From the Over My Dead Body Department:
The Houston Texans are reportedly seeking a sponsor to purchase advertisements on the team’s practice jerseys, the Houston Chronicle reports. The ad would be on a patch no larger than 3 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches on the left shoulder of the jerseys. To entice potential buyers, the Texans put team patches on their practice jerseys to show what the ad would look like.
“It’s a natural evolutionary step in sports marketing,” said Oliver Luck, president and general manager of the Houston Dynamo. His team started selling ads on its jerseys in 2007. “It’s probably something Major League Baseball and perhaps even the NBA will look at,” Luck said. “It’s a very important piece of the soccer industry . . . Because soccer is the most popular sport in the world, you have a broad acceptance from fans around the world that it’s appropriate to put advertising on soccer jerseys,” he said. “And it’s a small step to go from a soccer jersey to a football, basketball or baseball jersey.”
I’ve long argued that whenever football comes up with a bright idea, baseball would do well to look it, understand it, and then do the exact opposite. This goes doubly true when football gets its ideas from soccer.
Yes, ads on soccer kits have “broad acceptance” around the world. Soccer fans also broadly accept ties, loose interpretations of game time limits, and rampant nationalism as a basis for their rooting interests. That’s fine. It’s their sport and they can do what they want with it. But if baseball ever allows soccer-style advertising on uniforms, I’ll do whatever I can to ensure that such advertisements serve only as a means of identifying products to be boycotted.
