This Pittsburgh Penguins jersey is brought to you by...

There’s something a little sad about the insidious spread of advertisement, branding, and labeling. There’s something quite sad about having to rely on the financial backing of advertisers in order to provide a good or service. This is much less sad in the world of professional sports than, say, in school curricula and textbooks.

A long series of cultural studies folks (recently Naomi Klein in No Logo) have argued that advertising and branding of bits of our lives have a pernicious effect. I’m agnostic on that point, personally, but I do see some potential for mischief: if a corporation sponsors your team, your college class, your activity, or your pants, that corporation may claim some right over how you operate your team, class, activity, or pants – what you do with them, who does what with them, etc. No sponsor advertises for any reason but self-interest, and in certain contexts, it makes sense to wonder what that self-interest is, and how it could conflict with other interests.

</professorial rambling> (I’ve done stuff on advertising in my philosophy classes for about 12 years now, so this is kinda in my bones.)

On one level, it’s a personal choice. I personally do not want Budweiser to have any rights to my class, or my pants.

It’s less clear to me why this would be a big deal in a sport that already features advertising plastered all over the boards, benches, and ice.

Aesthetically, it sucks. I still remember fondly the white boards of 1970s arenas. And those backlit ads in some rinks are distracting as hell.

Um…as I’ve said a few times, I was a NASCAR fan before I was a hockey fan. Not only that, I recently bought the Tony Stewart Burger King T-shirt because I look better in that blue than I do in the red Office Depot color scheme, and anyway, since it’s Tony’s, I needed it. So I can’t say anything against it at all, though I do sort of hope, just for the sake of the jerseys’ aesthetics, that it doesn’t happen. I’m okay either way, really.

Would there have to be some sort of league-wide revenue sharing of this ad revenue? Obviously the Rangers and Islanders would have a bigger pool of big advertisers to choose from than, say, the Blue Jackets.

I’ve always been a soccer fan and never thought the advertising on the jerseys was aesthetically unpleasant. But… this is probably because it almost takes place of a logo that NHL or NBA or MLB fans are used to. One big advertisement in the center of a jersey, that’s it. As for european hockey jerseys that I and everyone has seen, awful, absolute awful.If you could keep jersey advertisement to one sponsor there’s a chance you may be able to keep a jersey aesthetically pleasing. Now the question is where to put the advertisement. The only 2 places I can think is either below the logo on the front or under the numbers on the back. That would mean players would not be able to tuck their jerseys in. That means you Kris Letang. That’s my 3 cents, one advertisement on a jersey is no big deal. The entire jersey littered with advertisements is a big deal, to me at least.

I’m not a fan of the idea. It wouldn’t be a make or break for me, but if it happened, and it filtered into retail sales of jerseys, I would never buy another NHL jersey again.

But the jersey is basically the last domain in the NHL world that doesn’t appear littered with advertising, and I hope it never does.

I know it’s a bit silly, but ads on jerseys would really, really bum me out. (I did a post on this for more.)

I’m a soccer fan, too, but they’ve had the primary sponsor on the front for as long as I can remember (mid-80s-ish) and their team crest was never prominent, anyway.

There’s just something about the hockey jersey — I really am rooting for laundry in a lot of ways — and aesthetic mystique stuff like the Cup and team crests/colors is part of my enjoyment of this league. But I’m the type who absolutely hates logo changes (Isles fisherman of course, but also the streamlined Penguin and the Sabres logo wandering). If something is really awful, change it; but if not, allow the years of tradition to breathe and live from one generation to the next.

IF done tastefully……maybe, but NOT like what they have in Europe! Some of the minor leagues have done this the right way…..think about it………That would be the ONLY way I would go for it!

I actually stopped watching Nascar for going so overboard on the advertising.

Every damn camera shot has a sponsor now!!

There’s a slight bit more to the shirts than sponsors, but even they can become what the team is in some way through time.

Still, in terms of uniform, the hockey uniform is in no way as elegant as a football kit can look like. I mean, really, the guy has scotch tape covering up the helmet supplier’s logo(with some chip shop written on it no doubt), and the rest is all sorts of yellow pages in action.

AND that’s my UniWatchBlog piece for the day.

the football uni is close to what I was saying about the Minors so, how about it?