wildly popular sporting leagues, seem almost inevitable.
The Leading Example of Sports Sponsorship
Easily, one of the most notable and storied of the big-money sports leagues from around the world that has long embraced sponsorship on its game day attire is the Premier League. The biggest revenue creator of all of the elite European domestic leagues, Premier League teams have had front-of-shirt sponsors for decades.
Now, many of them also have sleeve sponsors. For some Premier League teams, and most lower down in the football pyramid, there are also lower or upper-back sponsors, too. It’s all prime real estate for sponsors to get wide-spanning adverts out there while the teams can bank millions.
Coming into the 2024/25 season, sponsorship revenue for the 20-team league in the UK increased to $1.68 billion, marking a 12.4 per cent surge on the season prior. Headlining the extra infusion of cash are clothing and accessories, travel and tourism, financial services, and gambling brands.
Clothing and accessories contribute over $570 million annually, followed by $223 million from travel, $232 million from financial brands, and some $180 million from gambling brands. Most of the cash coming in from gambling brands goes to having sponsors on the front of football shirts.
Annual fees for long-term shirt sponsorships vary tremendously due to the prominence of certain clubs and the level at which they compete – some are clear relegation candidates while others are UEFA Champions League regulars. Arsenal, for example, net $62 million per year across their ten-year deal for their shirt sponsor, Emirates.
While they’ve been rung up on the deal being excessive compared to fair market value, the owners of Manchester City have had their travel company, Etihad, sponsor the club to the tune of $84 million per year. While far from being as successful as they have been in the increasingly distant past, Manchester United gets $75 million per year.
Towards the lower end of the Premier League table, as well as teams in smaller markets or who have recently been promoted, you can see Bournemouth, Everton, Fulham, and West Ham United collecting $12.5 million per season for their front-of-shirt sponsors. Each also makes more from sponsors dotted on other parts of their kits.
Without sponsors on jerseys, the NFL generates $2.3 billion in total sponsorship revenue. That 2024 figure puts the league well ahead of any other North American major league. However, that is spread across 32 teams dotted over a continent-sized country and many of the largest individual consumer markets in the world.
While the average deal for an NFL team sponsor is at $760,000 for 2023/24, the total average per team, going from how much the league generates, clocks in at $71.9 million. The shirt sponsorship of the flailing Manchester United alone beats the average total, perhaps showing the potential for NFL jersey sponsors.
How Other Major Leagues are Using Sponsorships
In 2017/18, the NBA became the first of the big four major leagues in North America to welcome jersey sponsors. Now, all 30 NBA teams have a jersey sponsor, and some, like the Brooklyn Nets, have already filtered through several. In the case of the Nets, they’ve had jersey sponsor patches paid for by Infor, Motorola, Webull, and now GetYourGuide.
The NBA jumping into the fray was a huge step for the major leagues. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman famously said that his league “certainly won’t be the first” to go for advertisements on jerseys, and that to do so, they’d have to “drag me kicking and screaming.” In the end, none of this was necessary as the NBA gave the green light.
In the 2022/23 season, a select few NHL teams revealed their new jerseys with sponsors. Some of the 32 teams organized separate deals for home jersey and away jersey sponsors, as well as helmet sponsors. Soon after, in the 2023 season, Major League Baseball joined the fold by letting its 30 teams make deals for shirt sponsors.
Of them all, the NHL offers the quintessential look at how valued jersey sponsors can be in North America. Several of the teams have two jersey sponsors, with the value of these sponsors in terms of social reach online per season spanning around $4 million for getting a patch on a Nashville Predators jersey to over $25 million with the Boston Bruins.
It’s a very attractive prospect, particularly for new tech sectors looking to gain traction across the two countries. One such sector in the United States and Canada is that of iGaming. Slowly, online casinos are being regulated in many states and provinces, but as not all regulate them, there’s an opening for bad actors.
So, to gain validity and trust in the market, brands have to do a few things. One is to trust that parties with interest in the market will offer guides to help steer customers away from dubious platforms. Anyone can read this comprehensive list of blacklisted casinos, for example, and know to go to a safe and regulated site instead.
Platforms also need to perform well and in a trustworthy manner to gain a strong reputation with the still relatively new audience of North America. Finally, they can turn to advertising and sponsorship. It’s the time-honored tradition of tying a popular brand to the new one to earn validity and exposure with the masses, which is why five NHL jerseys now don a gambling sponsor.
Potential for Huge Revenues in the NFL
While there are far fewer games played in the NFL compared to the NHL, NBA, MLB, and even the Premier League, deals for NFL jersey sponsors would surely break into a new tier for revenue. In the NHL, it’s said that the 2022/23 deals – which didn’t span all teams – amounted to $3.9 million for the jersey sponsors and $2.1 for helmet ads per team.
So, across the 32 teams in the NHL, that amounts to around $192 million in additional revenue for jersey and helmet sponsors. Given that 2023 figures show that the NFL boasted around five times the viewing minutes as the NHL, it’d be fair to assume that the arrangements for NFL jersey sponsors would be looking at breaking the $1 billion mark.
With a particular eye on gambling sponsors, a deal for NFL jersey sponsors could be huge. After all, not only are sports betting and online casino gaming growing rapidly across the US, but the biggest betting occasion of the year is the Super Bowl. Super Bowl betting is huge every year in the US. In 2024, 68 million people wagered over $23 billion.
NFL jersey sponsors would have a tremendous amount of appeal for gambling brands and any brand that wants colossal exposure. If a brand backs the right one and ends up on the jersey of a Super Bowl team, the implied value could be huge. A mere 30-second commercial spot during the Super Bowl costs around $7 million. NFL jersey sponsors would get much, much more exposure and would be unavoidable for anyone watching the game itself.
For now, NFL jersey sponsors aren’t in the works. Quite simply, the NFL doesn’t yet need to dip into that revenue well. Given how much money is up for grabs, though, NFL jersey sponsors are all but inevitable.
