In 1999, a company almost nobody outside the energy business could describe paid about $100 million to put its name on a football stadium in Houston.
The company was Enron.
You know how that ended.
Two years later the name came off the building. The city bought it back for roughly $2.1 million. Workers spent a weekend unbolting letters off a facade that was barely broken in.
That is the naming rights business in one story. Enormous money. Enormous confidence. And a name that a lot of people were not using anyway.
Here is what makes it interesting.
Naming rights deals did not slow down after Enron. They exploded. The biggest ones now run past $30 million a year. Some stretch twenty five years. Companies are signing them faster than any normal human can learn the new names.
And fans still say the old name.