timeThe Cleveland Browns held a strangely celebratory press conference last week to announce the sale of naming rights to their stadium to Huntington Bank, a regional bank based in Columbus, Ohio. Over the next 20 years, the former Cleveland Browns Stadium will be renamed Huntington Bank Stadium. Never mind that Huntington Bank Stadium is a ridiculously generic name that doesn’t even attempt to maintain continuity with the arena’s two most recent nicknames, both of which mark it as a stadium rather than an athletic field; the real problem is, the Browns It hasn’t even been decided yet whether to renovate their current home on the shores of Lake Erie or build a new stadium in Cleveland’s southwest suburbs.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Browns’ home stadium will be Huntington Bank Stadium, no matter where it ends up: The stadium now has a permanent name, but an odd air of ephemerality hangs over its address.
The prospect that this proudly established franchise will begin the new NFL season in a stadium with a name but no confirmed location is a compelling illustration of the power of money to strip modern sports from its roots and make it a reality. It’s disconnected from history, community and a feeling. Corporate sponsorship has become such an integral force in sport that it is now more powerful, and in some ways even more real, than the clubs, jerseys, buildings etc. that it sponsors themselves.
A modern professional club is not only a collection of players, coaches and fans, but also a series of marketing transactions. Selling stadium naming rights is now a priority for clubs in the United States and Europe, even if the sums involved are modest. The Browns did not disclose terms of the deal with Huntington Bank, but they last sold naming rights to FirstEnergy from 2013 to 2023, bringing in a relatively meager $6 in annual revenue. It is reported that after Manchester City sold the naming rights of their home stadium to Etihad Airways, the club’s season income is 21.9 pounds, which is barely enough to buy half an English defender in the transfer market. Still, these deals represent money, and in an era of increasingly “sophisticated” investment capital in professional sports and growing audience numbers, one thing clubs must do to survive and thrive is generate revenue wherever and whenever they can.
Almost every club in the Premier League is now looking to follow pioneers such as Arsenal, Leicester City and Manchester City and strip their stadiums of naming rights. Of course, these clubs signed naming deals as part of moving into new stadiums this century; the new structure attached to the sponsor’s name goes some way to alleviating the aversion to brand association. Now, however, it looks like storied venues like Old Trafford and Anfield will follow cash-strapped Barcelona’s lead and sacrifice more than a century of noble tradition – ‘Més que un Club’ and all that – in 2022. — renamed its historic stadium “Spotify Camp Nou” in the name of paying off debt.
Once bulwarks against social and economic change, totems of tradition and custom, these historic buildings have fallen under the capricious regimes that govern everything in 21st century life. It will rightly make many fans furious to see their club sell out for such a meager return while doing nothing on the brand.
Executives at Fenway Sports Group, which owns Liverpool, have said they “would consider” selling naming rights to the redeveloped Anfield Road stand, as well as smaller discrete areas within the stadium. Reports elsewhere suggest new minority owner Jim Ratcliffe is seriously considering selling the naming rights to United’s home ground. The sale of Old Trafford would be part of an effort to raise funds for stadium renovations or the construction of an entirely new ballpark – a Cleveland Browns-style solution that would give the club’s new home a brand name before a site is decided. Bank of America and current jersey sponsor Snapdragon are among the most likely corporate names, and the early surrender to tradition in these corporate lawsuits does little to inspire confidence that history will survive the name sale undisturbed.
“Old Trafford is Old Trafford and it should always be Old Trafford,” Don McGuire, chief marketing officer of Qualcomm, the semiconductor maker that owns Snapdragon, recently told The Athletic. But, he clarified, “if there’s a brand attached to it in some way, driven by someone, ‘at’ or something else,” that could help alleviate fans’ concerns about losing the old name the old stadium was known for. The day at Old Trafford’s Snapdragon Stadium may be closer than we think. Eventually, it looks like every Premier League stadium will be named after a universal bank, tech giant or insurance company, while minor gods from the mobile phone, clothing and food and drink industries plaster their names on every stadium stand. An inch of space.
These sponsorship deals are not without reputational risks. The Browns terminated an early stadium deal with FirstEnergy Corp in 2023 after the utility company was embroiled in a bribery scandal; in recent years, Liverpool terminated ties with Russian gaming company IxBet and Thai coconut water brand Chaokoh following animal cruelty allegations. A small brand partnership between the two companies. But the real damage to modern naming deals is, of course, the damage to tradition, to club identity, to sporting consciousness – something that has been damaged by decades of commercialization but remains strongly present in the minds of athletes and fans around the world. Something pure, something beyond the dirty transactional world of money and influence. The Orange Velodrome may occupy the same site as the Velodrome Stadium, but it’s no longer the same place.
New stadiums or even stadium renovations are often referred to as large-scale urban renewal projects. The Guardian revealed this week that Chelsea’s plans to leave Stamford Bridge and build a new stadium at Earls Court could see similar commitments if they go ahead; there has been talk of building “affordable homes” at the site as part of any stadium redevelopment part, offering minimal concessions to standards in an effort to address concerns about displacement and gentrification. Naming-rights deals by major corporations reveal the cynicism of such moves and the hollowness of high-pitched rhetoric about urban revitalization, serving as a semi-permanent reminder of the disparity between fans and who team executives view as their ultimate audience. As one member of the Cleveland City Council said after the Browns announced their new partnership with Lincoln Financial, many local residents “can’t even go to the stadium.” Land and cities may be reborn, but for whom?
Eric Cantona has claimed he would “quit football forever” if Manchester United sold the naming rights to Old Trafford – although any move to commercialize the names of these old stadiums is unlikely to lead to a mass defection of fans , but there will still be something important and more ineffable happening that gets lost in the process. Stadium names connect clubs to history and their communities; they are a way of cementing bonds of unity and solidarity, giving sports clubs social and cultural vitality. Stripping a stadium of its historical name somehow severes its connection to place; an arena that is constantly renamed is somehow less real and less solid than the physical space, both figuratively and literally. All are more shaky.
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This is especially true in the United States, where stadiums are now being branded and renamed with such frequency that the stadiums themselves are starting to look almost nameless and therefore have nowhere to go. Hard Rock Stadium, home to the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, has had 10 different names over the past 37 years, including three years at the turn of the century when it continued to be a zombie company (sports apparel company Pro). Player) has filed for bankruptcy.
Branded stadium names are often dizzyingly ugly: among the generic Target Center and T-Mobile Park in major American professional leagues, you’ll find names like Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (Cleveland Cavaliers). home), M&T Bank Stadium (Baltimore Ravens), Loan Warehouse Park (Miami Marlins) and Smoothie King Center (New Orleans Pelicans). Once they lose their original identity and become mere billboards, brand-sponsored stadiums become zones of corporate influence rather than arenas for sporting events or places for fans to experience collective emotional moments. That’s not to say that memories aren’t made and emotions aren’t felt in these places – of course there are. But I think for everyone, the ephemerality and frequent silliness of the venue names detracts from the purity of the experience; remembering fondly a day spent at the ballpark or ballpark when the memories take place at Guaranteed Rate Field or the Intuit Dome It becomes a little difficult. This feeling of drift and amnesia is all the more overwhelming when the venue in question changes name every few years, as it does with most of these arenas: What’s a place without a fixed name?
The Premier League could still refuse to accept this soulless American commercialism, but it won’t. As long as the club’s bottom line gets a modest boost, no one in the executive suites at Old Trafford’s Bank of America Arena or Anfield’s Amazon Dome cares about the damage done to heritage by selling off these evocative old stadium names of destruction.
It would be easy to describe this situation as dystopian, but it means that modern sport is tied to a fixed place. As the flow of capital, people and ideas becomes increasingly globalized, the financial journey of the world’s most influential and powerful leagues is doing just the opposite, transforming sport into something without attachments, something that comes from nowhere. of wonders.
The advent of the Huntington Bank Arena era does not herald our collective entry into a dystopia, but rather into a sports void. In the coming years, as player attrition increases and games increase to the point of meaninglessness without stakes, marketing deals and sponsor names may even become the most permanent thing about these clubs, becoming rootless “history.” ” is the only true mark. , the hyper-financialized and dilapidated world of perpetual sports spectacle. Ultimately, the sport itself will become a real event, a backdrop for brand celebrations.