Comcast and NASCAR plan to announce a 10-year sponsorship agreement next week that will turn the sport’s secondary circuit into the Xfinity Series. The deal, which is valued at close to $200M, is expected to be announced on Wednesday in Charlotte, according to sources. Comcast and NASCAR both declined to comment.
The announcement follows several months of negotiations and represents a major achievement for NASCAR. The sanctioning body began looking for a title sponsor late last year after current sponsor Nationwide Insurance decided to discontinue its sponsorship.
Comcast emerged as a viable replacement after the company’s sports TV group, NBC, signed a 10-year, $4.4B rights deal with NASCAR. As part of the deal, Comcast agreed to spend $10M marketing and promoting the sport. Its marketing team saw title sponsorship of NASCAR’s secondary series as a way to fulfill that obligation and also promote its cable TV, broadband and phone business unit, Xfinity. Comcast initially wanted a shorter-term deal and resisted NASCAR’s push for a 10-year agreement.
However, in recent weeks, it decided to commit to 10 years to match the length of NBC’s broadcast deal. NASCAR was asking for $12-15M a year in rights fees, with media and activation commitments that would take the total value of a deal to more than $25M. A deal of that size would have been an increase from the approximately $10M in rights fees Nationwide spent for title sponsorship of the series.
NASCAR was unable to find a replacement partner willing to pay more for a series that had seen its average TV viewership per race fall from 2.06 million in ’08, when Nationwide started its sponsorship to 1.7 million this season. Comcast approved a rights fee in ’15 of approximately $9M, with media and activation commitments that would take the total spend to more than $18M.
