Golden 1, one of the nation’s largest credit unions, has acquired naming rights for the $477M downtown NBA Kings arena, scheduled to open in October '16. An announcement on what will be called Golden 1 Center is scheduled for today adjacent to the construction site in downtown in Sacramento. Sources pegged the deal at $120M over 20 years, with an average annual value at $6M, making it one of the largest naming-rights deals for a single-tenant NBA arena.
Sacramento-based Golden 1 is the latest company to support a hometown naming-rights platform. It is the largest credit union in California and the sixth-largest in the U.S., with $9B in assets. It boasts 720,000 members in California, largely employees of the state government. Rights obtained by Golden 1 under the contract are not broadly exclusive across financial services, so the Kings, which handled the deal in-house, can cut more deals within that category. Golden 1 Center is believed to be the first major-league sports facility with a credit union as naming-rights sponsor. However, there are more than 10 college and minor-league facilities with credit unions in their nameplates, including State Employees Credit Union Arena at Towson Univ., SEFCU Arena at the Univ. at Albany and UCCU Center at Utah Valley Univ.
