LA28 Sets Sponsorship Target After Slow Dealmaking Start

Yahoo

22-05-2025

The Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic Games is steadily pushing toward its $2.5 billion domestic sponsorship goal.
LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman said he hopes to hit at least $2 billion in corporate revenue by the end of the year. The Hollywood sports mogul declined to specify how much LA28 organizers, Team USA and its media partner Comcast have collectively generated to date but estimated it was more than $1.5 billion.
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Still, in a phone interview, Wasserman acknowledged the 11-year lead time between Los Angeles securing the Olympics and the actual event has challenged his sales team. Committees typically get a shorter seven-year window to strike deals.
'People buy when they want to buy, and not when you want to sell,' he said in a phone interview. 'No one has ever had an 11-year cycle, from awarding the games to hosting the games. Those timelines are nontraditional and produce nontraditional ebbs and flows of all these processes. In many ways, as we go through it for the first time, the whole movement, in terms of how they think about it and compare it, is going through it for the first time as well.'
Wasserman also attributed the initial lag to the complexities of the partnership program between the USOPC and LA28, which aimed to drive more revenue by selling bulk partnerships over four Olympics in Beijing ('21), Paris ('24), Milan ('26) and LA.
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Organizers are now eight months away from the Winter Games in Italy (Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo), which will be followed by the Summer Olympics in 2028—held in the United States for the first time since 1996.
LA28 organizers are still looking to fill major categories like financial services and automotive. Last year, top-tier sponsor and software firm Salesforce split less than three years into their seven-year partnership. It was a notable loss since it left LA28 with just two founding partners in Comcast and Delta. In the meantime, the committee has added lower tier sponsors such as Cisco and Aecom, who are joining older USOPC partners on the same level as Nike and Ralph Lauren.
'In the next 60 days, you'll see some pretty significant announcements in some big categories, and we'll continue to show our momentum,' Wasserman said. 'We're hitting our stride to say the least.'
The nonprofit organization remains confident about its revenue trajectory after hiring new CEO Reynold Hoover last summer. As the committee and partners such as NBCUniversal prepare to add more corporate backers, Wasserman in recent months has turned his attention to ensure that 2028 Olympians won't have visa issues. He has met with President Donald Trump on multiple occasions and maintains that he does not anticipate athletes and their supporters having trouble entering the country despite Trump considering various travel restrictions.
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'I have no doubt that we're going to have everyone in the world here to experience an incredible Olympic Games,' he said.
Wasserman also confirmed that Dodger Stadium will host all of the baseball games in 2028. Baseball is returning to the summer sports program after being excluded from the Paris Games in 2024.
Meanwhile, all cricket matches will be played at a temporary built facility at The Fairgrounds in Pomona, Calif. That means neither New York nor any other East Coast state will host cricket matches despite the chance to offer prime time broadcast slots in India.
'There's a lot of logic to it,' Wasserman said. 'But in the end, the [International Cricket Council], it was really important to them to have the cricket athletes be part of the Olympic Village and the Olympic program for their first opportunity at the games in a long time.'
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