Changes in sponsor sales pay off for Sporting KC

Sporting Kansas City has transformed its commercial partnership group over the past two years, with the resulting revenue from that department increasing from $4.2 million in 2012 to $8.3 million last year.

That transformation and growth culminated earlier this month in Sporting KC being named the 2014 MLS Corporate Partnerships Team of the Year, one of the league’s annual awards. But the club still feels there’s more to achieve — most prominently, a naming-rights partnership for the team’s stadium.

The club sees an opportunity to achieve more in sponsorship sales, including selling naming rights to Sporting Park.



Jamie Guin, vice president of corporate partnerships with Sporting KC, has helped oversee the changes made in the department since joining the club from the New Orleans Hornets in August 2012. Among those steps has been placing more emphasis on what exactly the team can offer partners in their developing Kansas City market. An original MLS club (known back then as the Wizards), the team was rebranded as Sporting KC in 2010 in advance of a move into a new, soccer-specific stadium.

The team was purchased by a consortium of Kansas City investors from its original owner, Lamar Hunt, in 2006.

“Our business was totally transformed after playing at a baseball stadium and moving to a state-of-the-art facility and being sold out every night,” said Guin, referring to the team’s move in 2011 from CommunityAmerica Ballpark to Sporting Park, where the team has sold out its last 53 MLS matches. “Usually sponsorships are about a year lag time on ticket sales, but the marketplace still had a perception of what the team was hailing back to the Wizards’ days, so we needed to reach out to the big Kansas City companies and educate that marketplace that we’re one of the Big Five sports here and not a little brother.”

At the same time, the team’s nine-member partnership group has worked to stress what it sees as the differentiating points that set Sporting KC apart from the other teams in the area: a largely millennial audience; an organizational focus on technology and innovation; and perhaps most importantly, the team’s clear link to the local community with its Kansas City ownership group. It also has focused on providing partners an outlet for community outreach through cause and purpose marketing, such as its youth soccer program.

The results include Sporting KC more than doubling its number of partners from roughly 30 to 64 over the past two years, with five of those slotting in as “first team” partners. That top level of partnership brings the team at least $500,000 annually, and the club expects to unveil another such partner in the next 30 days, Guin said.

One of those first-team partners, Ivy Funds, is also the club’s first jersey sponsor. Signed initially in 2013, it agreed to a five-year extension of that jersey sponsorship in October.

The results in total have brought Sporting KC into the top half of MLS teams in terms of overall partnership revenue, and the club has set a goal to be in the top five by the end of the year. To reach that mark, Guin said the club hopes to push its number of first-team partners up to eight this year — with a stadium naming-rights partner potentially being one of them.

Of the 14 soccer-specific stadiums across MLS, only two lack a naming-rights partner: Sporting Park and Columbus Crew Stadium. Such deals typically fall in the $1 million to $2 million range of average annual value.

In 2011, Sporting KC announced a six-year naming-rights deal with the Livestrong Foundation, through which the club was set to donate a portion of revenue up to $7.5 million over the term of the deal to the foundation developed by cyclist Lance Armstrong. In 2013, after Armstrong’s admission of doping, the foundation and the club agreed to end the contract. The stadium has been without a naming-rights partner since.

Guin declined to comment on the targeted size of a deal but said the club is in talks with several potential partners, all of which are local Kansas City businesses.

“Across our entire organization, we’re very proud of our successes both on and off the field,” he said, “and we’re working really hard on telling the story of the league and the sport here.”