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≡ LA28 SALES UPDATE ≡
“Los Angeles is having its Team USA-U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Partners Summit, which is anticipating the [Winter] Games in Milano Cortina, and the Games in Los Angeles in 2028.
“The team for LA 2028 is finally becoming a real team, with now about 250 people and you can see that with a little more than three-and-a-half years away, it’s all very, very real.”
That’s U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee Board Chair Gene Sykes, during Thursday morning’s online first meeting of the Salt Lake City-Utah 2034 Steering Committee, sharing an update on the progress of the LA28 organizing committee.
It was noted that the success of the Los Angeles Games in 2028 will have a major impact on Salt Lake’s success six years later. Explained USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland, sharing more from the sponsor meetings in L.A.:
“One of the conversations we had, and the data we’re looking at, is the impact of the success of the Paris Games on Milan Cortina [2026]. And there is, as you can imagine, we all do quite a bit of market research around what the consumer sentiment is, where the American people are, in perceptions of the Olympic & Paralympic Movement.
“And the reality is, the success of the Paris Games and the positive momentum that came from those Games have created incredible energy and a much high propensity to engage in Milan Cortina than where we were coming out of Tokyo [2021], going into the Beijing [2022] Games.
“So the cycle is meaningful and you see how one builds upon the next; the data validates that, so as we look at the success of L.A. will inevitably create incredible momentum around the Movement in this country, that will be a propellant to the success of Salt Lake, no doubt.”
John Slusher, the new chief executive of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Properties sales team, told the Los Angeles Times that is seeing a major urge in discussions and interest around sponsorship support for 2028:
“It would not surprise me if we do three or four [times] the sponsorship deals this year, from a dollar standpoint, than we did all of last year. So business is just on fire.”
But he was also cautious, not mentioning any names and adding, “Things could turn the other direction too. So I think we’ll know a lot more in three months.”
Slusher’s enthusiasm is pointing to reaching close to $2 billion in domestic sponsorship sales by the end of 2025, against a budgeted target of $2.514 billion by the time of the 2028 Games.
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From an overall budgeting perspective, LA28 senior staff repeatedly confirmed during 2024 that the organizing committee had contracted for 64-65% of the total budget of $6.882 billion for the 2028 Games, roughly $4.6 billion so far.
That included about $1.5 billion on the sponsorship side, so with another $500 million coming in during 2025, the total contracted revenue would surpass $5 billion or more, perhaps 74% of the 2028 budget, with ticket sales not part of the equation yet. (There is a sizable hospitality sales guarantee as part of the already-contracted revenue, however.)
That is a good sign for the organizers and should bring some comfort to the Los Angeles City Council, reeling under an already-strained budget and new, pressing questions on the rebuilding of the Palisades area from the January fire. (Altadena, badly mauled in the Eaton Fire, is outside the City of Los Angeles.)
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