Meadowlands Stadium Gets Beer Money

Two down, three to go at the future NFL stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., where Anheuser-Busch recently announced it would buy one of the stadium’s "cornerstone" sponsorships.

The $1.7 billion stadium is expected to host the National Football League’s New York Giants and New York Jets when the Meadowlands complex opens in 2010.

Instead of looking for just a naming rights sponsor, facility operator New Meadowlands Stadium Co. is divvying up the stadium into five quadrants. Metropolitan Life Insurance bought the first deal and now the company that makes Budweiser beer has bought the second.

Anheuser-Busch will get a 25,000-square-foot plaza on the stadium’s north side, plus sports bars on various levels and a sponsored HD video display board, according to the St. Louis Business Journal. Each sponsor is expected to have its own video display.

A naming rights sponsor for the stadium has yet to be found but the name should fetch $25 million annually, according to the Wall Street Journal, which estimated the Anheuser-Busch sponsorship at $8 million a year.

"Most advertisers today want a cleaner, less cluttered facility," Tony Ponturo, VP of global media and sports marketing at Anheuser-Busch, told the paper. "It’s the new frontier."