FC Cincinnati's new home in the West End has a name: TQL Stadium.
The announcement came Wednesday from the soccer club and Total Quality Logistics that TQL, based in Clermont County, bought the naming rights to the stadium.
TQL Stadium is set to open May 1, with a ribbon-cutting and some team practices there. The first home match against Inter Miami is scheduled for May 16.
The naming rights partnership includes signs inside and outside the stadium, a branded bar area and branded seating area. The stadium's lighted sign will feature the company’s logo moving across the stadium's exterior.
Union Township-based TQL and FC Cincinnati declined to give details about the deal, such as cost and duration of the partnership. They said only that the deal is long-term.
“TQL Stadium is an investment in Cincinnati,” said TQL President Kerry Byrne. “This is a very unique opportunity. We identify with FC Cincinnati. We started with two people in 1997 and have grown ever since. FC Cincinnati started with an idea by (FC Cincinnati president) Jeff Berding, became a USL team and look where they are now. Culturally they are a great fit for us."
Byrne said the company is looking to elevate its profile as it grows, aiming at younger people who are professional soccer's demographic.
TQL is growing, hiring 1,000 people
TQL is Cincinnati's largest privately held company, on track to do $5 billion in revenue in 2021, with more than 5,000 employees in 56 offices throughout the country. The company brokers more than 2 million loads of a freight a year making it the second-largest freight brokerage firm in the nation.
TQL is hiring 1,000 employees in 2021, 400 of them in Cincinnati, Byrne said.
The company recently expanded its headquarters to a 233,000-square foot campus.
Berding said the deal is important to the club’s growth because the revenue gives the team to ability to recruit the best players.
"We share the same entrepreneurial spirit," Berding said of the team and TQL. "We are both hometown success stories. We both have a love for Cincinnati and it’s a big part of who we are.”
Berding said he and Byrne share a vision to make Cincinnati a destination where people want to work and visit.
"When we created the club we wanted to use soccer as a way to bring the world to Cincinnati and promote Cincinnati to the world," Berding said.
FC Cincinnati, led by controlling owner Carl Lindner III and managing owners Meg Whitman, Scott Farmer and George Joseph, was awarded a Major League Soccer expansion team in 2018, with MLS play beginning in 2019. As part of the expansion deal, the team promised to build a soccer-specific stadium, which is now almost completed in the West End. The $250-million, privately funded stadium, has 26,000 seats, making it one of the largest MLS soccer stadiums.
The stadium has 53 traditional suites and 4,500 premium seats.
Naming rights details often secret
The value of naming rights deals are often closely held secrets.
In January, Austin FC announced its under-construction soccer-specific stadium would be called Q2 Stadium, in a naming rights deal with Q2 Holdings, Inc., an Austin-based financial experience company. In April, the San Jose Earthquakes and PayPal Holdings Inc. announced a multi-year sponsorship agreement to call the Earthquakes' stadium PayPal Park.
That deal will last 10 years, but neither team shared financial details about its naming rights deals.
There are publicly available details related to the Cincinnati Reds' and Cincinnati Bengals' stadiums. Those stadiums are owned by Hamilton County.
In July 2000, the Reds announced that Great American Insurance had purchased the naming rights to the new ballpark for $75 million over 30 years. It would be – and is – called Great American Ball Park.
Paul Brown Stadium is named for Paul Brown, who founded the Bengals. There is no sponsorship deal attached, but under the Bengals lease with Hamilton County the Bengals would get at least $16.67 million from any naming rights deal. That amount must be increased by 6% annually, beginning with the year 2000, to adjust for inflation. That would now be nearly $56.7 million per year.
Dueling lawsuits related to the FC Cincinnati stadium shed light on what a naming rights deal for the FC Cincinnati stadium could be worth to the team.
The team, Futbol Club Cincinnati, hired Premier Partnerships, a Los Angeles-based sponsorship sales and consulting firm, in May of 2017 to help secure naming rights. But a potential deal fell apart and ended with the team suing Premier Partnerships in June of 2020 for breach of contract.
Premier Partnerships countersued. The lawsuits were combined into one case in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court and is pending.
The team alleges Premier Partnerships botched a deal with an unnamed company by promising the company concessions that could not, under Major League Soccer and player contracts, be granted, causing the deal to fall apart.
The lawsuit values such a deal as worth more than $10 million, saying, "... under the potential deal, FC Cincinnati would have received tens of millions of dollars in stadium sponsorship revenue over the next several years."
Premier, in its own breach of contract lawsuit against the team filed in July of 2020, said that over the course of three years, Premier obtained $86 million in sponsorships for FC Cincinnati and hashed out a "lucrative" deal for a stadium naming rights sponsor.
Neither lawsuit names the naming rights sponsor at the center of the suits.
Premier's lawsuit alleges the unnamed company was prepared to pay an amount that "would have been the third-largest MLS naming rights deal ever – no small feat for a team in what was then the smallest market in MLS and only the 35th largest market in the United States, and that had only recently been promoted to MLS."
The deal would have lasted for 17 years, with options to extend for 27 years, the lawsuit adds. The deal then died.
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