Upcoming renovations will soon change M&T Bank Stadium. The venue’s name, however, will stay the same.
The Ravens and M&T Bank have agreed to extend their naming rights agreement until 2037, they said Thursday, meaning the 71,000-seat stadium will retain the name it has held since 2003 for 15 more seasons. The current deal had been set to expire in 2027.
The Maryland Stadium Authority, which owns M&T Bank Stadium, and the Ravens signed a new lease in January, extending the team’s formal ties to Baltimore from 2027 to 2037. That prompted the Ravens to reach out to M&T Bank and extend their partnership until the lease’s end, Ravens president Sashi Brown said.
“As soon as we got to the point where we knew we would get to a deal — and we’re thankful to the state for that — we reached right out to M&T and advised them of the extension. They were excited to hear that and naturally began discussions about extending our partnership so that it was coterminous,” Brown said.
The Ravens retain two five-year options to extend their lease (potentially until 2047) and Brown said the club plans to continue their partnership with M&T Bank “at least” until 2037. That could mean further extending the naming rights agreement if the club exercises its options with the state.
Construction began on the publicly funded football stadium in 1996, and to generate more money to complete the project on time, the state sold the naming rights to the Ravens for $10 million in 1997. Originally called Ravens Stadium at Camden Yards in 1998, its inaugural season, the stadium was then sponsored by PSINet in 1999 for about $5 million annually.
But when PSINet, an Internet service provider, went bankrupt, the Ravens agreed to a deal with M&T Bank in 2003. The bank agreed to pay $5 million a year at the time and in 2014, M&T Bank and the Ravens renewed their agreement for an annual fee of $6 million; thus far, the team has made about $110 million from naming rights deals. The Ravens and M&T Bank declined to disclose the terms of this extension.
Brown said that the Ravens did not seek to strike a naming rights deal with any other company or entity, but instead began talking with M&T Bank last year. “We were solely focused on extending with M&T,” he said.
Augie Chiasera, M&T Bank’s regional president for Greater Baltimore, highlighted community projects the bank and the team have collaborated on and noted “similarities between our organizations.”
“We’ve been thrilled with what the partnership has brought us and our brand and how we’ve been able to work together with the Ravens successfully and the community and we thought it made a whole bunch of sense for us to continue this partnership,” he said.
Sponsored stadium names are common in North America and particularly common for NFL teams. Only three of the league’s 32 clubs currently play in a stadium without sponsorship: Green Bay’s Lambeau Field, Chicago’s Soldier Field and Cleveland Browns Stadium (which was called FirstEnergy Stadium until last week and could find a new sponsor soon).
M&T Bank Stadium is the fifth-longest active naming rights deal in the NFL, according to a news release.
Naming rights revenue can be quite profitable. When the Ravens announced their agreement with M&T Bank in 2003, then-Ravens owner Art Modell said: “You have to have that revenue to be competitive.”
NFL teams do not share naming rights revenue with the rest of the league. That’s unlike MLB teams, which must split half of any such revenue with their counterparts; that could make a sponsorship deal less appealing. The Orioles have been able to sell the naming rights to Oriole Park at Camden Yards since 2001, but they are one of nine MLB teams that do not play in a ballpark with a corporate naming rights deal.
Following a law signed last year, the stadium authority can borrow up to $1.2 billion to pay for stadium improvements ($600 million each for Oriole Park and M&T Bank Stadium), provided the teams sign long-term leases. Economists have called those subsidies a bad deal for the state and its taxpayers.
The stadium authority and the Ravens recently began the process of improving the stadium with those state funds — which will eventually be paid off by public lottery money — by hiring an architect, Gensler, to design the renovations for $18 million.
The stadium updates, which include changes to premium seating, could begin as early as this year and will be completed by 2026, Brown said.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do and we look forward to rolling out these renovations in ’24, ’25 and maybe a bit out to ’26,” he said.
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