Anheuser-Busch choosing not to renew its sponsorship of the Washington Commanders delivered a devastating financial blow to the team, the details of which have now been confirmed by JP Finlay.
The contract was worth "at least $4 million annually," Finlay reports, citing NFL and team sources, which ranked it among the Commanders' four largest sponsorships along with Pepsi, FedEx and Bank of America.
The Commanders had an exclusivity deal with Anheuser-Busch, Finlay adds, meaning that only Anheuser-Busch products — like Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra and Stella Artois, to name a few — could be sold on the premises of FedEx Field.
"Team and league sources said it was highly unusual that [Anheuser-Busch parent company] InBev would drop from an exclusive deal to no deal rather than simply lowering its financial commitment and moving to a non-exclusive contract," Finlay writes.
Losing its primary beer sponsor shows only a partial view behind the scenes on the non-football side of the organization. Finlay describes a time of "significant upheaval" inside the organization's business operations department, confirming that "at least 20 non-football employees have left since the beginning of the year."
Compounding these woes, Anheuser-Busch is not the only partner to cut ties with the organization. Rather, it's just the latest in a string of major sponsors to either not renew or cut short their partnerships with the Commanders.
Medliminal, a medical bill review company, opted not to renew its contract with the team last month. Inova, a major health care provider in Northern Virginia, cut short its 10-year partnership with the team five years early, in April 2021. At the time, Inova also announced that Dr. Robin West — then the team's director of sports medicine — and its physicians would no longer be working with the Commanders. West remains the team physician for the Washington Nationals.
On Wednesday, The Team 980 host Kevin Sheehan announced that Audacy would not be continuing its partnership with the team, saying that Commanders games would not be broadcast on The Team 980 — its longtime radio home — or any Audacy stations for the 2022 season.
Still, the team insists it's doing fine financially despite its sizable loss of revenue from Anheuser-Busch and other losses, telling Finlay that current sponsorship revenues are "on pace to outperform 2021."
Further, the team says it's sold more new season tickets in the last three weeks than in the previous three years, a period which includes the final year of Jay Gruden's coaching tenure in 2019, a mostly fan-less 2020 due to the pandemic, and 2021, in which the team was coming off a division-winning 7-9 season.
Washington ranked second-to-last out of 32 NFL teams in average attendance (52,751) in 2021, bringing in more fans per game than only Detroit (51,522), and came dead-last in percent of its stadium's listed capacity filled (78.5%), per Sports Business Journal.
Read the full report from JP Finlay at NBC Sports Washington.
