Numlock Sunday: Neil Paine tracks the economy through sports

Photo by David Vives on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Neil Paine, who wrote “A history of the American economy through stadium names” for Sherwood News. Here's what I wrote about it:

Stadium naming rights are a major business comprising hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands so that companies have the right to slap their name on professional sports venues. Incidentally, the evolution of stadium names over the decades paints a fascinating picture of the American economy. As recently as the first half of the 1990s, 93 percent of pro sports venues were unsponsored, a figure which today has collapsed to just 13 percent. The turn of the century saw a spate of dot-coms, then energy companies and airlines, while retail and food companies came and went. Financial companies have been racking up arenas, as have insurance companies.

A very, very fun part of me taking the executive editor job at Sherwood is that I now get to commission p…