Many nations, such as the United States, won’t allow tobacco companies to advertise at sporting events. Japan is not one of those countries — and it may pay a big price for that.

Even though there is some debate about if hosting the Olympic Games is financially worth it, plenty of nations are always at the table when the International Olympic Committee is ready to dole out assignments for the next one.

Japan is often one of the ones pulling its chair up at those negotiation sessions. It last had the ginormous quadrennial sporting event when Nagano hosted the 1998 Winter Games and women’s hockey players and snowboarders got to go for gold for the first time.Continue reading...

In the late summer of 2012, the sporting world’s eyes will be upon London where the XXX Olympics (oh, behave!) will kick off with much fanfare and probably a good many shots on the television of the Queen’s Guard marching about seriously.

If all goes well for Olympic organizers, it’ll also feature a stadium with a new name. The Daily Mail reports that the Olympic Park Legacy Company is “looking to raise about £10million ($13.5 million) a year in naming rights for the three main arenas in Stratford after the 2012 Games.”

With the Olympic ceremonies alone estimated to be valued up £5b, it could be an unprecedented platform for brand exposure. That's why London 2012 organizers are seeking sponsors to sign on the dotted line and place their names on the new Olympic Stadium, aquatics center, and velodrome. The stadium alone should raise £6m ($8m) annually, the Mail reports.

The West Ham United club of the English Premier League are looking to move into the stadium after the Olympics end, the Mail notes, which would make it part of the growing numbers of teams that play in a branded stadium.Continue reading...

Basketball fans are rejoicing following this weekend's news that the end of the 149-day NBA lockout is nigh. As AP reports, following intense negotiations the makings of a deal between the NBA and NBA players is now in place, with a tentative agreement starting the delayed season on December 25th.

"Barring either side rejecting the deal, training camps will open Dec. 9, with the league's first three games set to be played on Christmas Day," AP notes. "The Utah Jazz invited fans to start calling again to discuss ticket options, the reigning NBA champion Dallas Mavericks wrote 'Go Mavs' on Twitter shortly after the middle-of-the-night news conference to announce the breakthrough, and Shaquille O'Neal recorded a brief video to show his excitement."Continue reading...

English Premier League club Newcastle United caused a stir by announcing it sold the naming rights for its historic stadium, St. James' Park, to British retailer Sports Direct. In England, a country where soccer stadiums could be mistaken for places of worship, this is scandalous.

However, rising player wages and billionaire owners like Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour are making money more important than ever in the British game, as the New York Times notes.

Sponsorships, of course, generate significant revenue for sports teams, yet American sports teams have generally avoided covering their jerseys in corporate logos, even though rival soccer teams around the world (including American ones) don't seem to mind. Manchester United even has two shirt sponsors: Aon (game jerseys) and DHL (training kit). Spend enough time around a Premier League stadium and you might mistake it for a NASCAR race.Continue reading...

When Qatar was awarded the first World Cup to ever take place in the Middle East, some eyebrows were raised because, well, it’s going to be 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade when the games take place during the summer months and the country only has one stadium that was deemed worthy enough to use.

Still, the country has until 2022 to work out these problems. Part of its bid promised that it would build nine of the most gorgeous stadia you’ve ever seen. They will be air-conditioned to ensure the good feeling and health of the players and fans alike. Also, some are promised to be modular so that they can be taken apart after the Cup and sent along to developing countries so they can enjoy them along with their Texas Rangers 2011 World Series champs T-shirts.

So who is going to build these lovely places? The BBC reports that “over 90% of Qatar's workforce is made up of foreign migrant workers, many of them from South and East Asia,” and several labor unions argue that the workers are not being treated humanely and that, in fact, it's a modern-day form of slavery.Continue reading...

The beermeisters at MillerCoors spend about $214 million annually on TV advertising and about three quarters of that goes to sports, according to the Sports Business Journal. As much of that budget goes to the NBA, and the NBA is still locked in a stalemate, the big brewer is holding onto the ball, for the time being.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that when NBA players (who aren't getting paid either) rejected the latest collective-bargaining offer from team owners, MillerCoors announced that it had been hanging onto the payments it had signed on to make to its NBA partners.

As soon as a deal gets done, MillerCoors spokesman Peter Marino told the paper that the payments “will be made in full” to brewer's many NBA partners.

The Journal-Sentinel also checked in on another sponsor of the Milwaukee Bucks, BMO Harris Bank. But the bank hasn’t followed the lead of MillerCoors: "We have been and continue to be a proud sponsor of the Milwaukee Bucks," said bank spokesman Jim Kappel to the Journal-Sentinel.

Reuters notes that the NBA's television networks including TNT and ESPN/ABC have been ready to lose NBA games for a few months, but with the looming possibility that the entire season could be lost, the networks have a lot of air time to fill and ad inventory to sell.Continue reading...

Morgan Freeman is the voice of Visa's new NFL and pre-Super Bowl campaign, aimed at the estimated 198 million American fans of the NFL. As the New York Times' Stuart Elliott notes,

The promotion is centered on a sweepstakes that offers a lucky Visa cardholder a chance to attend Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis on Feb. 5 with 10 of his or her family and friends. Cardholders enter the sweepstakes by using their Visa cards. The Visa N.F.L. promotion comes after a popular Visa sweepstakes last year, which offered the winner Super Bowl tickets for life.

No purchase is necessary, and only one entry per week per person is allowed. One option, as Visa tweeted today:Continue reading...

FIFA, the organizing body of world soccer, dug itself a massive PR hole this past spring when a cash-for-votes scandal was unearthed. It left Asia’s former soccer head Mohamed bin Hammam banned for life “after being accused of bribery during his failed attempt to become FIFA president,” according to Reuters.

Though bin Hammam has always denied the allegations, it doesn’t change that FIFA sponsor Emirates Airlines felt “overlooked” during the whole scandal and now is considering leaving when its contract runs out in 2014, Reuters reports.

"We are seriously thinking about not renewing our partnership with FIFA beyond 2014," said Boutros Boutros, the divisional senior vice president of corporate communications for Emirates, told Australia’s B&T Media. The comment took FIFA by surprise, according to Bloomberg.Continue reading...