The Cleveland Browns held an oddly celebratory press conference last week to announce the sale of the naming rights to their stadium to Huntington Bank, a regional bank headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For the next 20 years, what was once Cleveland Browns Stadium will be known as Huntington Bank Field. Never mind that Huntington Bank Field is a laughably generic name that does not even attempt to maintain continuity with the arena’s two most recent monikers, both of which labeled it a stadium rather than a field; the real catch is that the Browns haven’t even decided whether to renovate their current home on the shore of Lake Erie or build a new stadium in Cleveland’s southwestern suburbs.
Under the terms of the deal, the Browns’ home will be Huntington Bank Field wherever it ends up: the stadium now has a fixed name but a curious air of ephemerality hangs over its address.
The prospect of this proud old franchise beginning the new NFL season in a stadium with a name but no certain place offers a striking illustration of the power of money to rip modern sport from its roots, to detach it from history, community, a sense of belonging. Corporate sponsorship has become such an indispensable force in sport that it’s now more powerful and perhaps, in some ways, even more real than the very things – clubs, shirts, buildings – it sponsors.
More than it is a collection of players, coaches, and fans, the modern professional club is a series of marketing deals. Selling stadium naming rights is now a major priority for clubs across the US and Europe, though the sums involved are hardly enormous. The Browns didn’t disclose the terms of their deal with Huntington Bank but their last sale of naming rights, to FirstEnergy from 2013-2023, brought in a relatively piddling $6m a year. Manchester City’s sale of its home ground’s naming rights to Etihad reportedly gives the club £21.9m a season, which is barely enough to buy half an English fullback on the transfer market. Still, these deals represent money through the door, and in an era of increasingly “sophisticated” investment capital in professional sport and booming viewerships, the one thing clubs must do in order to survive and thrive is generate revenue, wherever and whenever it is available.
In the Premier League, virtually every club is now looking to copy early movers like Arsenal, Leicester City and Manchester City and flog off the naming rights to their stadium. Those clubs, of course, inked their naming deals this century as part of the move into new stadiums; the ickiness of the brand associations was lessened somewhat by the newness of the structures to which the sponsors’ names were attached. Now, however, storied old grounds like Old Trafford and Anfield look to be up for appellative auction, following the example of cash-strapped Barcelona, which in 2022 sacrificed more than a century of high-minded tradition – “Més que un club” and all that – in the name of debt service and rebranded its historic stadium as the “Spotify Camp Nou.”
Once bulwarks against social and economic flux, totems of tradition and custom, these historic structures are falling under the regime of impermanence that governs everything else in 21st century life. To see their clubs sell out for such puny returns and wimp into branded everything will rightly leave many fans livid.
Executives at Fenway Sports Group, which owns Liverpool, have indicated that they “would consider” selling the naming rights to the redeveloped Anfield Road stand, along with smaller discrete areas within the stadium. Elsewhere reports suggest that new minority owner Jim Ratcliffe is giving serious thought to selling the naming rights to Manchester United’s home ground. The Old Trafford sale would form part of the effort to raise funds for the stadium’s refurbishment or the construction of a completely new arena – a Cleveland Browns-style solution that could give the club’s new home a branded name before its location has been settled. Bank of America and current shirt sponsor Snapdragon are among the corporate names most likely, and the early genuflections toward tradition from those companies’ suits don’t encourage much faith that history will survive the name sale unmolested.
“Old Trafford is Old Trafford, it should always be Old Trafford,” Don McGuire, the chief marketing officer of semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm, which owns Snapdragon, told The Athletic recently. But, he clarified, “if there is a brand attached to that in some way shape or form, powered by someone, an ‘at’ or whatever,” that could help allay fan fears over the loss of the old ground’s famous old name. The days of ‘Snapdragon Stadium at Old Trafford’ may be closer than we think. Eventually, it seems, every ground in the Premier League will be titled after a generic bank or tech giant or insurance company, with the lesser gods of the mobile phone, apparel and food and beverage industries plastering their names across every inch of each stadium’s stands, tiers, hospitality lounges, fan zones, retail “experiences” and “activation spaces”.
These sponsorship deals are not without reputational risk. The Browns ended an earlier stadium deal with FirstEnergy Corp in 2023 after the utility company became embroiled in a bribery scandal; in recent years Liverpool have terminated smaller brand partnerships with the Russian gaming firm IxBet and Thai coconut water brand Chaokoh after allegations of animal cruelty were leveled at both companies. But the real damage of the modern naming deal, of course, is to tradition, to club identity, to the sense – already compromised by decades of commercialization, but still powerfully present in the hearts of athletes and fans across the globe – of sport as something pure, something that transcends the grubby transactional world of money and influence. Orange Vélodrome might occupy the same ground as the Stade Vélodrome, but it’s not exactly the same place anymore.
New stadiums and even stadium renovations are often presented as grand urban renewal projects. Chelsea’s plan to leave Stamford Bridge and build a new ground at Earl’s Court, revealed by the Guardian this week, will probably involve a similar promise should it move ahead; already there is discussion of building “affordable housing” on the site as part of any stadium redevelopment, the standard measly concession tossed up to head off concerns about displacement and gentrification. Mega-corporate naming rights deals reveal the cynicism of such moves and the emptiness of high-flown rhetoric about urban regeneration, serving as a semi-permanent reminder of the gap between fans and those who team executives see as their ultimate audience. As one city council member in Cleveland put it after the Browns’ new partnership with Lincoln Financial was announced, many local residents “can’t even go to the stadium”. The grounds and their cities may be revitalized, but for whom?
Eric Cantona once claimed he would “quit football forever” if Manchester United sell the naming rights to Old Trafford – and while it’s unlikely any move to commercialize these old grounds’ names will cause mass fan defections, there will still be something important, more ineffable, lost in the process. Stadium names connect clubs to history and to their communities; they’re a way of cementing the bonds of solidarity and togetherness that give sporting clubs their social and cultural vitality. To strip a stadium of its historic name in some ways severs its connection to place; an arena that’s frequently renamed is somehow less real as a physical space, less solid, on shakier ground both figuratively and literally.
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This is especially the case in the US, where stadiums are now brand-named and renamed with such frequency that the arenas themselves start to seem almost nameless, and therefore placeless. Hard Rock Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, has had 10 different names over the past 37 years, including a three-year stretch at the turn of the century when it continued to be named after a zombie company (sports apparel concern Pro Player) that had filed for bankruptcy.
Branded stadium names are often eye-stabbingly ugly: across the major US pro leagues, truffled among the mundane array of Target Centers and T-Mobile Parks, you’ll find such exotic offenses against aesthetics as Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (home of the Cleveland Cavaliers), M&T Bank Stadium (the Baltimore Ravens), loanDepot Park (the Miami Marlins) and Smoothie King Center (the New Orleans Pelicans). Once it’s lost its original identity and been transformed into a mere billboard, the brand-sponsored stadium becomes a zone of corporate influence rather than an arena of sporting competition or a place for fans to experience moments of collective emotion. That’s not to say memories aren’t made at these venues, that feelings aren’t felt – of course they are. But the transience and frequent silliness of the venues’ names dull the purity of the experience, I think, for everyone; reminiscing fondly about a day out at the ground or ballpark becomes that little bit harder when the memories were made at Guaranteed Rate Field or Intuit Dome. That sense of drift and amnesia is even more difficult to resist when the ground in question changes its name every few years, as most of these arenas do: what is a place without a fixed name?
The Premier League could still refuse to embrace this kind of soulless American-style commercialism, but it won’t. As long as there’s a moderate boost to the club bottom line, it’s doubtful anyone in the executive suite at Bank of America FieldHouse at Old Trafford or Anfield Presents Amazon Dome will care about the wreckage done to heritage by selling off these grandly evocative old stadium names.
It would be tempting to describe this state of affairs as a dystopia, but that would imply that modern sport is tied to a fixed place. The direction of financial travel across the world’s most influential and powerful leagues, with increasingly globalized flows of capital, people and ideas, is very much the other way, toward the transformation of sport into a thing without attachment, a spectacle from nowhere.
The dawn of the era of “Huntington Bank Field” does not herald our collective entry into a dystopia but into a sporting no-place. In years to come, as player churn increases and the competitions multiply to the point of stakes-free meaninglessness, the marketing deals and sponsor names may even become the most permanent things about these clubs, the only real markers of “history” in a rootless, hyper-financialized and shabbily denatured world of permanent sporting spectacle. Eventually the sport itself will become mere background decor to the real event, the celebration of the Brand.