And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you’d start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don’t want to say I told you so, but I’m coming across articles about how Pat Riley is about to get paid all over the place. If you didn’t read the previous post on all of this, this all has to do with Riley’s trademark for the term “three-peat”, a portmanteau that Riley registered in the middle of a failed run to win 3 NBA championships with the Lakers decades ago. Despite the term being relatively common as a sporting term, challenges to Riley’s trademark have thus far been unsuccessful.
That is despite his own commercial use of the term, outside of licensing it, has been a joke. Like, badly designed bumper stickers and license plate frames level of a joke. But since we have a culture that leans more towards ownership than sanity, when the Bulls had two championship runs that were three-peats, Riley got paid.
And now according to reports, he’ll also be paid by the Kansas City Chiefs if they win the Super Bowl this Sunday.
Riley’s trademark attorney John Aldrich told cllct Tuesday there is an agreement in place with the NFL to use “Three Peat” if it happens. Aldrich would not comment on what percentage royalty Riley would make, but did say plans are, as has been in the past, to earmark it for the Pat Riley Family Foundation.
When reached Tuesday, a league spokesperson said the deal, which is not yet formally signed, would be with the Chiefs, not with the league. Current licensees that would make product once a deal is struck, the spokesperson said, would be Fanatics, New Era, Wilson, Riddell and Wincraft. The products would exclusively be sold at Chiefs retail.
This, again, is a perversion of the purpose of trademark law. Riley’s association with the term “three-peat,” as much as an association even exists, comes strictly from the licensing deals he’s signed, not because of any product or service he’s actually produced. He didn’t coin the term himself. He doesn’t provide anything of value that concerns the phrase. There’s question among the public as to the source of a good or service here. This is purely a 79 year old being paid for having registered a trademark so he could be paid in exactly this way.
How much money that is is anybody’s guess.
Although Riley will make some money, reports in the last week saying he could make millions are extremely exaggerated, one source in the licensing industry told cllct. Licensees usually pay a 10% to 15% royalty on the wholesale price of an item.
A $30 hat or T-shirt is $15 wholesale, which means that Riley would make $1.50 to $2.25 per item, meaning roughly 50,000 pieces would have to be sold to even make $100,000 in royalties. The highest priced item that could have “Three-Peat” on it would be fan championship rings, though the royalty percentage on those would likely be lower.
Given the popularity of the NFL and the Chiefs, it’s not hard to imagine the sale of 50k pieces of merch that include the phrase, honestly. In fact, I can imagine a world where many times that much merch gets sold.
But however much that ends up being, some of that money will go, unearned in my view, to Pat Riley.
Filed Under: football, pat riley, three-peat, threepeat, trademark
Companies: kansas city chiefs, nfl
