Million-Dollar Smile: Shohei Ohtani was responsible for $70 million in incremental sponsorship revenue for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024, according to research by SponsorUnited.
One season into Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the National League MVP and World Series champion is showing his value, on the field and off it.
In 2024, the Dodgers added 12 Japanese-based partners and a total of $70 million in incremental sponsorship revenue thanks to the 30-year-old superstar, according to research firm SponsorUnited. The benefits are extending to the rest of Major League Baseball as well.
“Every time he played an away game, if you look at any backstop, you see Japanese brands that are advertising with the Orioles, the Yankees or whoever he’s playing,” says Bob Lynch, CEO of SponsorUnited, which estimates that teams hosting the Dodgers generated roughly $15 million in cumulative revenue from Japanese brands inking signage deals for those games. “So you’d see a slew of brands essentially following him around across the country that are paying dollars either directly to the teams or to Van Wagner, who’s selling the backstop signage.”
The Ohtani effect, along with the introduction of assets such as jersey patches and helmet logos, helped baseball pick up nearly $300 million in new sponsorship business in 2024 and reach $1.84 billion league-wide, SponsorUnited found in a report published Thursday. The total represents a 16% jump year over year and a 36% increase over the past three seasons. Among the five major North American pro sports leagues, only the NFL, at an estimated $2.3 billion during the 2023 season, exceeds MLB’s sponsorship figure, and no league is growing as fast.
The NFL, the NBA, the NHL and MLS all experienced double-digit growth over the three-year period, however, signaling a vibrant future for the industry. Hockey, which has made itself more alluring to marketers by introducing “digitally enhanced dasherboards” that allow broadcasters to replace the ads painted around rinks, came closest to matching MLB with three-year growth of 32%, pushing its sponsorship revenue to $1.35 billion, according to SponsorUnited. And while MLS lagged behind the other leagues with an estimated $665 million in total team sponsorship revenue in 2024, it outpaced its rivals with its new sponsorship, representing 18% of its total.
Combined, the five leagues generated a record-breaking $7.66 billion in sponsorship revenue—up 12% year over year—across nearly 14,000 deals, according to SponsorUnited. Almost 200 brands spent more than $1 million each on new sponsorship pacts last year, and across the five pro leagues and the Power 5 colleges, about 15% of sponsorship revenue came from new deals. The NFL leads the way with an estimated average deal value of $760,000, and all five pro leagues exceed $300,000.
In part, the surge is a reflection of the demand to throw in with major professional sports. But teams and leagues are also becoming increasingly creative with their offerings for partners. Stadiums and arenas are placing less of an emphasis on traditional luxury suites and carving up their spaces into a broader array of premium seating experiences, each of which can carry a sponsor’s name. Meanwhile, deals are not as rigid with brand exclusivity as they once were, with major pro teams possessing 10 alcohol sponsorships on average, according to SponsorUnited. And digital advertising has changed the way organizations and networks deliver their inventory, allowing a new level of customization.
“The play for these brands, and wanting to spend millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars in sports marketing, is to reach interested and captive audiences more efficiently,” says Tim Derdenger, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “Using technology to reach customers and personalize those messages for them is going to be a key player in the growth of sponsorship across the leagues.”
Expanding the sponsorship segment will be especially crucial for MLB and the NHL, which don’t have the massive national media deals of the NFL or the NBA to fall back on and are facing uncertainty with another critical revenue stream amid the struggles of regional sports network operator Diamond Sports Group, recently rebranded as Main Street Sports Group. According to Forbes estimates, team-specific advertising and sponsorship represented 8.9% of total revenue in the NHL and 8.1% in MLB during the most recent season with available data, compared with 7.6% in the NBA and 7.4% in the NFL.
In MLB’s case, SponsorUnited’s Lynch doesn’t expect growth to continue in a linear fashion. “You’re seeing a two-year plan of them selling jersey patches; you’re seeing dugout signage and on-field signage. So that’s one area that didn’t exist before,” he says. “That’s kind of a unicorn thing that you’re not going to necessarily see every year.”
Still, he’s optimistic on the sponsorship outlook. Challenger brands, like Logan Paul’s Prime Hydration, are pushing big-spending incumbents to be even more aggressive and think differently, the way Verizon did with its 30-city Super Bowl FanFest. Overseas markets are ripe for new opportunities thanks to events like the NFL’s International Series. Meanwhile, the changeover of many ownership groups and, to varying degrees, the arrival of institutional investors have driven teams to reconsider their priorities.
“Certainly with private equity coming in with even larger valuations, you’re going to start to look at every single area of the business and say: ‘How can we make it more efficient? How can we increase margins to ultimately unlock new value?’” Lynch says. “Sponsorships is one of those areas that is not as reliant on wins and losses as the ticket or even the hospitality businesses because they’re longer-term deals in many cases—and the business could still be successful even if the team’s not successful on the field.”
