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Nets sell jersey rights to software company

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Brooklyn Nets

Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box Wednesday, Brett Yormark and Jeremy Lin announced a jersey sponsorship deal between the Nets and Infor, a privately held, New York-based software company .

According to Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg News, the deal will include placing a post-it sized red square on the team’s jerseys, starting in 2017-18.

Soshnick reports...

The company paid $8 million for the deal, according to a person familiar with the terms who asked for anonymity because the information is not public. As part of the tie-up, Infor will also provide data analytics and technology to support the team’s business operations, fan experience initiatives and player performance.

“Infor will soon become the main artery of our company, one that connects both business and basketball,” said Brett Yormark.

Specifically, the Nets provided this description of how Infor will help the Nets basketball operations...

The most unique aspect of the partnership will see Infor develop a one-stop digital hub designed to help Nets General Manager Sean Marks and the team’s Basketball Operations department generate stronger results on the court. This hub, developed by data scientists at Infor’s Dynamic Science Labs and a team from its in-house digital agency, H&L Digital, will provide actionable insights by analyzing the vast array of data captured by the Nets on-court performance as well as the team’s travel information, training activity, and other performance data. The centralized digital platform will aim to enhance data visualization and to further unify all of Basketball Operations, including players, coaches, training and medical staff, and analytics team.

In addition to the jersey patch, the Infor logo will be “a branding presence” throughout Barclays Center and HSS Training Center, according to a press release on the Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment website

The deal is the fourth between NBA teams and sponsors. Teams could only start marketing the jersey space in recent months. The NBA had long considered jersey ads, but only agreed to sell them last year. Ads on practice jerseys have permitted since 2009. The Nets were the first to sell space on practice jerseys.

The company, which competes with enterprise technology SAP and Oracle, was valued at about $10 billion as recently as November, when it accepted an investment from Koch Industries worth more than $2 billion. The Koch Brothers are best known for their political contributions to Republican and other conservative causes.

According to Soshnick, this is Infor’s first North American sports sponsorship, though it also supports the Scuderia Ferrari Formula-1 racing team and New Zealand’s BNZ Crusaders rugby team and has its name on a lounge in the Barclays Center.

“This isn’t about sponsorship," said Infor president Stephan Scholl. “It’s really about making them win more games with my name on their jerseys. That’s a great message for us and our customers.”

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