The Warriors signed the largest jersey ad in NBA history this week, with Rakuten set to sell $60 million over the next three years.

It is reported that the Warriors have reached an agreement with Rakuten Co., Ltd. (Rakuten) for 20 million per year, three-year jersey advertising. "We have a lot of options, and it's not the highest offer in the competition." Said the Warriors' chief marketing executive. After the Warriors won the 2016-17 NBA championship with a score of 4-1 this year, they attracted the attention of many brands and companies with the influence of superstars such as Curry, Durant, Thompson, and Green.

In addition to the Warriors, Rakuten Co., Ltd. (Rakuten) has signed a four-year contract with La Liga giants Barcelona with a total price of 235 million US dollars, with an annual basic sponsorship fee of 55 million euros, and winning the La Liga championship will increase by 1.5 million, and the Champions League winner will increase by 5 million.

When it comes to jersey advertising, football is naturally the first to be commercialized.

In 1973, Braunschweig, who had won the Bundesliga in 1966-1967 (now the Bundesliga), suffered a serious financial crisis. Flick, the club's president in crisis, came up with a deal with a spice company that contributed 100,000 marks to his company's jerseys.

However, this new thing in football has been opposed by the German Football Association. Officials of the German Football Association (DFB) believe that this practice tarnishes the sport's competitive nature. However, sponsorship revenue is important to the club, and when other clubs saw the success of the Braunschweig team, they demanded more advertising space on their shirts as well. As a result, the German Football Association (DFB), under pressure from all sides, finally agreed to the club's right to print sponsorship advertisements on the jerseys, and in addition to the graphics, the text was also allowed to appear on the jerseys.

Slowly, jersey advertising spread from Germany to world football. Although when jersey advertising first appeared, it was customary for the print media to cover up the advertisements on the players' photos in their reports because they did not want to advertise the jerseys for free, but now we are used to jersey advertising.

Football jersey advertising developed relatively early, but basketball jersey advertising has only gained traction in recent years.

In 2014, Xiao Hua said that he would realize the plan to advertise jerseys in the next five years: "This is unavoidable, because the market has this demand. In April, the league's board of directors formally approved the three-year pilot program, which would allow teams to sell 2.5" x 2.5" (about 6.35 cm x 6.35 cm) advertising space on their jerseys. As a result, the NBA became the first of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States to allow advertising on jerseys.

According to the original revenue distribution plan, half of the revenue from chest advertising would go to each team, while the other half would need to be handed over to the league and redistributed by the latter. In addition, the advertising sponsor cannot sign a chest advertising contract with the team for a period of more than 3 years.

For the NBA, as long as the sponsor's business is not involved in gambling, alcohol and politics, it can be advertised on the NBA jersey. Of course, the NBA's official partners are not eligible to appear as jersey sponsors, NBA official partners include media outlets such as ESPN, ABC, Turner, jersey supplier Nike, timer supplier Tissot, basketball supplier Spalding, etc. But ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and Home Depot won't be limited by their competitors.

After the policy was introduced, the Philadelphia 76ers, who have had a worrisome record in recent years, became the first to eat crabs. Beginning with the 2017-2018 season, the logo of the ticketing company Home Depot will appear on the 76ers' jersey for three years and $15 million. In addition, The Home Depot has an option to extend the contract. The Home Depot will also automatically renew its contract for another year as long as the league allows 2.5 by 2.5-inch ads to continue to appear on jerseys.

A few days ago, Xiao Hua announced several rules to be revised. It can be summed up in three main "changes": the season has become longer, the trade deadline has become earlier, and the number of timeouts has decreased. But this kind of reform is not happy for everyone, Xiao Hua did not hesitate to offend advertisers with this "change", and the NBA, where interests are paramount, has it begun to focus on human feelings? Definitely not.

This new policy can be described as a blessing for players, for a long time, the problem of the NBA schedule is too dense has been repeatedly complained about by teams and players, and now the league with small ball and running rampant has higher requirements for players in all aspects, so the probability of serious injuries has greatly increased the probability of players. The data shows that by the time of the 2015-2016 Finals, key rotation players (the team's top seven players in average minutes per game) had missed a total of 61 playoff games, the highest number in the last 20 years.

The start date is to help reduce the burden on the players. Don't underestimate the fact that this is more than a week, as the number of back-to-backs and four-game games in five days will be further reduced next season, which will reduce the chance of players getting injured due to exhaustion, and fans will be able to enjoy the game at a higher level.

Bringing forward the league's trade deadline to before All-Star Weekend was also unanimously approved. While this will make it more difficult to cut trade time, for all traders, the All-Star Weekend can be used to focus on grinding in on the new roster and making the final break. To be precise, the trade time is not any less, as the NBA has brought the season forward by exactly a week.

The most controversial is the last one, the NBA has reduced the number of full-court timeouts from 18 to 14, and the original rule that the last 2 minutes can be called 3 timeouts has now become 2 times in the last 3 minutes, and the game will be greatly accelerated. At the same time, the short timeout rule was abolished. The NBA's original 90-second timeout and the actual 60-second "20-second timeout" are now all 75-second timeouts.

The NBA's move is undoubtedly a qualitative improvement in terms of improving the spectatorship of games, but for TV broadcasters, fewer pauses means less advertising. Fans are the parents of the NBA, but advertisers are undoubtedly also one of the owners of the NBA, and no one is easy to offend. Such a seemingly contradictory thing, in fact, Xiao Hua is very sure in his heart, because his principle at the helm has not changed from the beginning - "adding value to the NBA brand".

The direct conflict over money is not a once, and many of his changes are also incomprehensible - is it too commercial to sell jersey advertising? When the replay center was built, some people said at the beginning that it actually lengthened the process of the game, and more questioned the authority of the referee; The part of the All-Star voting that gives the right to the player is simply a wasted vote, because many players do not vote based on facts at all, but vote for their teammates casually; The regular season awards ceremony, invented last season, was considered by some players to be "turning a wonderful moment into a big show." ”

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Again, don't look at it, brothers, I'm rushing for word counts...