The Wall Street Journal (which has a very underrated sports section) has a fun story about stadium naming rights, and me being me, I couldn’t help but share these two paragraphs.
When Dan Gilbert bought the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2005 for $375 million, he named the team’s arena after his company, Quicken Loans. Since the change, the Cavaliers have won 66% of their games. They’d won 44% in the 11 previous seasons when the building was named for the team’s former owner, Gordon Gund.
Citigroup seems to have had the opposite effect. Since the company signed a 20-year, $400 million agreement with the New York Mets in late 2006, the team hasn’t made it to the playoffs. Its first season in its brand-new ballpark, Citi Field, produced the team’s worst record in 15 years.
Personally I don’t care if the stadium is named Citi Field. Â I would have preferred Shea or something Mets related, but now that it has a name, Citi Field is the name and should last forever…lest we be like the Marlins/Dolphins.
Getting Lebron James had nothing to do with the team all of a sudden starting to win.
Such a dumb paragraph. I would expect more from the WSJ
I guess saying 15 years makes it sound more dramatic, whether it’s accurate or not. The Mets lost 95 games in 2003; they lost 92 games last year.
So much for that “underrated sports section”. Seems like they just threw numbers and names out there to make it seem like it makes some kind of sense.