MLS Team to Play in ‘Sports Illustrated Stadium’ in $100M Naming Deal

The New York Red Bulls announced a 13-year stadium naming-rights agreement with Sports Illustrated Tickets on Wednesday.

The 25,000-person Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J., just outside of New York City, is now called Sports Illustrated Stadium. Despite sharing a name, the partnership isn’t a deal with the famous sports magazine. The deal is worth more than $100 million, according to Sportico.

Sports Illustrated Tickets is a secondary ticket marketplace launched in June 2021 that the magazine’s licensing company, Authentic Brands Group, allows to use the media outlet’s name. Sports Illustrated was embroiled in controversy earlier this year as its publisher, The Arena Group, missed a large payment to ABG and laid off most of the outlet’s staff. Later in the spring, ABG struck a deal with Minute Media to publish the magazine and website, and the company hired back most of the editorial team.

The Red Bulls lost in the MLS Cup championship Sunday to the LA Galaxy. The new naming rights agreement, which Authentic helped broker, will begin next season.

Sports Illustrated Tickets will also become the official ticket partner starting in 2026 for all events in the stadium, which is also the home venue for the 2023 NWSL champion Gotham FC. Leaning even further into the SI branding, the ticketing company plans to allow fans to digitally put themselves on the SI cover at all events at the stadium, and make a premium suite called Club SI. It won’t be the first “Club SI,” though—it had one at the Kentucky Derby this May.

Representatives for the SI union did not immediately return requests for comment. This is the first stadium naming deal for SI, and because the media outlet and ticketing company don’t interact, it’s not supposed to have any impact on SI’s coverage of MLS.

Red Bull Arena opened in 2008, and it reached perhaps its most high-profile moment when it hosted Lionel Messi’s regular-season MLS debut in August 2023. Red Bulls president and GM Marc de Grandpré told Front Office Sports at the time that the match was expected to bring two to three times the revenue of a normal game, and called it the “largest-ever MLS gate since we’ve been at Red Bull Arena.”