I wasn’t kidding when I said that this was a busy offseason for Sporting Kansas City. Last week, it was announced that Sporting Kansas City would host the 2013 AT&T MLS All Star Game, July 31 on ESPN. The announcement was celebrated with a press conference at LIVESTRONG Sporting Park with MLS Commissioner Don Garber, Sporting KC Owner Robb Heineman and Kansas City, Kansas Mayor Joe Reardon. I noticed at the time that nobody mentioned LIVESTRONG by name in the entire 20 minute announcement. All mentions of the stadium were generic statements that didn’t mention LIVESTRONG at all. My concerns that it was the beginning of the end of the Sporting/LIVESTRONG partnership were confirmed Tuesday evening when Darren Rovell of ESPN reported that Sporting KC and LIVESTRONG were parting ways effective immediately. Right from the get go, it has all the looks of an ugly, public divorce.
According to Rovell’s article, LIVESTRONG terminated the agreement because Sporting had only paid $250,000 of a total of $1,000,000 they were supposed to pay in 2012. Sporting came back and said that they weren’t getting what they expected either from the cancer charity. CEO Robb Heineman issued a statement soon after the announcement where he said that LIVESTRONG was “utilizing tactics designed to force us into an unsatisfactory agreement.” Sporting felt that it was a situation where they were getting taking advantage of by LIVESTRONG and they terminated the agreement. Heineman also told KC Star sportswriters Tod Palmer and Sam Mellinger that the team paid what they had owed to LIVESTRONG. Immediately after the news came out, all mentions of LIVESTRONG were gone from Sporting’s website, the LIVESTRONG Sporting Park sign outside the stadium went dark and the @LSP twitter account has been changed to @SportingParkKC. Until further notice, the stadium will be named Sporting Park.
This has all the look of a “he said, he said” type of divorce and it’s tough to determine who is telling the truth or not. Both sides may be at fault at varying degrees but it did look obvious that the relationship wasn’t going to last for too long anyway. Even though Lance Armstrong and LIVESTRONG have no affiliation with each other, many people still associate the two and could cause Sporting issues when it comes to dealing with future partnerships with other companies. As much as Sporting believes in LIVESTRONG’s cause, this is also a business. If Sporting wants to go down the charitable route again, there are other cancer charities that don’t have the PR baggage LIVESTRONG has right now. LIVESTRONG has to probably undergo a major image change if they want to survive as a charity so it’s probably better that this happened now rather than later.
In the end, I think it’s kind of funny LIVESTRONG is acting like they’re holding all the cards. They currently have to deal with their founder admitting to widespread performance enhancing drug use and without his cheating, the charity would most likely cease to exist. They definitely wouldn’t have raised as much money as they did. LIVESTRONG also forgets the fact that Sporting paid them to sponsor a world-class stadium and essentially gave them free publicity and the ability to have a viable partnership for two years. Also, in a time where other companies were running away from LIVESTRONG like it was going out of style, Sporting stayed with LIVESTRONG and at least publicly, were willing to see their partnership through. As far as Sporting’s next step, they really do hold all the cards. They now have a stadium with no sponsor and are going to be getting some great events this season. They have the MLS All Star Game, which will be against a worldwide popular team and play in CONCACAF Champions League as well as a World Cup Qualifier. Not to mention that this is one of the nicest and most modern stadiums in the world. Each high profile event that gets announced and every time the team “paints the wall” just means the price for the naming rights will go up. I don’t know if they’ll be able to get a deal done by the All Star Game but Sporting will make sure they will be even more thorough in choosing their future partner this time around.
(image courtesy of livestrong.org)
