The Toronto Maple Leafs have taken a first small step over the economic edge and begun making their way down the slippery slope toward European-style shirt sponsorship.
This morning, the Leafs will debut a credit-card sized patch on the chest of the team’s practice jersey advertising the Purolator brand. It’s one element of a larger sponsorship deal that has the Canadian shipping giant paying the club an amount in the low seven figures, according to MLSE sources.
The Leafs become the sixth NHL franchise to take advantage of the league’s new (and in certain U.S. markets, desperate) search for additional revenue streams.
At this point, it’s an experiment contained to morning skates and the off-season.
But this is where it starts - on a practice jersey even the die-hards don’t give a damn about. This road leads, of course, to the sacramental cloth the players wear on game days.
Shirt sponsorship in the modern, splashed-in-big-letters-across-the-front sense started in Germany’s Bundesliga in the early 70s. It was deeply unpopular. Within a decade, everyone was doing it.
For the biggest soccer clubs in Europe, it is a colossal source of revenue. Manchester City recently signed a 10-year, $625 million sponsorship deal with Etihad Airways, the major component of which is their shirt-front billboard.
Nearly every sports league in the world has sold off its uniforms. Except here.
North America is an island in the larger world of professional sports, actually and ideologically. We are new countries with old traditions. The uniform colours don’t change year to year. The logos don’t ever really change. The symbols mean something.
This is the dangerous ground the NHL must now contemplate crossing while balancing several clubs in dangerous financial decline in one hand, and tradition in the other.
History has generally shown that, in that fight, money wins.
Any sort of switch that smells of commerce will be welcomed like a skunk at a garden party. Europeans (and eventually, everybody else) got used to it, but their transition was relatively simpler.
In Europe, there is little tradition of splashing a team logo across the front of a jersey. Most teams feature a small badge over the heart. That left a lot of unused real estate to play with.
In order to reap maximum financial advantage, NHL teams would have to make room by getting rid of their team logos.
Nobody in Raleigh is going to kick too hard if the stylized hurricane is bumped. Just try replacing the winged tire on Detroit’s jersey with a Chrysler logo. In the current climate, it’s impossible.
But, let’s say the NHL left this up to clubs to decide. And let’s imagine that a few of the fringe or nearly bankrupt outfits decided to try it out. As soon as the predictable backlash petered off, how long would the Original Six hold out?
How much would it cost, say, a Bell or a Rogers or a TD Bank, to convince Toronto to remove the maple leaf from the jersey front?
“That would be blasphemous,” MLSE VP Tom Anselmi said yesterday, when the idea was put to him.
So you’d rule it out categorically?
Anselmi is that rare sort who thinks about questions before he answers them. He thought for a long while.
“Yes,” he said finally. “As long as I’m here.”
He won’t be there forever.
They don’t step on the lot ‘less they wanna buy. That’s the car salesman’s creed. It works the other way around, too – you don’t open up this can of worms unless you’re willing to sell.
This will happen. As long as there’s a serious buck to be made, business logos will migrate from practice jerseys to game uniforms. It’s going to happen because too many clubs in the NHL need the money to survive.
The maple leaf will never disappear from the Toronto jersey. But who’d bet it will always be front and centre if shrinking it or pushing it off to the side earns the club half a year’s worth of ticket revenue?
When and if the NHL’s most famous symbols begin to fade in the capitalist clutter, the purists will wonder if anything is sacred any more.
The slow creep of commerce across the ocean and into North American sport’s holiest of holies suggests that nothing ever was.
