The Florida Panthers currently play their games at FLA Live Arena, which is a generic name due to the fact that the arena doesn’t currently have a naming rights sponsor. The Dan Le Batard Show considered changing that Friday, by putting their own name on the building.
“Is FLA Live at thing that I didn’t know about already?,” producer Billy Gil asked,
“No, I think they just made up a name because they don’t have a sponsor,” Chris Wittyngham said.
“Wait. Hold on a second. Why don’t we make it Meadowlark Arena? They don’t have a sponsor. Why don’t we sponsor an arena? Take Tyler Van Dyke’s money — that was a waste of money, no offense — and give that to them and see if for like $25,000 grand, we could just name an arena after ourselves until they get an actual sponsor,” Gil concluded.
“Landshark did that for a little bit, right? It was Landshark Stadium. I think it was even like half a season because they had some deal with Jimmy Buffet and Landshark Beer where he was part owner or whatever of the team. Can we sponsor an arena until they get a proper name?”
“Are there any sportsbooks that sponsor arenas that you can think of?,” Jessica Smetana asked. “Because I feel like that might be the one type of business that a sports team doesn’t want to associate with.”
After a discussion about whether teams and arenas wanted to be in business with sportsbooks, Gil reiterated his idea.
“I was thinking like Meadowlark Arena,” he said. Or if you guys don’t want in, we could make it like Stupodity Stadium or God Bless Football Arena.”
“What should we name it? Because right now, whatever we offer is going to be better than the $0 that they’re making,” asked Jeremy Tache.
“My presumption is — and David Samson has talked about this — they didn’t put a sponsor on Marlins Park for awhile ’cause they were holding out for an amount of money,” Gil added. So I don’t think they’ll want to devalue their naming rights too much to where they’re giving it away for like $25,000 a game. But we could make a call.”
“You’ll get a call if you leave a generic message. ‘Hey, I’m interested in naming rights’. Of course they’re gonna call you back! They don’t have naming rights!,” Stugotz exclaimed. “Once we get around to $25,000, they’re gonna hang up the phone on us.”
Smetana then said they could offer $30,000 per game, which the crew decided was too far out of their price range.
