A Virginia-based credit union has signed a multiyear deal for the naming rights to the home stadium of the Washington Commanders football team, the Washington Post reported today. FedEx Field in Maryland was rebranded as Northwest Stadium following an agreement with Northwest Federal Credit Union. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the newspaper cited an anonymous source stating that the agreement was for eight years and exceeds the average annual value of the previous deal with FedEx, which was roughly $7.5 million a year.
The announcement is the latest in a series of expensive marketing campaigns by credit unions that raise questions about their nonprofit mission. Other examples include a 2022 multimillion-dollar branding agreement between PenFed Credit Union and Washington Dulles International Airport, and a 2023 deal in which Mountain America Credit Union paid more than $50 million for the naming rights to Arizona State University’s football stadium. In California, the NBA’s Sacramento Kings play in the Golden 1 Center, until today the only other big-league pro sports venue named after a credit union.
In a recent ABA DataBank column on the trend, ABA’s Dan Brown and Robert Flock noted that while assets of banks with more than $1 billion in assets have grown by 80% over the last decade, marketing efforts by credit unions over $1 billion in assets have fueled their 127% increase in assets during that same period.
“Stadium naming deals, marquee sports event sponsorships, university partnerships and endless ads by credit unions are hard to ignore,” Brown and Flock wrote. “In fact, on a proportional basis, credit unions with over $1 billion in assets, which are not-for-profit entities that do not pay taxes, spend significantly more on marketing than similarly sized banks.”
