Fanatics, NFL's Rams kick off on-demand delivery partnership with Uber

Dive Brief:

As the Los Angeles Rams prepared to take the field Monday night in the long-awaited return of pro football to the city, the Rams franchise, its sports merchandise retail partner Fanatics and ride-sharing service Uber partnered to enable delivery of Rams merchandise, signed memorabilia and game day food, SportTechie reports.
While the UberEATS LA tab of the Uber mobile app allowed fans to order food from more than 150 restaurants prior to the Rams’ Monday Night Football game against the San Francisco 49ers, they were also able to order team apparel and signed collectibles from Rams rookie quarterback Jared Goff, one of Fanatics’ exclusive memorabilia athletes.
Fans in certain areas in Southern California, including the Valley, Westside, Downtown, South Bay and Orange County, are eligible for the UberEATS promotion and received e-mails and push notifications announcing the initiative.

Dive Insight:

This is possibly the most excited anyone will be about the L.A. Rams all season. Despite the enthusiasm over the return of pro football to the city, the team was absolutely abysmal in Monday's 28-0 loss, and has been widely criticized for using the No. 1 overall draft pick on Goff, who was not even active for Monday night's big opener. (It would be much cooler to see Uber show up on your doorstep with a jersey signed by stout second-year running back Todd Gurley, or the late and legendary Ram Merlin "Father Murphy" Olsen, for that matter.)

Still, setting aside all that, this is the second interesting intersection of pro football, online retail and express delivery that we have heard about already this young season after the San Francisco 49ers said Amazon would make Prime Now deliveries to its Levi's Stadium parking lots before games.

It's good to see NFL teams, usually not the most progressive of institutions, thinking outside the box in terms of participating in these new partnerships. Also, in this particular case, Fanatics and Uber both may have recognized a previously unexplored opportunity for each. The partnership should result in new traffic, usage and sales for both of them.

With a couple of very interesting marketing and sales partnerships already unveiled the first week of pro football season, it will be even more interesting to see where things go from here. The 49ers' partnership with Amazon was an example of a tech-savvy team in a tech-savvy town making a pretty natural move, and the Rams' new partnership may have been inspired mostly by a widely-celebrated event, so what's next? Could the New York Jets sign Lyft to lift New York-style pizzas over to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey? We'll see.