The NBA's landmark media-rights deal announced in July was valued at $76 billion over 11 years beginning with the 2025-26 season. The length and value of the contract highlight the league's steady growth, and the potential for even more eyeballs on the best basketball league in the world.
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The NBA renewed its partnership with Disney and signed new agreements with NBC Universal and Amazon Prime Video. ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon will telecast NBA games through the 2035-36 campaign.
With the increased exposure among fans streaming games comes an intense race among sponsors for increased brand visibility.
Jersey patches invaded the NBA beginning with the 2017-18 season, when the league became the first major North American men's pro sports league to allow a sponsor presence on the front of uniforms. Initially ushered in as a three-year trial, the jersey patches helped boost the NBA's sponsorship revenue from $861 million to $1.12 billion in the span of one year, according to Statista.
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It was a watershed moment for the league, even if the growth in Year 1 of the trial could not be replicated in the years that followed. All 30 teams had a jersey patch during the trial period; today, that is not the case.
However, a majority of NBA teams have jersey patch sponsors locked up, and even more are in the pipeline, said Andrew Feinberg of Klutch Sports Group. He believes every team will have a jersey patch again soon.
"It was a sensitive subject for every league and team at the beginning," Feinberg told Newsweek Sports. "It almost felt untouchable, for a certain period of time."
The Miami Heat and Memphis Grizzlies recently announced multi-year agreements with Robinhood, including a jersey patch that will make its regular season debut Wednesday. Four other teams — the Knicks and Celtics, and the Lakers and Timberwolves — tip off their regular seasons Tuesday.
Klutch negotiated both Robinhood deals, and has negotiated jersey-patch deals in other sports as well. Both World Series participants, the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, have a patch on the sleeve of their jerseys that figures to generate immense brand exposure on baseball's biggest stage.
Major League Baseball uncovered the risk in jersey-patch deals when the cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy in 2022. FTX became "the official cryptocurrency partner" of MLB in 2021, and umpires wore an FTX patch on the front of their jerseys that year.
The patch turned into a black eye for the league when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with multiple fraud counts, sentenced to 25 years in prison, and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Since then, brands and teams have slowed down and become more deliberate in doing their due diligence prior to signing any deals, Feinberg said.
With those screening processes in place, Feinberg believes we could see longer-term deals for jersey sponsors in the future.
"I think these brands, since they've gotten so sophisticated over the last several years over how they spend their money in sports, are just scratching the surface of how to get the maximum value out of these partnerships," he added. "The data that companies like Klutch show brands in terms of what they're getting in return for these partnerships is allowing them to navigate and move these partnerships forward."
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