Big deal: Scotiabank opens vault for rights,

ACC becomes Scotiabank Arena next July for cool $800 million

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and Scotiabank have agreed to one of the sports world’s most lucrative naming rights deals.

Starting next July, MLSE’s Bay St. venue will be renamed Scotiabank Arena under a 20-year agreement worth a reported $800 million.

The agreement illustrates just how steeply prices have climbed. When Air Canada signed on as the building’s title sponsor in 1999, it pledged $4 million a year — a price that rose when it became clear both the Raptors and Leafs would occupy the building.

Neither party would confirm the dollar figure, but Scotiabank did describe it as one of the three richest deals in pro sports, even after adjusting for the exchange rate.

Chase Bank’s marketing agreement with New York’s Madison Square Garden is worth $30 million (U.S.) annually, while its deal with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors is worth $23 million a year. Capital One pays an average of $10 million annually for naming rights to the arena shared by the NHL’s Washington Capitals and NBA’s Washington Wizards. In 2007, Barclays agreed to pay $40 million to put its name on the Brooklyn arena housing the NBA’s Nets and NHL’s Islanders.

Scotiabank chief marketing officer John Doig says the arena’s location and heavy schedule — home to three pro sports teams along with concerts and special events — justify the hefty price.

“There’s no other facility like this. It’s top five (or) six in the world from an entertainment standpoint,” Doig said. “And it’s Toronto. Toronto’s a hugely important market to us . . . Those factors demand a bit of a premium.”

The bank already sponsors the Leafs, along with hockey broadcasts on Rogers and more than 8,000 youth leagues nationwide. In 2010, it also bought naming rights to Calgary’s Saddledome. Doig said the Toronto deal was a logical expansion of the company’s sports portfolio.

Still, MLSE chief commercial officer Dave Hopkinson points out that Scotiabank had to outbid several competitors to secure the partnership, which includes annual contributions to the MLSE Foundation.

“The competitive nature of this building and this marketplace yielded this result,” Hopkinson said. “(If ) that number being reported is accurate, not everybody’s going to go to that number. He had more interest than we had serious competition, but we had both.”

While its name will come off the flagship building next summer, Air Canada renewed its agreement as MLSE’s airline sponsor.

Scotiabank and MLSE, meanwhile, will also collaborate on customerbased projects at the bank’s Digital Factory, housed in the old Toronto Sun building on King St. E. Doig says this type of venture is becoming more common as deals evolve from sponsorships to multidimensional partnerships.

“We want to make sure this deal is more than a name on the side of a building,” Doig said. “We’re going to create an incubator to help (MLSE) solve customer challenges. We want to innovate with them.”

Tuesday’s deal is the latest in a string of partnerships dating back to 2013, when now-departed CEO Tim Leiweke arrived and encouraged sponsorship staff to aggressive in courting new agreements.

Since then, MLSE has struck deals with Canadian Tire, Ford (which appended its name to a popular fan gathering place outside the building) and SportChek (now the in-house apparel store at Maple Leaf Square).

Another deal saw the Raptors put a BMO logo on the floor near the team’s bench, among the first handful of NBA teams to open up that space for sponsorship.

Hopkinson wouldn’t discuss how Tuesday’s agreement would affect the Raptors, but pointed out that the team has one season remaining on its BMO deal, which expires before Scotiabank takes over arena naming rights.