The naming rights fire sale
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 day ago
- 37 min read
New Zealand taxpayers and ratepayers have wasted more than a billion dollars building three stadiums — and handed the corporate branding rights away for what amounts to small change. There were better options - demonstrated in Melbourne and Los Angeles - but nobody in this country took notice.
On 25 March 2026, the Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a naming rights deal that should have made every stadium trust in New Zealand sit up and take notice. The Japanese apparel giant Uniqlo had agreed to pay the Dodgers more than US$125 million over five years. For that sum — roughly NZ$42 million per annum — the company got its logo on the batter's eye in centre field, on the grass along the baselines, and on the façade beneath the press box. What it did not get was the right to rename Dodger Stadium.
Dodger Stadium, opened in 1962 and the first privately-financed Major League Baseball stadium since Yankee Stadium in 1923, kept its name. What was sold was the playing surface — "Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium". Team president Stan Kasten told The Los Angeles Times: "Dodgers Stadium will never be for sale." The Times' Bill Shaikin calculated that the annual naming-rights income is "in line with the ones at Crypto.com Arena, Intuit Dome and Sofi Stadium, without the Dodgers having to sell naming rights to the actual venue."
It is one of the most lucrative sports-marketing coups of the decade — and it was signed by a private owner who paid for his own stadium.
Now consider New Zealand. We — the ratepayers and taxpayers — have paid to build three covered rugby stadiums in the last twenty-five years at a combined cost of more than NZ$1 billion. The naming rights to all three have been handed to corporates on terms that would have embarrassed Walter O'Malley.
Contents
Forsyth Barr Stadium: $224 million build, $500,000 a year for the name
One New Zealand Stadium / Te Kaha: $683 million build, secret naming deal
Sky Stadium / Hnry Stadium: three corporate names in twenty-five years
The Australian comparison: the same pattern, slightly larger cheques
The Los Angeles Dodgers model: keep the name, sell the field
SoFi, MetLife, Emirates, Tottenham: what the private world pays
The cost-per-seat scandal: what New Zealand ratepayers pay for less stadium
The utilisation gap: paying more, using less
From Rotary basecourse to consultant culture: the familiar cycle
“But New Zealand is earthquake-prone”: the objection that doesn’t survive Auckland
One New Zealand Stadium: Where the local team and pitch features 2degrees logos
Why New Zealand ratepayers are getting fleeced
When naming rights cost more than they earn
Forsyth Barr Stadium: $224 million build, $500,000 a year for the name
The Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin opened on 5 August 2011, just in time for the Rugby World Cup. The final disclosed construction cost was $206.4 million plus $18 million in interest, a total of $224.4 million. A 2013 review by the council commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Otago Daily Times found that with road realignment, land purchase, legal fees and the acquisition of Carisbrook, the total public bill climbed to around $266 million.
Who paid? The Dunedin City Council borrowed $109 million. The Otago Regional Council committed $37.5 million, largely through targeted rates and a special Port Otago dividend (see ODT coverage of the ORC repayment structure). The Crown contributed $15 million. The University of Otago was a significant partner. Private-sector funding through seat sales and sponsorship was targeted at $45.5 million — a target the Carisbrook Stadium Trust never fully secured.
And the naming rights? In January 2009, Dunedin sharebroking firm Forsyth Barr announced a ten-year head naming rights deal. Neither party disclosed the figure. Chairman Sir Eion Edgar — who also sat on the Carisbrook Stadium Trust — called it a "significant sum" but "certainly not" what the trust would have liked. In fact, the trust's own 2007 marketing adviser had valued head naming rights at up to $10 million.
The actual figure leaked out later. When Forsyth Barr renewed the deal in 2020 for a further ten years, managing director Neil Paviour-Smith told the ODT the original decade had been "believed to be $5 million" — $500,000 per year. The renewed deal was described as "multimillion-dollar" and "worth more than it had paid for the past 10 years," although the actual figure was withheld.
Then there is the way the original contract was structured. Stadium critic Bev Butler, using the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, uncovered that Forsyth Barr made no payments whatsoever until September 2011 — two and a half years after signing — and then only monthly, in arrears. Ratepayers borrowed to cover the expected naming rights revenue and paid interest on that loan while the stadium was being built.
A $224 million public facility generating $500,000 a year in naming rights is a ratio of 0.22 per cent. Over the deal's lifetime, the naming rights amounted to roughly 2.2 per cent of the construction cost.
One New Zealand Stadium / Te Kaha: $683 million build, secret naming deal
If Dunedin's ratio is embarrassing, Christchurch's is worse. Te Kaha — the stadium name gifted by Ngāi Tūāhuriri — officially opened on 27 March 2026 and is operating under the commercial name One New Zealand Stadium. Its final construction cost was NZ$683 million.
The funding mix is almost entirely public. Christchurch City Council ratepayers committed $453 million. The Crown contributed $220 million. That is $673 million — or 98.5 per cent of the build — paid for by ratepayers and taxpayers. A Christchurch ratepayer now pays approximately $94 more per year in rates, rising to $209 in 2027-28, solely to service stadium debt. The stadium alone accounted for a two per cent rates rise in 2024.
On 3 July 2024, Venues Ōtautahi announced a ten-year naming rights deal with telecommunications company One New Zealand (the rebranded Vodafone New Zealand), running from 2026 to 2036. The financial value was not disclosed. Venues Ōtautahi spent $86,504 developing the Te Kaha brand and website — which will now live on as the precinct name while One New Zealand gets the stadium signage, the tickets, and the broadcast call-out.
The Christchurch deal runs on the same logic as Dunedin's. When a deal value is not disclosed in New Zealand, it is generally because the number is not impressive. If the sum were ten or twenty million a year, somebody would have leaked it. Comparable Australian deals for stadia of this size and use-case — we will get to Allianz, Optus and CommBank shortly — sit between A$2.4 million and A$6 million a year. The New Zealand market commands less.
A $683 million publicly-funded stadium, for which ratepayers are paying more on their rates bill than they pay in stadium naming revenue every year.
Sky Stadium / Hnry Stadium: three corporate names in twenty-five years
The Wellington Regional Stadium opened on 3 January 2000 at a cost of $130 million. Greater Wellington Regional Council put in $25 million, Wellington City Council $15 million, and $7 million came through grants and donations, with the balance funded through a trust structure, fundraising, and long-term debt serviced by the stadium's operating revenue.
From 2000 to 2019, the naming rights sat with Westpac Trust (later simply Westpac) for twenty years — one of the longest-running deals in Australasian sport. In August 2019, Sky Network Television took over under a six-year deal, renaming the venue Sky Stadium from 1 January 2020. Within three months Sky was back at the table — in the words of stadium trust chair John Shewan, "in talks" with Sky about the effect of the Covid-19 lockdown on the fee. The pay-TV operator, then posting a $607.8 million full-year loss, renegotiated its naming-rights payment downward during 2020.
In May 2025, Sky announced it would not renew. On 27 January 2026, the stadium trust announced a five-year deal with the Wellington-born accountancy-services firm Hnry, effective 1 March 2026. Hnry — an eight-year-old sole-trader tax company founded in Wellington — now has its name on a stadium that 12 million patrons have passed through. The deal value was not disclosed. The Wellington Stadium Trust is not a council-controlled organisation, but its board of trustees is appointed by Wellington City Council and Greater Wellington Regional Council.
In twenty-six years, the "Cake Tin" has had three commercial names. The sponsors' logos change; the building was paid for once, in 1999, and the debt still sits against the councils' balance sheets.
The Australian comparison: the same pattern, slightly larger cheques
New Zealanders sometimes imagine the Australian market to be a different species. In terms of naming-rights structure, it is not. The Australian pattern is the same: public money builds the stadium, private companies buy the identity for a fraction of the build cost. The difference is that Australia's corporate cheques are two to ten times the size, while the public build costs are often three to ten times larger.
Accor Stadium (Sydney Olympic Park) — originally Stadium Australia — was built for the 2000 Sydney Olympics at A$690 million of public money. Telstra purchased the first naming rights in 2002. ANZ took over in 2008 for A$31.5 million over seven years — then still described as Australia's biggest stadium naming rights agreement. In 2021, French hotel giant Accor signed a seven-year deal on undisclosed terms. The ANZ rate translates to A$4.5 million per year — about 0.65 per cent of the construction cost.
Allianz Stadium (Sydney Football Stadium) opened in August 2022 after a A$828 million rebuild funded entirely from NSW public coffers — a rebuild so controversial a 2019 report revealed that "basic upgrades to the Sydney Football Stadium could have cost as little as $18 million" and a critical revamp around $130 million. The naming rights deal with the German insurance giant was announced in March 2022: A$36 million over six years. That is A$6 million per year, 0.72 per cent of the build cost.
Optus Stadium (Perth) cost Western Australian taxpayers A$1.6 billion (rising to A$1.8 billion with transport infrastructure). Premier Colin Barnett had refused to sell the naming rights, arguing "having the name of the host city within the name of that city's most significant big sports grounds is common practice around the world." When Labor won the 2017 election, Mark McGowan's government reversed course. Optus signed a ten-year deal worth approximately A$50 million — A$5 million a year, or 0.31 per cent of the construction cost, for naming the most expensive stadium in Australian history.
CommBank Stadium (Parramatta) was built by the NSW Government for A$360 million and opened in April 2019. Bankwest signed a seven-year, A$17 million deal at opening; the rights transferred within the Commonwealth Bank group to the parent brand in October 2021 on undisclosed terms. The Bankwest rate worked out to just A$2.4 million a year — 0.68 per cent of construction cost — for one of Sydney's busiest rectangular venues.
Marvel Stadium (Melbourne Docklands) is the outlier: built in 2000 at A$460 million, privately financed by the Docklands Stadium Consortium with the AFL taking ownership in 2016 for a nominal $30. Its naming deals — Colonial Bank (A$32.5 million / 10 yr), Telstra (A$50 million / 7 yr), Etihad (A$5–8 million annually), and now Marvel Entertainment (eight years from 2018) — reflect what a private owner can extract: significantly more per year than any New Zealand or publicly-built Australian comparator of similar vintage.
Suncorp Stadium (Brisbane) — formerly Lang Park — has carried the Suncorp name since 1994, after a A$280 million public redevelopment opened in 2003. Stadiums Queensland extended the Suncorp deal for a further decade in 2021. Financial terms are not publicly disclosed. What has endured is the discount: thirty-plus years of the same brand, because every renewal is negotiated from the trust's position of weakness, not strength.
Engie Stadium (Sydney Showground) received a A$65 million public upgrade in 2011–12. It has been Škoda Stadium, Spotless Stadium, Giants Stadium (self-branded by its AFL tenant), and — since March 2024 — Engie Stadium under a three-year deal with the French energy giant, on undisclosed terms.
Other venues on the list — UTAS Stadium (Launceston), Ninja Stadium (formerly Blundstone Arena, Hobart), TIO Stadium (Darwin), Queensland Country Bank Stadium (Townsville), Cbus Super Stadium (Gold Coast), GIO Stadium (Canberra), HBF Park (Perth Rectangular), Coopers Stadium (Adelaide Hindmarsh), AAMI Park (Melbourne), Mars Stadium (Ballarat), Brighton Homes Arena (Springfield), People First Stadium (Carrara), McDonald Jones Stadium (Newcastle), 4 Pines Park (Brookvale), Kayo Stadium (Redcliffe), RSEA Park (Moorabbin), Ikon Park (Princes Park, Carlton), and Ocean Protect Stadium (Cronulla, 2026) — follow the same pattern: public money or AFL/NRL club money built the physical stadium, corporate partners buy the signage on short-to-medium-term deals. In every case, the construction cost is public; the naming rights revenue is a fraction of that.
Across the Tasman, the pattern is identical. Public builds it. Private names it. And nobody has worked out a better answer.
The Los Angeles Dodgers model: keep the name, sell the field
Which brings us back to Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers are a publicly-traded sports property owned since 2012 by Guggenheim Baseball Management — a consortium led by Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, with Magic Johnson, Todd Boehly, Stan Kasten and Peter Guber as partners. Forbes valued the franchise at US$7.8 billion in 2026 on revenues of US$850 million.
Walter O'Malley built Dodger Stadium in 1962 for US$23 million of his own money — the only privately-financed Major League Baseball stadium in the thirty-nine years between Yankee Stadium (1923) and Oracle Park, San Francisco (2000). Adjusted for inflation, US$23 million is roughly US$230 million today. The city's contribution was the site — 352 acres of Chavez Ravine, acquired by Los Angeles through a deeply controversial use of eminent domain under the Federal Housing Act of 1949, then traded to O'Malley in exchange for the deed to the old Wrigley Field in LA and his commitment to build at his own cost, pay taxes on the stadium, and maintain the facility.
Sixty-four years later, the franchise owned by Walter O'Malley's successors found a way to extract roughly US$25 million a year — NZ$42 million a year — while retaining "Dodger Stadium" as the official venue name. The Uniqlo deal is structured as "field presenting partner" and "Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium" appears in broadcast scripts, signage and stadium apparel. Tadashi Yanai, Uniqlo's founder, acknowledged publicly that "many fans will keep calling the ballpark 'Dodger Stadium' regardless of what the signage says. That's a very natural reaction. We respect that."
This is the clever part. Uniqlo paid full market price — Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times both confirmed US$125 million over five years — for a rebrandable secondary asset. The primary asset — "Dodger Stadium", a name with sixty-four years of accumulated civic meaning — stayed in the ownership of the franchise. Shaikin noted the deal's per-annum value is "on par with what was paid for Crypto.com Arena, Intuit Dome, and SoFi Stadium, but without having to give up the name of the actual venue."
Dodger Stadium is now in its fifth year of an increasingly Japanese commercial strategy. Since Shohei Ohtani signed in December 2023 on a ten-year, US$700 million contract, the franchise has attracted sponsorship deals from Nippon Airways, Toyo Tires, Daiso, Yakult and others. The 2025 World Series averaged 9.7 million viewers in Japan. Uniqlo — 794 stores in Japan, only 78 in the United States — gets brand exposure its retail footprint alone could never buy. The Dodgers get a revenue stream. Los Angeles keeps its ballpark name.
This is what a mature market looks like. The branding asset the public cares about is separated from the branding asset the corporate wants.
SoFi, MetLife, Emirates, Tottenham: what the private world pays
To understand why the Uniqlo deal is such a smart piece of commercial architecture, look at what the private stadium market actually pays for full stadium naming rights.
SoFi Stadium (Inglewood, Los Angeles) , the US$5.5 billion home of the Rams and Chargers, is entirely privately funded by Stan Kroenke. When it opened in 2020, Social Finance Inc. committed to a 20-year naming deal reportedly worth US$625 million — more than US$30 million a year — the richest stadium naming-rights deal in world sports at the time.
MetLife Stadium (East Rutherford, New Jersey) was built jointly by the New York Giants and Jets in 2010 with private funds, at a cost of US$1.6 billion. MetLife Insurance signed a 25-year, US$400 million naming-rights agreement in 2011 — approximately US$17–20 million a year. For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the stadium must temporarily revert to "New York/New Jersey Stadium" due to FIFA's strict sponsorship rules, costing MetLife roughly a month of branded exposure but not the deal itself.
Emirates Stadium (London) , Arsenal Football Club's home since 2006, was built for £390 million using a combination of bank loans secured against future revenue, a supporter bond scheme, and the sale of Highbury for residential redevelopment. Emirates Airline paid £100 million in 2004 for fifteen years of naming rights plus eight years of shirt sponsorship — the biggest club sponsorship in English football history at the time. The naming-rights element alone, now running at roughly £4 million a year, is widely considered below market; Arsenal is seeking a significantly higher figure for the 2028 renewal.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium , opened in 2019 at a cost of roughly £1 billion (with just £32 million in government grants — the rest private), still has no naming rights sponsor seven years in. Chairman Daniel Levy is holding out for £25 million a year. The club has reportedly turned down deals in the £10–15 million range. It is a useful data point: a privately-built stadium with a strong brand, in London, can afford to wait for £25 million a year, or more than ten times the annual rate any New Zealand or publicly-funded Australian stadium has been able to secure.
Scotiabank Arena (Toronto) — formerly Air Canada Centre, home to the Maple Leafs and Raptors — is the record-holder in North American sport for annual naming rights. Scotiabank signed a 20-year, C$800 million deal in 2017 to rename the venue from July 2018. That is C$40 million a year, up from Air Canada's roughly C$4 million. The arena itself is owned by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, a private joint venture of Rogers Communications and Bell Canada.
The clear pattern: when stadiums are privately owned, naming rights command 1–3 per cent of the construction cost per year. When they are publicly owned, the figure collapses to 0.2–0.7 per cent.
The cost-per-seat scandal: what New Zealand ratepayers pay for less stadium
There is a second, harder question sitting underneath the naming-rights one, and it is more damaging: New Zealand ratepayers are not just giving the branding away cheaply, they are paying far more per seat for their stadiums than almost any comparable country.
The most damning comparison is internal. In 2011, Dunedin completed the world's first permanent-roof natural-grass stadium — Forsyth Barr Stadium — at a disclosed construction cost of NZ$224.4 million for 30,000 seats. That is NZ$7,480 per seat. Adjusting for New Zealand construction-price inflation since 2011 — which Te Waihanga has measured as running roughly one-third faster than general CPI — the 2026-dollar equivalent is around NZ$320 million, or about NZ$10,600 per seat.
Fifteen years later, Christchurch has built a functionally similar covered 30,000-seat stadium — Te Kaha / One New Zealand Stadium — for NZ$683 million. That is NZ$22,767 per seat. Even after accounting for 15 years of New Zealand construction-cost inflation, Te Kaha is more than twice as expensive per seat as Forsyth Barr. The stadiums are the same capacity, the same covered configuration, the same hosting use-case. Christchurch just paid double.
One covered 30,000-seat stadium at NZ$10,600 per seat. Another covered 30,000-seat stadium, fifteen years later, at NZ$22,767 per seat. Both paid for by the public.
The external comparisons are, if anything, more embarrassing. The Principality Stadium (formerly Millennium Stadium) in Cardiff — a retractable-roof, 74,500-seat international rugby venue opened for the 1999 Rugby World Cup — was built for £121 million (of which £46 million was UK Lottery funding). That is £1,636 per seat at 1999 prices. Even after 26 years of UK construction inflation, the equivalent per-seat cost today is roughly NZ$7,500 — a third of what Te Kaha is costing per seat. And Principality Stadium has a fully-operating retractable roof, twice the capacity, and hosts a rugby World Cup, European football finals, and international concerts.
Eden Park, Auckland's 50,000-seat national stadium, was redeveloped for the 2011 Rugby World Cup at a disclosed cost of NZ$256 million. That is NZ$5,120 per permanent seat — although it should be noted Eden Park is an open-air stadium. The redevelopment was partly funded by central government ($190 million budget cap approved in 2007), Auckland Council ($15 million plus a later $40 million debt takeover), the Eden Park Trust Board and NZRFU. Even the Auckland redevelopment came in at less than a quarter of Te Kaha's per-seat cost.
Wellington's own public stadium — built in 1999 as WestpacTrust Stadium, later Sky Stadium, and now Hnry Stadium — cost NZ$130 million for 34,500 seats. That is NZ$3,768 per seat at 2000 prices. Run through New Zealand construction-price inflation over the intervening 26 years, the 2026-dollar equivalent is approximately NZ$8,300 per seat. Wellington also got a cricket-capable playing surface out of the deal — something neither Forsyth Barr nor Te Kaha can offer, because both were built with permanent fixed rugby pitches. The capital city's stadium, with 15 per cent more seating and dual-code cricket-and-rugby capability, cost a third as much per seat as Christchurch's new covered arena.
Across the Tasman, the two most natural comparators for Te Kaha are Melbourne's Docklands Stadium and Perth's Optus Stadium — both multipurpose venues built in the same era, both with Te Kaha-comparable amenity packages.
Melbourne's Docklands Stadium — now Marvel Stadium — opened in 2000 as Colonial Stadium. Construction cost: A$460 million, entirely privately financed by a Seven Network-led consortium, with the AFL taking ownership in 2016 for a nominal A$30. Capacity 53,000, with a fully retractable roof and movable seating that converts the playing surface from oval AFL configuration to rectangular rugby/football configuration in a matter of hours. Per-seat cost: A$8,679. Allowing for twenty-five years of Australian construction inflation to bring it to 2026 prices — roughly a doubling — Marvel Stadium cost comparably to Forsyth Barr, and well under Te Kaha, despite being significantly larger and fully flexible. The A$460 million was private money.
Perth's Optus Stadium opened in 2018 at a final cost of A$1.6 billion, rising to approximately A$1.8 billion once transport infrastructure was included, entirely funded by the Western Australian government during a construction boom. It seats 60,000 — double Te Kaha's 30,000 — and includes a far larger corporate-hospitality footprint, a dedicated Stadium railway station with six platforms, a pedestrian bridge across the Swan River, and a full precinct of food and beverage outlets. Per-seat cost (stadium alone): A$26,667. Per-seat cost in 2026 NZD at purchasing-power parity: roughly NZ$29,000 per seat.
That is the comparison that should trouble Christchurch ratepayers most. Optus Stadium cost A$26,667 per seat in an inflationary Western Australian resources-boom market, for a 60,000-seat venue with transport infrastructure bundled in. Te Kaha cost NZ$22,767 per seat, in a post-Covid construction market that was not especially inflationary by 2024–25, for a 30,000-seat venue with no comparable precinct infrastructure. Normalising for capacity, Te Kaha cost roughly the same per seat as a stadium twice its size. Either Perth overpaid — which Colin Barnett was accused of — or Christchurch overpaid by a factor of two.
Te Kaha's per-seat cost sits closer to Optus Stadium — Australia's most expensive stadium ever — than to any other publicly-funded covered venue built anywhere in the English-speaking world. At half the capacity.
Further down the Australian cost curve, the picture becomes more brutal still:
Suncorp Stadium redevelopment (Brisbane, 2003) — A$280 million for 52,500 seats = A$5,333 per seat, publicly funded rebuild.
Accor Stadium / Stadium Australia (Sydney, 1999) — A$690 million for 83,500 seats = A$8,263 per seat, Olympic-grade venue, publicly funded.
CommBank Stadium (Parramatta, 2019) — A$360 million for 30,000 seats = A$12,000 per seat, publicly funded rectangular stadium.
Allianz Stadium (Sydney Football Stadium, 2022) — A$828 million for 42,500 seats = A$19,482 per seat, publicly funded rebuild.
Among privately-funded stadiums, the pattern is equally revealing:
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (2019) — £1 billion for 62,850 seats = £15,911 per seat, almost entirely private.
MetLife Stadium (New York/New Jersey, 2010) — US$1.6 billion for 82,500 seats = US$19,394 per seat, entirely private (Giants and Jets).
Emirates Stadium (London, 2006) — £390 million for 60,704 seats = £6,425 per seat, private (bank loans + supporter bonds + Highbury site sale).
Dodger Stadium (1962) — US$23 million for 56,000 seats = US$411 per seat, entirely private. Adjusted to 2026 USD, approximately US$4,100 per seat.
Te Kaha costs New Zealand ratepayers more per seat than almost every major publicly-funded covered stadium built in the English-speaking world in the last quarter-century.
This is not an accident. It sits inside a documented national pattern. Te Waihanga, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, has benchmarked the country against other high-income nations and found New Zealand carries a significant "cost premium" on "complex, large-scale infrastructure projects." Stadiums fit that definition exactly. In a separate analysis, Te Waihanga found that New Zealand ranks in the bottom 10 per cent of high-income countries for infrastructure investment efficiency, with infrastructure prices rising one-third faster than general prices and construction productivity growing at one-third the rate of the wider economy.
QV CostBuilder's 2025 analysis adds the commercial-sector confirmation: New Zealand building-cost inflation has run roughly 1.8 times the pace of general inflation over the past decade. The country builds slower, builds more expensively, and — when it comes to mega-projects — builds significantly more expensively than its international peers, in real purchasing-power terms.
The implication for a fair naming-rights settlement is direct. If New Zealand is paying roughly twice what Australia pays and three times what the UK pays for the physical stadium, the country should be demanding a proportionally larger cut of the branding value, not settling for a proportionally smaller one. The numbers run the other way.
The utilisation gap: paying more, using less
There is one further dimension to the New Zealand stadium economics problem that the cost-per-seat numbers alone do not capture: how often the buildings are actually used. A stadium is a fixed-cost asset. Its construction debt is paid down over decades. Its naming-rights revenue, ticket receipts, and corporate-box income are all functions of how many days a year somebody — anybody — is inside the building. The fewer the events, the worse the economics. And on this measure, New Zealand has chosen a stadium model that hosts a small fraction of the events that an Australian or American comparator hosts.
Consider the three markets. In the United States, a Major League Baseball regular season runs to 162 games. Half of them are home games. Dodger Stadium therefore opens its gates 81 times a year before a single playoff fixture, pre-season exhibition, concert, or civic event is added. Layer on the off-season — Dodger Stadium has hosted McCartney, Elton John, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, papal masses, soccer matches, and Hollywood premieres — and a single year inside the building easily clears 100 paid-attendance event-days. The other 29 venues on the MLB roster operate from the same baseline. American stadium economics start from the assumption that the asset is in use roughly one day in three.
Australia operates a different model and produces a similar utilisation result. Multipurpose oval venues — the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Sydney Cricket Ground, Adelaide Oval, the Gabba, Optus Stadium — host four formats of cricket alongside winter Australian Football League fixtures: domestic Sheffield Shield, the 50-over List A competition, the Big Bash League T20, and international Tests, ODIs and T20Is. The same playing surface that hosts a Boxing Day Test in December is hosting an AFL Anzac Day match by April, a State of Origin in June, and a stadium concert in November. The oval geometry — which is what makes the Australian stadium a true multipurpose venue — is not an aesthetic choice. It is a revenue choice. The MCG schedules dozens of AFL home games, the showcase international cricket fixtures of an Australian summer, and a year-round concert calendar in a single building, on a single debt facility.
New Zealand has gone the other way. Forsyth Barr Stadium, as noted earlier, hosts roughly three major events a year. Te Kaha — by design — cannot host cricket; its fixed seating geometry and rectangular surface preclude it. Hnry Stadium retains a cricket-capable surface, but its rugby tenancy dominates the calendar. The country’s once-multipurpose approach — where Eden Park hosted both rugby and cricket, and Carisbrook did the same in Dunedin — has been progressively abandoned. In Christchurch, Te Kaha now handles rugby and the open-air, grass-terraced Hagley Oval handles cricket: two ratepayer-funded facilities to do the work that one used to do, neither of them covered for the cricketing summer. In Auckland, a Foundation Agreement signed in April 2026 has Auckland Cricket leaving Eden Park altogether for a $10 million upgrade of Colin Maiden Park in St Johns, Auckland Rugby looking for a separate “fit-for-purpose regional facility,” Eden Park itself pursuing a $550 million redevelopment plan with a $120 million first stage that may eventually include a roof, and Western Springs being remade as the “Western Springs Bowl” — a Hollywood Bowl-inspired summer concert venue with a boutique sports stadium attached. One city, in one announcement, has split itself into four single-purpose venues where it used to manage with two multipurpose ones.
An Australian oval handles four formats of cricket and AFL across summer and winter. An American MLB stadium handles 81 home games plus a concert season. A New Zealand rectangular stadium handles three rugby weekends a year — and has the more expensive per-seat construction cost of the three.
The naming-rights logic of all this is bleak. The corporate logo on the outside of the building is, in commercial terms, a billboard on a building that is empty for the overwhelming majority of the year. The advertising inventory inside the stadium — on the field surface itself, on the perimeter LED boards, on the goalposts, on every visible angle of the broadcast — turns over on every match-day, sold and resold to whichever sponsor pays the highest match-day rate. Inside-the-stadium advertising is the high-value space. The naming right is the low-value space. New Zealand has built three of the most expensive low-value spaces in the public-stadium world, and is now actively building more of them.
There was a working alternative on the table at every one of these decisions, and it was Marvel Stadium in Melbourne — the privately-financed Docklands venue noted earlier in this column. Covered, retractable-pitch, with movable seating that converts the playing surface from oval AFL configuration to rectangular rugby and football configuration in a matter of hours. It hosts AFL, rugby league, football, rugby union, concerts, motorsport, and stadium-scale corporate events in one building, on one site, on one debt facility. A Marvel-equivalent stadium in each of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch would have given New Zealand three world-class venues capable of hosting Test cricket, rugby internationals, AFL exhibition fixtures, FIFA World Cup matches, and the stadium-scale concerts that currently route around New Zealand to Sydney and Melbourne. With three such venues, the country could realistically have bid to co-host major international sporting and cultural events. With the venues it has actually built — and is now actively splitting further into single-purpose fragments — it cannot.
Auckland’s choice to keep upgrading Eden Park is the clearest case of the road not taken. A Docklands-style covered stadium on Auckland’s waterfront, near Britomart, would have sat alongside Spark Arena, the cruise terminal, the central hotel district, and the hospitality strips of the Viaduct and Wynyard Quarter. Patrons would arrive by train, ferry, bus, or on foot, then spill into the surrounding bars, restaurants, and accommodation that the location already provides. Eden Park, by contrast, sits in a residential suburb. It is accessible by one branch-line train station and a tightly-policed corridor of side streets, with no comparable density of nearby hotels, hospitality, or other entertainment venues. Concerts at Eden Park trigger consent battles with neighbours; concerts at a waterfront stadium would not. The opportunity cost is not architectural — it is the events the city does not host, the World Cups it cannot stage, and the concert seasons that bypass Auckland entirely.
As a side note, the same three cities that have made expensive single-code stadium decisions have also made notably fragmented conference-centre decisions — and the parallel is instructive. Auckland Council inherited The Cloud and Shed 10 on Queens Wharf, built by the central government for the 2011 Rugby World Cup as a waterfront “party central” and now described by Auckland councillors themselves as “not exactly fit for purpose,” while the Government separately negotiated the SkyCity International Convention Centre deal in 2013 — two large facilities in the same CBD, ending up in partly-overlapping markets. Wellington’s original convention-centre vision had Sir Peter Jackson’s movie museum anchoring the Cable Street exhibition floor and pulling the city-wide tourism traffic that a stand-alone convention venue cannot generate; that arrangement collapsed in August 2018, and the resulting Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre opened in May 2023 at NZ$180 million and is currently running a multi-million-dollar annual operating loss. Christchurch built Te Pae as its post-quake anchor convention project on Oxford Terrace — a respectable central-CBD location, but on the opposite side of the four avenues from Te Kaha, with no integrated precinct planning between the city’s two largest publicly-funded event assets. The conference-centre map in each of the three cities tells the same story as the stadium map: dispersed, single-purpose, expensive, and disconnected from the transport, hospitality, and accommodation that would have driven utilisation.
New Zealand’s design, cost, and revenue stack is not working. The buildings cost more, hold fewer events, and earn less from naming rights than nearly every comparable jurisdiction. The Marvel Stadium model — covered, multipurpose, integrated with transport and hospitality — was on the table for every one of these decisions and was taken in none of them.
From Rotary basecourse to consultant culture: the familiar cycle
Readers of this column will recognise the pattern. In "When good intentions paved the road to gridlock: New Zealand's cycleway saga", I traced how the Hawke's Bay cycleways — built in the 1990s and early 2000s by Rotary volunteers spreading basecourse along river stopbanks — became the 21st "surprise" announcement at John Key's 2009 Jobs Summit. A $50 million national cycleway "with absolutely no rigorous — or even token — cost-benefit analysis" (as Labour's Kelvin Davis put it at the time) unleashed a consultant bonanza that has since seen the Petone cycleway blow out from a $50 million Wellington-to-Hutt estimate to $63 million for the Petone section alone, the Auckland Skypath balloon from $67 million in 2018 to $240 million before the Government pulled funding, and the Auckland Transport business cases for Quay Street, Nelson Street, Grafton Gully and Beach Road all overestimate demand by factors suggesting, in the regulator's own words, "exaggerated data to improve business cases to give a favourable cost-benefit analysis."
The stadium saga runs on the same template.
Stadium rugby in New Zealand began as amateur community infrastructure. Carisbrook was built by the Otago Rugby Football Union. Eden Park was built by Auckland sports associations. Players' clubs, members' subs and gate takings paid for the terraces, the concrete, the corrugated-iron sheds. The professional era — which began in 1995 with the IRB's decision to allow rugby to pay its players — should, logically, have been the moment the game funded its own stadiums too. Professional rugby has broadcast-rights money, sponsorship deals, and corporate-box revenue streams the amateur game never had.
Instead, the opposite happened. The 2011 Rugby World Cup became New Zealand rugby's Jobs Summit. An international tournament awarded in 2005 translated into public-funded covered stadiums in Dunedin ($224 million plus cost overruns) and a $256 million Eden Park redevelopment. The 2011 Christchurch earthquakes — a genuine catastrophe — then generated a second wave of anchor-project stadium investment, culminating in Te Kaha's $683 million. In each case, professional rugby's governing bodies were a beneficiary of the spending; in none of them did the professional game meaningfully contribute to the construction cost.
And alongside each of those public builds, a consultant supply chain appeared. PricewaterhouseCoopers peer-reviewed Dunedin's economic forecasts. The ODT later confirmed that the Carisbrook Stadium Trust's private-sector funding targets — $45.5 million — were "not, and are still not fully secure" when the final contract was signed. A 2013 MBIE meta-analysis of 18 major events found that organisers and consultants had systematically overstated economic impact by 350 per cent — claiming $143.8 million in benefits when independent analysis found $32.1 million. Christchurch's Te Kaha was promoted as generating a $50 million annual economic benefit for the region; ratepayers are currently paying a 2 per cent rate rise plus $94–$209 extra per year to service the debt.
The cycleway model and the stadium model are the same model, just built of different materials: public money funds the asset, consultants inflate the business case, and the corporate logo goes on the finished product for a fraction of the build cost.
In the cycleway case, the corporate signage is on Auckland Transport's branding boards and the tour operator signs along the Great Rides — and the outputs are often barely-used cycle lanes in Wellington, Hastings and Auckland. In the stadium case, the corporate signage is on the stadium itself — and the outputs are venues that host only a handful of major events a year. Forsyth Barr Stadium has hosted just 30 major events since 2014, roughly three per year, according to information released under the LGOIMA. Covered or uncovered, most stadiums — like most urban cycleways — sit empty most of the time.
The deeper problem is the extraction of credit. Corporations that contributed little to the build get their names on the building. Consultants whose business cases justified the build collect their fees. Politicians who announced the projects take the ribbon-cutting photograph. The ratepayer pays for all of it and is then sold the resulting branded asset as a corporate gift to their city.
We need a better accounting of who paid for what, and who is taking the credit for it. Names on buildings matter — because names on buildings rewrite public memory of who actually bought the building.
“But New Zealand is earthquake-prone”: the objection that doesn’t survive Auckland
The standard rebuttal to any New Zealand stadium cost comparison runs like this: “Our buildings must be engineered for earthquakes. You can’t compare us to Cardiff or London.” It is a reasonable objection in general, but it does not survive scrutiny in the specific case of Auckland — and it does not explain the Te Kaha cost premium either.
Start with Auckland. Under New Zealand’s Building Act, the country is divided into high, medium, and low seismic risk zones. Auckland is formally classified as a low seismic risk zone — one of the least seismically active parts of the country. On average, fewer than ten earthquakes occur in the Auckland region per year, most too small to be felt. The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission’s cost benchmarks and the Building Act’s earthquake-prone building remediation rules both reflect this: Auckland buildings are subject to a 35-year remediation window, not the tighter timelines applied to high-risk zones. Eden Park, which this column has noted was redeveloped for the 2011 Rugby World Cup for NZ$256 million, sits in a low seismic zone. The seismic loading requirement for a stadium in Tāmaki Makaurau is materially lower than for one in Wellington or Christchurch. The earthquake objection does not apply to Auckland.
For Christchurch, the objection carries more weight — but the weight it carries is itself a reason to question the Te Kaha build cost, not excuse it. The 2011 earthquake sequence that destroyed Lancaster Park (formerly AMI Stadium, formerly Jade Stadium) had an ironic prologue: just before the February 2011 earthquake, the city had completed a $60 million redevelopment of the stadium’s eastern stand, the Deans Stand, opened in January 2010, specifically to bring Lancaster Park to a 38,500-seat capacity for the Rugby World Cup. That brand-new stand — built to modern standards, in an earthquake-prone city, with full knowledge of Christchurch’s seismic history — was so severely damaged by the February quake that it, along with the rest of the stadium, was eventually demolished. Repair costs were assessed at $255 million to $275 million for a stadium insured for only $143 million. Demolition cost a further $12 to $20 million over two years.
The lesson of Lancaster Park is not that earthquake engineering makes stadiums more expensive in ways that justify the Te Kaha premium. It is the opposite: Lancaster Park’s $60 million in pre-earthquake upgrades was spent on a multi-purpose open stadium of approximately 38,500 seats — meaning the city spent around $1,560 per seat on a refurbishment, then lost the whole asset within twelve months. Te Kaha, by contrast, is a fully covered stadium at $22,767 per seat, built on an inner-city site to replace the demolished venue. The earthquake does not explain the cost; the earthquake explains the vacancy. The building code in New Zealand has not changed dramatically since 2011. What has changed is the procurement culture, the materials market, and — as Te Waihanga’s benchmarking confirms — New Zealand’s systemic construction cost premium, which has grown roughly one-third faster than general inflation over the past fifteen years. Seismicity is a constant in Christchurch. The cost premium is not.
If earthquake engineering were the primary driver of cost, we would expect to see New Zealand building costs cluster at or above the Christchurch level across the country. They do not. Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin — also built in a seismically active South Island city, also to a modern building code, and also a covered stadium — came in at NZ$224 million in 2011 for the same 30,000-seat capacity. Adjusting to 2026 dollars, that is roughly NZ$10,600 per seat. Te Kaha is $22,767 per seat. Both cities are in seismically active zones. Both stadiums are covered. The difference in cost is not explained by earthquake engineering. It is explained by fifteen years of New Zealand’s construction cost spiral — and by the absence of any competitive pressure on a public client who has no alternative supplier and no hard budget constraint.
Auckland is in a low seismic zone; the earthquake objection does not apply there. Christchurch is seismically active, but Dunedin is too — and Te Kaha cost more than twice as much per seat as Forsyth Barr, despite both being covered 30,000-seat stadiums built under the same national building code.
One New Zealand Stadium: Where the local team and pitch features 2degrees logos
There is one further detail about the One New Zealand Stadium naming deal that deserves its own paragraph, because it is either a failure of due diligence or a masterpiece of comic irony — possibly both.
The stadium is named after One New Zealand — the rebranded Vodafone New Zealand, a telecommunications company. The main tenant of the stadium is the Crusaders Super Rugby franchise. The Crusaders’ exclusive telecommunications partner, whose logo appears on the front of every Crusaders jersey worn at every home game, is 2degrees — a competing telecommunications company. 2degrees extended its deal as exclusive telco partner for all five New Zealand Super Rugby sides through to at least 2026, with the logo appearing at pride of place on every jersey. When the Crusaders run out onto the pitch inside One New Zealand Stadium, the centrepiece branding on the playing surface — the giant logo visible from every seat and every broadcast camera — is the name of a company whose direct commercial rival is printed on every player’s chest.
Outside the stadium: One New Zealand. On the centre of the pitch: the same. On the jerseys of every player on that pitch: 2degrees. The two sponsorships do not compound each other — they cancel each other out. A telecommunications brand that names the stadium achieves maximum exposure in the moments when a rival telecommunications brand has maximum jersey exposure. Every broadcast close-up of a Crusaders player that captures the stadium-name graphic board in the background is, simultaneously, an advertisement for both competing telcos — and therefore a clean advertisement for neither.
It is worth noting, for completeness, what neither of the two stadiums discussed in detail in this column can actually offer. The Wellington Regional Stadium — now Hnry Stadium — is not a fully covered stadium; it has an open section that limits all-weather use. And One New Zealand Stadium, despite its $683 million construction cost, cannot host cricket. The playing surface and the fixed seating geometry are configured exclusively for rugby and football. Hagley Oval, an open-air venue built after the earthquakes, handles Christchurch’s international cricket. A ratepayer who hoped the $683 million anchor project would return Christchurch to the Test cricket map is out of luck.
The stadium is named after a telco. The team is sponsored by a rival telco. The two brands cancel each other out at the precise moment — broadcast rugby — when both are paying for maximum exposure. It is the most expensive way possible to achieve zero net brand differentiation.
Why New Zealand ratepayers are getting fleeced
The reasons New Zealand trusts extract so little from naming rights deals are structural, not accidental.
First — the asymmetry of information. When the naming rights to Forsyth Barr Stadium were negotiated in 2008, the Carisbrook Stadium Trust's chair and the signing company's chairman were the same person's close associates. Sir Eion Edgar was a director of Forsyth Barr at the time he joined the CST board "many months before the signing of the Forsyth Barr naming rights deal," as the ODT coverage noted. The trust negotiating the price was intertwined with the corporate buying the name.
Second — the structural weakness of the seller. New Zealand stadium trusts are not-for-profit entities appointed by councils and reliant on tenant rugby unions whose professional clubs need the venue to exist. Ratepayers cannot walk away. The corporate buyer always has the option of doing nothing. The result is what economists call a "negotiation imbalance" — a term of art for "the trust takes what it can get."
Third — the small market. New Zealand has a population of 5.3 million people. A stadium name in Dunedin or Christchurch reaches perhaps 1.5 million televised game-viewers on a good year. A naming right in Sydney reaches ten times that audience. In Los Angeles, a hundred times. Naming rights prices track media reach, which tracks addressable audience. That part is immutable.
Fourth — the deliberate obscurity of the disclosure. Every significant New Zealand naming rights deal has been announced without a financial figure. The Hnry–Sky Stadium announcement of 27 January 2026 did not reveal the value. Nor did the One New Zealand Stadium announcement of 3 July 2024. Nor did the Forsyth Barr renewal in 2020. This is not accidental. Ratepayers who paid for the stadium have no way of assessing whether the naming rights fee they are receiving represents fair value, because the fee is a commercial secret between a publicly-controlled trust and a private corporation.
That last point is the most objectionable. A Dunedin ratepayer can see, down to the last cent, the $2.8 million per year targeted rate the ORC levied to service its stadium debt. That same Dunedin ratepayer cannot see what Forsyth Barr is paying to put its logo on the building they are paying for. The information flows one way.
When naming rights cost more than they earn
Underneath the pricing question lies a more basic one: what is a naming-rights deal supposed to be in the first place? At its honest core, sponsorship is an exchange of money for a direct link between a brand and the costs of the thing being sponsored. A logo on a Crusaders jersey points to something straightforward — 2degrees is helping cover the cost of fielding the team. A logo on a Formula One car points to the cost of building and racing it. The brand value the sponsor receives is grounded in that link: the sponsor is genuinely supporting the activity the customer cares about, and the customer can see the connection.
A logo on the outside of a publicly-funded stadium points to nothing of the kind. The ratepayers paid for the building. The Crown topped it up. The corporate sponsor paid a fee — usually undisclosed, almost always small relative to the construction cost — for the right to put its name on a building that exists regardless. There is no direct link between the corporate spend and the existence of the asset. The sponsor is buying signage on a building it did not help build, on terms designed to obscure how little was actually exchanged. That is a precarious foundation for brand value, and it carries a series of risks that the sellers and the buyers both routinely underestimate.
The first risk is backlash. When ratepayers realise that they paid $683 million for a stadium and the company whose name is on it paid an undisclosed sum that the trust will not name — but which the broader market suggests is somewhere between $1 million and $4 million a year — the brand association the corporate has bought is not goodwill. It is a reminder that someone got the asset cheaply on the public’s dime. Secrecy compounds the damage. A naming-rights deal that cannot be disclosed is one whose disclosure would invite questions the seller does not want asked — and customers reading the resulting headlines do not associate the corporate name with civic generosity. They associate it with the trust’s embarrassment.
The second risk is that the name simply does not stick. Wellington Regional Stadium opened in 2000 as WestpacTrust Stadium, became Westpac Stadium, then Sky Stadium, and is now Hnry Stadium — four commercial names in twenty-six years — and Wellingtonians overwhelmingly call it the Caketin. Christchurch’s new stadium was branded as the Canterbury Multi-Use Arena during planning, then as Te Kaha when Ngāi Tūāhuriri gifted the name, then as One New Zealand Stadium when the naming rights were sold in July 2024 — three names before it opened. Cantabrians, in the same way, have already settled on calling it Te Kaha. When a corporate name fails to take hold in vernacular usage, the sponsor has paid for signage that the public actively writes around. Worse, the cycle of name churn itself signals impermanence: every ratepayer who has lived through the WestpacTrust-to-Westpac-to-Sky-to-Hnry rotation has been trained, by experience, that the corporate name on the building is a lease, not an identity. Brand strategists pay enormous sums to avoid that perception. New Zealand stadium trusts hand it out for free.
And then there is the third risk, the one that should be the cautionary tale at the centre of every New Zealand stadium business case. New Zealand did not just lose money on naming rights. It once lost a Rugby World Cup over them.
In the lead-up to the 2003 Rugby World Cup, New Zealand was the joint sub-host alongside Australia, awarded the right to stage 23 of the tournament’s 48 matches. The IRB’s terms required “clean stadia” — venues free of competing in-stadium signage, with sponsorship inside each venue restricted to RWC tournament partners and a ban on conflicting advertising in a 500-metre exclusion zone around the ground. The NZRFU could not deliver. Its existing commercial commitments to local sponsors and corporate-box holders, together with its insistence on simultaneously running the domestic National Provincial Championship during the tournament, meant the country could not provide the stadia in the form the IRB and Rugby World Cup Limited required. On 8 March 2002, with the sub-host agreement signed under amendment by the NZRFU just before the deadline, the Australian Rugby Union withdrew co-hosting thirty-two minutes later. The IRB ratified Australia as sole host on 18 April 2002, by a vote of 16 to 5. New Zealand lost twenty-three Rugby World Cup matches — including a quarter-final and a semi-final — over how it had committed its stadium signage and sponsorship.
The same risk has not gone away. Major international tournaments — Rugby World Cups, FIFA World Cup matches, ICC cricket events, the Commonwealth Games, World Athletics, even the larger touring music acts — arrive with strict clean-venue requirements that override existing local sponsorship inside the venue. The MetLife Stadium reference earlier in this column is the same point in reverse: the stadium has to revert to “New York/New Jersey Stadium” for the duration of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and MetLife loses a month of branded exposure it has paid for. That cost is built into MetLife’s deal and accepted by both parties. New Zealand stadium trusts, by contrast, have repeatedly written naming-rights and in-venue sponsorship arrangements that an event organiser cannot accommodate, and have then watched the event go elsewhere.
Naming rights are not always a benefit. When they are locked in too tightly, kept too secret, or fail to earn cultural traction, they become a hindrance — costing the country events, customers, and the brand value the corporate buyer thought it was getting. The 2003 Rugby World Cup is the largest single example. Every Caketin and every Te Kaha is the smaller version of the same lesson.
What New Zealand should actually be selling
The Uniqlo Field arrangement at Dodger Stadium is one example of a stadium owner separating its branding assets and pricing each of them properly. It is not, however, directly transplantable to New Zealand. The Dodger deal works because Dodger Stadium’s playing surface is otherwise visually clean. The dirt around the bases, the outfield grass, the warning track — these are uncluttered surfaces against which a single “Uniqlo Field” branding actually reads on broadcast. A New Zealand rugby field is the opposite.
On a Super Rugby match-day inside Te Kaha or Forsyth Barr Stadium, the 22-metre lines carry a sponsor’s logo. The halfway line carries another. The in-goal areas carry a third. The broadcast LED perimeter cycles through a dozen more. The team jerseys carry the front-of-shirt sponsor (in the Crusaders’ case, 2degrees), the sleeve sponsor, the back-of-shorts sponsor, the kit-manufacturer mark. The “field” is not a clean asset that can be sold to one premium buyer — it has already been sold to a dozen different buyers, on different rate cards, by different rights-holders, with no coordination between any of them. And much of that on-field branding is now dynamically replaced for international audiences: broadcast technology routinely superimposes different sponsor logos on the playing surface for different territories, so the same physical pitch carries one set of brands for a New Zealand audience and a different set for an Australian, Japanese, or French one.
Which inverts the recommendation. The deeper lesson from the Dodger deal is not “sell the field” — there is no clean field left to sell as a single premium asset. The lesson is to recognise where the brand value actually lives. Inside the stadium, on every match-day, on every broadcast camera, on every overlay rendered for every overseas audience, the in-event brand visibility is the genuine revenue inventory. Outside the stadium, on a building empty most days of the year, the venue name is a billboard. New Zealand stadium trusts have inverted the prices: they sell the low-value billboard for a slow trickle of millions per year, while the high-value in-event inventory is parcelled out by a half-dozen separate rights-holders — the team, the league, the broadcaster, the stadium operator, the league sponsor, the kit manufacturer — none of whom are negotiating from the same table, and several of whom are actively cancelling each other out (see One New Zealand Stadium, sponsored by the team that plays in 2degrees jerseys). Every dollar of venue-naming revenue is, in effect, partly negated by an uncoordinated dollar of in-event sponsorship that contradicts it.
There is a second structural lesson. Every naming rights announcement in New Zealand should carry a public disclosure clause. The Te Kaha deal is being executed by Venues Ōtautahi, a wholly council-owned CCO. There is no commercial reason the annual sum paid by One New Zealand to a council-owned entity should be a secret. Ratepayers are entitled to know what their asset is earning.
And there is a third. New Zealand stadium trusts have one piece of commercial leverage they routinely under-deploy: heritage naming. When Venues Ōtautahi spent $86,504 developing the Te Kaha brand, gifted by Ngāi Tūāhuriri, and then handed the stadium signage to One New Zealand a month later, it threw away a commercial asset. A bilingual Māori stadium name — Te Kaha, Eden Park, Te Whanganui-a-Tara — is a branding asset every corporate sponsor should pay a premium to share, not displace. The Dodgers model respects the primary civic name; the New Zealand model deletes it.
The brand visibility during a match is the asset being given away. The brand display on a building is the asset being oversold. New Zealand stadium trusts are pricing both of them backwards — and have built the system in such a way that each cancels the other out.
The bottom line
New Zealand has built three major covered stadiums since 2000 at a combined public cost of more than NZ$1 billion. In return, the three stadiums generate roughly $3 to $4 million a year in naming rights revenue — if current rates are anything to go by. That is a gross yield of around 0.3 per cent of the invested capital, before any stadium operating cost is deducted.
The corporates whose logos adorn these buildings did not pay to build them. They did not take on the debt. They did not take the planning risk, the cost-overrun risk, or the operational risk of an empty stadium. They simply appeared at the ribbon-cutting and paid a fee — often undisclosed, almost always a small fraction of the construction cost — for the right to stamp their brand on a ratepayer-funded building.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, whose owner spent his own $23 million in 1962 and whose current ownership is valued at US$7.8 billion, worked out that naming rights are too valuable to give away wholesale. They sold the field. They kept the stadium. They pocketed US$25 million a year and preserved the civic name their customers actually use.
The answer to the question this column began with is: no, we are not getting a good deal. The corporates are getting the credit — and the brand equity — for something the public paid to build. At the very least, New Zealand stadium trusts should be forced to disclose the fees they are accepting. Beyond that, the country needs to face up to a more uncomfortable truth: the in-event brand visibility — the logos painted on the playing surface, the perimeter LED, the jerseys, the broadcast overlays superimposed for different international audiences — is the asset its sponsors are actually paying to be near. Selling the venue name on top of that, to a different sponsor, on different terms, with no coordination, is double-dipping that cannibalises both. Until the country values brand visibility during events more highly than brand display on the building, it will keep paying to build them, and it will keep letting somebody else take the credit.
