The 2028 Summer Olympics are introducing venue naming rights for the first time. Where might it go from there?

For the first time in Olympic history, LA28 is selling naming rights for some competition venues, a significant departure from the long-standing "clean venue policy" of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).  That policy required venues to hide all non-official sponsor branding, even if an existing venue had ongoing, commercial branding such as the stadium sponsor name. In the purist view, the Clean Venue Policy prohibited venue sponsors from minimizing the atmosphere with the commercialization of the events. In the cynical view, it was to bid up prices by protecting the official Olympic sponsors. The new initiative gives members of the Olympic Partner Program (TOP) rights of first refusal to purchase naming on up to 19 temporary venues, while allowing permanent venues to retain their existing venue naming rights if they pay up to do so.

This is the latest step in an attempt to shore up the financial model for the Olympic Games. After decades of rising costs, abandoned Olympic facilities, and ongoing corruption scandals, the Olympics saw a fall-off in interest from potential host cities. Paris and Los Angeles were the sole respective bidders on the 2024 and 2028 games. The first move to address this was to lower bottom-line costs by encouraging more use of existing facilities, even if they were less grand and further apart than in previous games. These new rights are intended to boost topline revenue in a long-term attempt to make the games self-funding. Comcast has already signed up to put its logo on the temporary squash venue at Universal Studios. Honda has opted to secure their existing naming rights on the Honda Center in Anaheim for the indoor volleyball competition. 

FIFA will be watching closely as they still have a policy for the World Cup similar to what the Olympics previously had. They will likely revisit their naming rights policy if LA proves to be a big draw. You can also look to see a further broadening of rights sales in the Olympics if 2028’s experiment is successful. Olympic uniform and gear branding has generally been limited to the manufacturers, but sponsor patches can’t be far behind if they add meaningful revenue. As sponsorship increasingly carries the badge of “making it” rather than the stigma of "selling out," you can expect the IOC to continue pushing the boundaries in an attempt to make the Olympics more attractive to future hosts.