Today in U.S. District Court, for the Southern District of New York, Anheuser-Busch InBev filed a lawsuit asking for a declaratory judgment against Major League Baseball. In “Anheuser-Busch, Inc. v. Major League Baseball Properties, Inc.,” ABI alleges that MLB “reneged on a renewal of its beer sponsorship rights this year and demanded ‘exponentially higher’ fees.” Back in April of this year, ABI believed it had reached a deal to renew its long-standing status (over 30 years) as the “official beer of baseball,” but apparently the baseball league tried to renegotiate the deal “due to ‘a change in marketplace dynamics,’ according to the lawsuit.” Naturally, MLB was seeking to increase the amount of money they would receive from ABI and also wanted to negotiate with rival beer companies for the same rights. The lawsuit asks the court to enforce the April deal and further prevent “MLBP from negotiating with any other brewers for sponsorship rights. The lawsuit doesn’t request money damages.” Baseball’s position is that the April deal was not binding and that they could “offer sponsorship rights to Anheuser[-Busch]’s competitors.” In addition to sponsoring the league as a whole, Anheuser-Busch also sponsors 26 of the total of thirty individual baseball teams in MLB.
The story has already been picked up by Bloomberg, Reuters, the St. Louis Business Journal and the Wall Street Journal.
Surprised ABI is even bothering to extend their deal as they’ve cut back on everything else marketing related.
Mr Nuts – Budweiser ads had permeated national radio/TV baseball broadcasts since at least the early 80’s, & they bought time on many teams’ local broadcasts. The “exclusivity” applied only to the Saturday games on Fox & to the post-season, BUT they could use “official sponsor of Major League Baseball” in local ad scripts that the guys in the booth read.
ABI is European & knows only soccer (& maybe basketball) from an advertising perspective. For sure they have NO CLUE about baseball, but I’m sure they understand that they gotta keep spending big $$ on ads for NFL games.
MLB is AMERICAN – they see a European conglomerate buy out the biggest American brewery & sorta freak; I don’t fault MLB at all for wanting to spread the advertisers around (especially since Bud/Miller/Coors are all now in multi-national conglomerates).
Molson/Coors should be frothing at the mouth to get into this, as there is an MLB team in Molson’ s home in Toronto.