The NBA has been kicking around the idea of adding advertising to jerseys for a few years now. All the way back in 2012, Adam Silver—who was the NBA Deputy Commissioner at the time—revealed that the league was thinking about adding ads to every NBA team’s jersey for the 2013-14 NBA season. It didn’t happen back then, but it’s going to happen in the very near future.
According to Bloomberg, NBA owners have voted to start putting small 2.5 inch-by-2.5 inch advertising patches on the front of NBA jerseys at the start of the 2017-18 NBA season. At that time, Nike is going to take over for adidas as the NBA’s official uniform supplier, so it sounds like the owners feel as though that the’s perfect time for the segue to take place. Bloomberg is reporting that the ads are expected to generate as much as $150 million in extra revenue every year and that individual teams will be allowed to keep half of all the money they generate from the ads. The other half will go into a pot that will be shared by all of the teams in the NBA.
There will probably be some outrage over the NBA owners’ decision to do this, but it’s been in the works for a long time now, so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. Here's some information that was released by the league a short time ago:
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[via Bloomberg]
