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January 6, 2010
What’s in a Naming Right? Certainly Not Cash
The New York Times
by Richard Sandomir
A Times story on the absence of a naming-rights sponsor for the new Giants/Jets football stadium in the Meadowlands touches on the Barclays deal for the planned Brooklyn arena.
For the Giants and the Jets, finding a naming-rights buyer for the new stadium will take time. If they planned to dedicate revenue from such a deal to help pay their construction debt, they will have to use money from other sources.
The market has been largely dormant and may never return to its prerecession peak, when Citigroup agreed in late 2006 to pay the Mets $400 million over 20 years to name the team’s ballpark Citi Field and Barclays followed soon after with a similarly priced deal to put its moniker on the Nets’ proposed arena in Brooklyn.
As Atlantic Yards Report will surely point out, the Barclays deal may never have been worth anywhere near $20 million per year. It surely isn't now, though the Nets still claim otherwise.
The recession and the departure of the star architect Frank Gehry led to the renegotiation of some terms of the Barclays-Nets deal. According to a bond document, the arena naming rights were halved.
The Nets insist that they have given Barclays more for its sponsorship money and that the bank’s total annual payments, including fees for other rights, remain unchanged.
NoLandGrab: All but the most naive among us learned a long time ago not to believe anything that comes out of the Ratner/Nets industrial complex.
Posted by eric at January 6, 2010 10:26 AM