Move over, Farmers Field, there’s a new vaportecture stadium with its own naming rights deal. Gov. Jay Nixon’s proposed $1 billion-ish St. Louis Rams stadium will be officially known as National Car Rental Field, if anything can be official about a stadium that isn’t built yet and doesn’t even have a complete funding plan, let alone a team owner willing to go along with it.
Under the agreement, the car rental company would pay an average of $7.9 million a year over 20 years to slap its name on the building. Since that’s just an average — payments could be heavily backloaded for all we know — there’s no way to determine a present value on those payments, but it’s a fair guess that it could pay off around $100 million in stadium costs. Nixon’s stadium task force didn’t actually say whose $100 million this would be: The naming-rights cash could go to the building’s public owners, which would make sense but go against common sports-stadium practice, or could go toward paying Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s share, which would maybe make him (and the NFL) more amenable to keeping the team in town and not moving it to Los Angeles.
And that’s what’s really going on here, with a corporate name for a stadium that doesn’t exist yet: Nixon is trying to show the NFL that he has momentum, or something, toward a new stadium and so they shouldn’t let the Rams move. As gambits go, there are dumber ones, especially since right now it looks like all St. Louis needs to do is to convince a handful of NFL owners to keep voting against Kroenke. It’s stupid, but the way things are going, I expect the L.A. move threat gamesmanship to get way more stupid before the winter is out.
Besides, in the meantime National Car Rental gets its name on some nice stadium renderings. And I can’t find anyone with anything bad to say about National other than that you have to haggle with them for the best rates just like other car rental companies, so here’s hoping they enjoy their moment in the computer-rendered sun!
Second paragraph, last line. I think you meant “…and not moving it to LA.”
Iceberg, Greenberg. Thanks, will correct it!
Neil, you forgot to mention this…
St. Louis NFL Stadium Plan Could Cost Taxpayers Millions More Than Anticipated
http://www.stlmag.com/news/sports/proposed-nfl-stadium/
City taxpayers would pay $215 million more than previously reported for a new NFL stadium in downtown St. Louis under a plan submitted to officials by the stadium task force, headed by Dave Peacock and Bob Blitz…
Yeah, just saw Calcaterra’s tweet about that, still trying to understand exactly what it means. I *think* it’s saying that by extending the tax that otherwise would have sunsetted sooner, St. Louis taxpayers would pay more than if the stadium weren’t built — still need to go back and see how that fits into the rest of Nixon’s Rube Goldberg mess of stadium funding, though, to determine a total figure. Will do so once I knock off some other work.
Good article, but I think you made an error. You said the public owners keeping naming rights money would make “sense” when it would actually make “no sense”. Just an oversight, I’m sure.
Care to explain that, Ben, or you want to stick with argument-by-assertion?
Win-win for National Car Rental. Just having its name attached to a potential stadium that might eventually be built at some point = free advertising.
I need to start a business and name it “White Elephant”. Think of all the free publicity I could get when stadium financing is mentioned in the news.
I know Santa Clara keeps 70% of the Levi’s naming rights money and the Vikings get 100% of naming rights money. It’s negotiable.
The NFL market survey claims STL can sell $200 million worth of PSLs. Kroenke will get all of that revenue.