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Sports Industry: A Research Guide

Venue Management & Naming Rights

One area that is important for those managing venues is revenue. To locate data related to venues and revenue, consulting firms like PwC do report some data. However, for those looking for historical data on Revenues from Sports Venues (RSV), Jim Grinstead published Revenues from Sports Venues, a weekly newsletter and annual publication that focused on how revenues are earned from major and minor league sports facilities (including luxury boxes) for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer facilities. The data used to be published by Mediaventures at sportsvenues.com through 2017, but the data was by subscription and only some free information is available via the webcature External from the Wayback Machine.

Below are just a selection of books on this topic; please see our online catalog for additional titles. The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to digital content are provided when available.

Venue Management

These are just a few of the more general business themed titles related to managing sports venues. If you are looking for very specific or for emerging or current issues, looking for articles will be a good resource.

Naming Rights

Many professional sports teams play in stadiums that have contractual relationships with companies for the naming rights to the stadiums. Since these contracts cover a period of years, it is not necessarily a topic that is written about as frequently as other aspects of the sports business, the items will be pretty static in terms of sources.

When a naming rights deal comes to an end, there will be a lot of discussion and interest, so searching news articles will be an important source of information not only related to any issues as to why a deal may not be renewed, but there will also be discussion about which companies are bidding and eventually which company secures the rights with information on the details.

The internet is a great place for finding out information about specific stadium naming. You will find out those situations where deals aren't renewed, which companies are interested, and eventually which companies end up sponsoring venue. We aren't including individual situations below; just some analysis and discussion to understand the bigger picture.