Inside the Olympic Movement: Rich Perelman on Money, Politics, and the Road to LA 2028

Right now, the recent World Cup soccer tournament going on and FIFA, the body that controls soccer, has been criticized, among other things, for certain demands on its host cities and stadiums, including sponsorship omissions so the names of the stadiums cannot be officially used and replaced with very generic terms.

So the naming rights partners of these stadiums have really lost millions of dollars in exposure.

Does the IOC handle things differently regarding name sponsorships?

Well, yes

and no.

FIFA and the World Cup is a, even though it's compared many times to the Olympic Games, it's a totally different event and really should not be talked about in terms of complexity in the same time at the Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games in 28 is going to be 36 sports.

36 sports.

And there's going to be something on the order of 50 venues if you include all of the one-offs and the small fry like the marathons and the walks and things like that.

The World Cup is one event that even in its expanded format is one sport.

It takes place in 16 sites, none of which have more than eight events, none of which are more than one a day.

And it's done over a very long period of 39 days now.

So it's a different kind of event.

Very large, very interesting, but it's a different kind of event.

In terms of the way the sponsorships work, the IOC is in parallel.

They're not the same.

So you would see in the case of Los Angeles, the main stadium, the Olympic Stadium in 2028, is going to be the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which does not have a corporate name attached to it.

So it will be called the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Now, the opening ceremony will take place in SoFi Stadium, which is named for the mortgage company SoFi.

And that is a commercial deal that was struck between Kroenke Sports, which is the stadium owner, and SoFi.

Now, the Olympics will also not allow SoFi Stadium to be named that way because SoFi is not an Olympic sponsor.

Now, one of the things that the LA-28 organizers, and I think Wasserman has to get credit for this, has brought in is the idea on a pilot basis that a LA-28 sponsor, not necessarily IOC sponsor, but an LA-28 sponsor can come in and if they have naming rights, They can use them.

So as an example, the Honda Center, which is an arena where the Ducks play in the NHL.

The Honda Center, Honda is an L.A. 28 sponsor.

And so that venue will be called during the 2028 games, the Honda Center.