In the summer of 2026, for the length of the football World Cup, three of the most recognisable stadiums in the United States stopped using the name their sponsors pay for every year. MetLife Stadium, AT&T Stadium and Mercedes-Benz Stadium went back to being, on maps and in commentary, New York New Jersey Stadium, Dallas Stadium and Atlanta Stadium. That is the FIFA clean stadium rule, and it is the quickest way to understand what a naming right really is: not a property, but a lease.

Updated September 2026.

The name is rented, not bought

This is the analogy I have used with clients for years, and the World Cup made it obvious to everyone. Whoever signs a naming right is not buying a building: they are renting a sign, and the landlord keeps the right to take it down when a contract with a third party, in this case an international federation, requires it.

The consultancy Navigate, in an analysis reported by Sports Business Journal on 12 June 2026, estimated before the tournament that the brands involved would forgo around $53.5 million in media value in the domestic US market and up to $134.8 million globally, with at least six brands losing the equivalent of their annual naming fee. Those are projections, not final figures: no post-tournament measurement has been published to date. But the order of magnitude tells you everything you need to know. MetLife Stadium hosted eight matches, five group games plus three knockout rounds up to the final on 19 July, without ever being called MetLife. One exception deserves telling, because it says a lot about how these things are really negotiated: in Atlanta, FIFA left the Mercedes logo on the roof visible, because it is made of rotating panels that cannot be covered without damaging the structure. The stadium lost its name, not all of its branding.

What the market is worth, in figures

The most up to date benchmark comes from SponsorUnited: in the United States, brands spend around $891 million a year on venue naming rights across the seven main professional leagues, with the financial sector alone accounting for more than $400 million of that. Venue naming is one of five major asset lines that together are worth $3.3 billion, roughly 40% of all team sponsorship revenue.

SoFi Stadium in Inglewood is still at the top: $625 million over twenty years, about $31.25 million a year, the richest naming deal ever signed in sport. Behind it, AT&T Stadium of the Dallas Cowboys sits in the $17-19 million a year band. Levi’s Stadium of the San Francisco 49ers is worth around $11 million a year today, $220.3 million over twenty years signed in 2013, and will rise to roughly $17 million with the $170 million extension that runs to the 2043 season. It has to be said honestly that these values are not linear: the SoFi contract carries escalating fees, from around $16.9 million in the early years towards $29 million, so the average figure only tells part of the story.

In Europe the numbers are a different planet, and they are worth looking at without indulgence. In Serie A the biggest contract is still Juventus with Allianz: the renewed agreement runs from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2030 and is worth €103.1 million, an amount that is additional to the previous contracts, which provided a guaranteed minimum of €75 million, around €6.2 million a season.

Below Juventus the scale drops fast, but it is moving, and that is the interesting part. Atalanta took around €750,000 a season from Gewiss up to 2025, then signed with New Balance: from 2025/26 to 2030/31 the same venue is worth about €2.4 million a year, more than three times as much. Udinese takes around €1 million a season from Bluenergy, on a five year contract that started in 2023. At the other end, Monza closed the U-Power deal at €250,000 a year and from 1 July 2026 its ground is called Brianteo again. In the 2026/27 season the Serie A grounds carrying a naming right are five: Allianz Stadium, New Balance Arena, Mapei Stadium, Bluenergy Stadium and Unipol Domus.

Why naming is worth less in Italy

There is one answer and it is not football: it is ownership. In the United States whoever sells the name owns the venue and controls every square metre of it. In Italy most stadiums belong to the municipality, and a club operating a public asset under concession is selling a weaker, shorter right, more exposed to political consensus and to the affection fans hold for the historic name.

Which is why 5 November 2025 matters more than many renewals: it is the day the City of Milan signed the deed transferring the Meazza stadium and the surrounding land to Inter and Milan for €197 million, paid in instalments with a first tranche of €91.96 million settled before signing. The Milan prosecutor’s office has opened a file on the procedure for bid rigging, and that should be said too. From that moment the San Siro naming right is a private asset, negotiable over a long horizon and on a venue the owners can redesign. That is the step Italy was missing. How long it takes the market to price it properly, we shall see.

Naming rights work differently in motorsport

In our sector the venue is not a 60,000 seat bowl in the middle of a city: it is a circuit, often outside built-up areas, with attendance concentrated into a handful of weekends a year. So the value does not come from footfall, it comes from the repetition of the name in commentary, in television graphics, in results and in archives. The Red Bull Ring is the extreme case: a company that buys a circuit and gives it its own name earns a compulsory mention every time that track is named, for good.

There is a limit, though, that shows up more clearly in motorsport than anywhere else, and it deserves to be named. The Buriram circuit in Thailand is commercially called Chang International Circuit, after the beer brand that holds the naming, but in markets where alcohol advertising is restricted it is referred to by the neutral name Buriram International Circuit. The same asset therefore performs differently depending on the country it is broadcast in. Anyone buying naming in a global sport must insist on a market by market coverage estimate, not a single number. In Indonesia the Pertamina Mandalika International Circuit shows the opposite case, where the state energy company uses the circuit as a reputation platform at home before anywhere else.

And then there are the circuits that do not sell the name at all, because they have already spent it well: Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli and Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari are worth more, in affection and identity, than any annual fee would bring in. Not every name is for sale, and not every name should be.

Five mistakes, in my view

The first: buying the name without buying the inventory. A naming right with no hospitality package, no activation rights in the common areas, no access to spectator data and no right to use the image of the venue in your own advertising is a sticker on a roof. An expensive one.

The second: not reading the neutralisation clauses. Every venue that hosts international federation events, and in motorsport that means practically all of them, is subject to periods when the commercial name is suspended. Those periods have to be known, quantified and compensated in the contract before signing, not discovered once the tournament has started.

The third: underestimating adoption time. The public keeps using the old name for years. In the investment plans I see, the communication spend needed to make the new name stick is almost always forgotten, and it is not a marginal cost.

The fourth: signing with someone who is not the owner. If the venue is public and the club runs it under concession, the naming term can never exceed the term of the concession. Check it first, with the contract in hand.

The fifth: treating naming as the finish line. It is almost always the starting point of a much wider commercial relationship.

Everything around the name

The least visible part of this market is also where, in my view, an industrial company finds the best margins. Again according to SponsorUnited data, in the United States the naming rights of training facilities alone attract more than $300 million a year of investment, around 9% of spend on major assets. These are buildings that almost never appear on television, and that work very well for anyone selling in a B2B logic.

Then there is the construction and operations supply chain, which in our trade is the most underrated ground of all. Producers of concrete, paint, windows, flooring, electrical systems, cabling, wi-fi networks, ticketing systems, furniture, lighting or catering equipment can enter a project as suppliers and come out of it as partners, settling all or part of the supply as a contra deal. The club gets the venue on better terms, the company gets visibility, a real case study and a permanent showroom to bring its own clients to. It is one of the few structures where the interests of the two parties genuinely align: the client wants an excellent building, the supplier wants that building to prove how good they are.

The same holds during operations: catering, cleaning, maintenance, security, logistics. Every management contract is a sponsorship contract that nobody has written as one yet.

How an operation like this is built

The method we use at RTR on projects of this kind comes down to five steps. One, map the entire specification of the works or of the operation, line by line, with quantities and values. Two, cross that map with the list of companies in each sector that have already invested in sport, because they have the shortest decision cycle. Three, define category exclusivity before opening any conversation, so you do not end up with two competing suppliers on the same project. Four, build the offer as a partial contra deal, not as a discount: the accounting difference is substantial for both sides. Five, put the programme of business meetings between partners in writing, because that is what keeps the relationship alive after the ribbon is cut.

Anyone working in motorsport sponsorship will recognise the structure: it is the same one applied to a team, where the title sponsor is the line everyone sees and the technical partners are the ones who make the project possible. With venues, the difference is that the asset stays standing for thirty years.

One last thing, and it applies to anyone weighing an investment of this kind. The name on the building is not yours. It is rented, it has an expiry date, it has clauses that can switch it off, and it is worth exactly as much as everything you build around it.

You do not buy a name. You rent it. Always.

Sources: SponsorUnited, Major Assets Series: Venue Naming Rights; SponsorUnited, Major Assets Series: Practice Facility Naming Rights; Il Sole 24 Ore, the sale of San Siro to Inter and Milan; Treccani, stadium naming rights in Italy.