To borrow a phrase from someone who knew a thing or two about the art of live entertainment, what's in a stadium’s name? Wouldn’t a sports arena sponsored by any other faceless conglomerate provide just as many thrills?

No, it may not seem to matter very much if you go to see LeBron James play at a venue named for an office-supply retailer or a cryptocurrency exchange, but the business of arena- and stadium-naming rights is a huge revenue driver in modern sports. Take the NBA, whose venues have sponsor names slapped on them in the highest proportion: according to SportsPro media, companies collectively pay about $250M to $300M every year for the right to promote their brands through arena-naming deals.

With that much money changing hands, we’re bound to see trends emerge in who actually pays for these sponsorships, from beer companies to dot-com startups to for-profit colleges and disgraced energy brokers. Where might these naming-rights go next, and what do they tell us about how big-time sports — and the US economy at large — have changed over the past five decades?

The modern era of professional sports arena and stadium sponsorships can be traced back to the 1990s, when a host of new buildings were constructed to house both existing teams and franchises that suddenly found themselves in new cities (whether through expansion or relocation). As more venues were built, the industry’s power brokers realized longstanding tradition of naming them after locations or important historical figures could be used to generate extra cash.

“Sponsorships had been a staple of the philanthropic world — hospitals, university buildings, etc.,” Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, told me. “But the sustaining interest in sport and owners seeking new sources of revenue, as player salaries rose, created a new synergy.”

We can see this by looking at naming trends in the so-called Big Four North American men’s pro leagues: the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB. From the 1970s through the 1980s, the share of home venues that were named either generically (i.e., Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium) or in tribute to an individual (Comiskey Park, etc.) was 97.3%. In almost every other case, the sponsor hailed from the food-and-beverage industry — such as Rich Stadium in Buffalo or Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Even in the first half of the 1990s, the unsponsored share of major pro-sports venues was still as high as 93% — though in a sign of things to come, the banking and financial sectors were beginning to creep into the stadium-naming space. The dam truly began to break in the late ’90s, with the proportion of unsponsored venues dipping to 68%, the beginning of a drastic slide that’s continued every half decade since. (The unsponsored share since 2020? Just 13%.)

The turn of the century was a time for tech companies to join the fray — the most notable being 3Com Park (formerly Candlestick Park) in San Francisco, Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland, and the Compaq Center in Houston. Naming rights of the early 2000s also belonged to energy and airlines; in 2006, both teams in the NBA Finals had arenas named after American Airlines. All three industries peaked in sponsorship share just before the dot-com crash and 9/11 took their respective tolls, along with 2001’s Enron scandal.

Other sectors peaked later as the Great Recession and its 2010s aftermath approached. Shipping reached its high mark in 2005 with FedEx sponsoring both a football stadium in Washington and a basketball arena in Memphis, but stayed relatively constant for the next decade-plus. Telecommunications and retail (think AT&T Stadium in Dallas and Target Field in Minneapolis) both peaked in 2013, and energy companies poured money back into naming rights (Consol Energy Center, Chesapeake Energy Arena, FirstEnergy Stadium, NRG Stadium — wow, there are so many of these) for a second go-round in the mid-2010s. Interestingly, the automotive industry, which needed bailing out as part of the 2008 financial crisis, was only minorly affected in the naming-rights department, dipping from 4.1% of all sponsorships in 2007 to 3.3% in 2010, but rallying back to a high of 6.6% by 2017.

It also makes sense that food and beverage companies would see a dip after the economy’s latest crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, before live sports shut down along with much of the restaurant and hospitality sectors, 10.6% of all naming rights belonged to the food-and-beverage industry. Now that number is down to 6.5%.

Some stadiums perfectly encapsulate the changing trends of naming rights in a single venue: Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium began life in 1987 as Joe Robbie Stadium after the founder of the Dolphins NFL franchise. In 1996 the naming rights were sold by stadium owner and Blockbuster Video mogul H. Wayne Huizenga to a line of sports apparel: Pro Player Stadium was born. After Pro Player went bankrupt, the name reverted to “Dolphins Stadium,” but soon the rights were resold to Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville to promote a beer brand, giving us the delightfully bizarre Land Shark Stadium. That arrangement lasted only a year, before Sun Life insurance picked up the rights, and finally the name was sold again to the Hard Rock Cafe chain.

If you’re keeping track at home, that means the venue now known as Hard Rock Stadium was, at different times, named as an individual tribute and a symbol of the ’90s sports-gear craze, carried a generic placeholder tag, helped sell insurance, and went through two separate food-and-beverage incarnations. Truly, the building is the avatar for the full transformation of naming rights over the decades, riding the waves of each industry’s fortunes, up and down.

Two industries, however, have been largely impervious to crashes as they rose to dominate the arena and stadium sponsorship game: finance and insurance.

Despite the Great Recession being primarily, you know, a banking crisis, banks — which had grown from having 3.6% of venues named after them in 1995 to 18.9% by 2007 — barely dipped after the financial crash, and then continued to add sponsorships at an aggressive rate. Today, the banking and finance industry claims 29% of all major pro-sports naming rights. And insurance is also gaining ground, growing from 3.3% of sponsorships in 2007 to 10.5% today.

Still other industries are on the rise. Chemicals, manufacturing, casinos, cryptocurrency, healthcare, home security, human resources, and transportation are all sectors that had little to no naming-rights presence a decade ago, but have joined in on arena and stadium sponsorships in recent years.

(Not that crypto has been without its particular challenges. After Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange melted down in 2022, the Miami Heat had to unwind their naming-rights deal with the company and search for a new sponsor. Eventually, they landed on Kaseya, a local South Florida software company, as FTX’s replacement.)

And perhaps the most intriguing modern development in naming rights came when Amazon devoted its sponsorship of Seattle’s NHL and WNBA arena to the Climate Pledge fund, an environmental initiative aimed at having companies reach net-zero carbon by 2040. In our data, this was the first example of a venue being named in honor of a social cause.

That and other trends may yet have room to grow. Perusing the different leagues in the chart below, you can see that the NFL still goes without a sponsorship in 10% of its venues, while MLB’s figure sits at 30% — many of which you can chalk up to tradition (see: Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium). Both leagues will offer more chances for new naming-rights deals if they bring those rates closer to the NBA’s 4% unsponsored mark.

They’ll do it if teams want to keep pushing for new revenue streams — tenant teams tend to negotiate splits in naming-rights money alongside the building’s owner, and even the local government in many cases — and if companies continue to see big value in having their brands plastered on the side of a massive sports arena in the middle of a city. All those factors, along with many more considerations, go into how much a naming-rights deal is ultimately worth.

“The amount of money is always a function of exposures, and the number of exposures — eyeballs that see the name — depends on many factors,” Rosentraub said. That’s “including the number of events held at the venue, the venue's location and visibility — proximity to highways obviously increases exposures. Think about the Grand Central Parkway and Citi Field or I-70 and Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Arenas and large stadia that host a multitude of events are more valuable as naming assets to sponsors than venues with fewer events. Venues that can be seen by traffic are more valuable than those which cannot be seen.

“Clearly, as part of a company's advertising strategy, naming rights are seen as valuable,” he added.

The stadium-naming craze doesn’t seem like it’s going to lose steam anytime soon. The only question might be which industries decide to get in on the action next — and, like scientists reading the rings of an ancient tree, what the next generation of naming-rights developments will say about the economy.

Neil Paine is a freelance writer whose work appears at ESPN and on his Substack. Previously he was a sports editor at FiveThirtyEight.