Los Angeles, which won Olympic hosting rights after Boston withdrew its bid because it was too expensive, is continuing to prepare for the 2028 Summer Games, a little less than three years out from the planned opening ceremonies. This puts L.A.’s Olympic committee smack in the middle of fundraising season, and L.A. officials negotiated a concession from the International Olympic Committee that it hopes will help avoid the crushing fiscal losses of past Games: the ability to sell naming rights to Olympic venues, instead of having to give them non-corporate names as the IOC has previously required.
The latest news on that front is that the Clippers arena, which is set to host Olympic basketball, will continue to be named after Intuit in a deal worth, let’s see:
Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
The arrangement with Intuit includes the company providing free tax preparation for some U.S. athletes and expanding its financial education program for the LA community.
That doesn’t sound great, though also naming rights that will last only about a month likely aren’t worth all that much, so maybe free tax prep is at least better than nothing.
All this matters for more than just the organizing committee because while L.A. is hoping for a repeat of the successful 1984 Summer Games, there’s a key difference this time around. In the run-up to the 1984 Olympics, then-mayor Tom Bradley led a push to successfully demand that the city not take responsibility for any costs overruns, forcing L.A. organizing committee head Peter Ueberroth to get creative to find a way to balance Olympic budgets. But this time around, then-mayor Eric Garcetti declared that attempting to get a similar agreement “would be a nonstarter for the IOC,” and instead settled for stuff like naming rights. This means that if the 2028 Olympics go over budget — and every Olympics since 1984 has done so, with costs often doubling or more — the city of L.A. will be on the hook for the first $270 million in losses, the state of California for the next $270 million, and the city again for anything over that.
How the Olympic budget is going so far is impossible to say, as the L.A. Olympic Committee’s periodic budget reports just indicate projected costs (currently $7.149 billion) and revenues (conveniently, also $7.149 billion) with no real breakdown of how those numbers are determined or where the money is coming from or going to. Olympic finances are famously handwavy during the preparations for the games — Olympic scholar Jules Boykoff has called them “Etch-a-Sketch economics” because the numbers change so much — and often even afterwards, thanks to measures like the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics setting fire to their own financial records.
Whether L.A. can get significant money from naming rights sales, then, looks like it may well be important for deciding if California taxpayers take a bath on the 2028 Summer Games, along with such questions as “Will international tourists still come if the city is a Trumpian military zone?” and “Is it a great idea to devote city time and money to hosting a sports mega-event when a large swath of your city just burned to the ground?” Not questions that the Olympics organizers are being made to answer in public, though — surely it’ll be okay, this one will be different!
I thought the whole idea behind putting the Olympics in LA was that they wouldn’t have to build anything. Like between the 10 major league teams (including MLS) you have 8 major league sports venues and then USC and UCLA’s arenas, the Coliseum Rose Bowl, and the venues at the smaller schools in the area (UC Irvine, Loyola-MArymount, etc) where is the money for this going?
They’re still building a ton of temporary structures, plus rebuilding some others, including a whole new field for the Coliseum, suspended above the old one, because new seating otherwise would have meant you couldn’t fit a full-sized track. Plus operational expenses like security and transit have to be paid regardless of whether the buildings are new or not.
Leaving aside the budget issues – what’s preventing other venue naming rights sponsors for insisting their names be used?
If the IOC allows sponsorships, the reasoning for covering up existing venue names goes away. If SoFi, Crypto etc already have contracts, they couldn’t they just sue to enforce them?
That’s an excellent question, and one I haven’t seen answered anywhere. One possibility is that this is less an actual naming rights sale and more “If you sign up to be an Olympic sponsor, we won’t throw a tarp over your arena name” — that’s what looks to have happened with Intuit:
https://www.sportspro.com/news/intuit-dome-la28-olympics-basketball-naming-rights-sponsorship-november-2025/
I’m guessing naming rights deals for arenas and stadiums all have a clause excluding Olympics events, as it’s historically been the case that Olympic venues do not have corporate names.
Aside from that, over $7 bil for any sporting event is insane. Must be some pretty nice Olympic village dorms being built…