Abstract
Extant scholarship on football stadium names is almost exclusively restricted to discussing naming rights deals as expressions of toponymic commodification. Departing from this rather strict focus, this paper sets out to examine the patterns of stadium names from a quantitative perspective that is based on a dataset comprising football stadiums from around the world (n=1485). Drawing on this empirical material, the paper conducts a multinomial logistic regression analysis focused on determining the factors that influence a stadium’s name as: (a) being neutral (names carrying generic, local and/or descriptive connotations); (b) being political (names celebrating ideological values, historical dates and/or political personalities); (c) representing sports figures (names commemorating sportspersons, either former players or club officials); and (d) representing sponsorship (corporate names). The model points out that variations in stadium names are accounted for mostly by the football continental confederation, but are also influenced by a stadium’s features such as capacity, year of construction and the status of being a shared venue or designated as the national stadium.
Introduction: stadiums as sites of power, memory and commodification
In the last century-and-a-half, stadiums emerged as the central pillars of an ever-growing landscape of sport. Since the imposition of the touchline in 1882 transformed football from a folk game with no spatial limits and weak rules of exclusion into a normatively structured game that segregated the players from spectators within the bounds of an enclosed pitch, stadiums were built at increasing paces throughout the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the wider world (Bale, 2003: 133–134). As a quantitative indication of this trend, the World Stadiums database includes information on 4837 stadiums in 224 countries, while other sources establish the number of stadiums worldwide at 5735 (Maps of World, 2020; World Stadiums, 2020).
In theorizing these developments, researchers have employed a repertoire of metaphors through which to make sense of stadiums’ increased role in contemporary societies. During the 20th century, as football emerged as a mass global phenomenon, stadiums were constructed as ‘modern coliseums’ to host the athletic drama unfolding within their material boundaries (Lisle, 2017). In explicit dramaturgical terms, Raitz (1995) spoke of stadiums as ‘the theatre of sport’. Metaphors that draw direct analogies between sports and religion also abound. In an age of increased secularization, stadiums have become the ‘new cathedrals’ of football culture (Trumpbour, 2007). Equally powerful, Gaffney (2008) highlights the sacred nature of football stadiums, which for many have become hollow grounds and ‘temples of the earthbound gods’.
Whereas sociologists of sports have theorized stadiums as spaces of confined surveillance and increased capitalistic consumption (Bale, 1993), cultural geographers have conceived of stadiums as monumental spaces of spectacular athletic performance that become iconic landmarks in the urban environment. Football stadiums are characterized as ‘monuments, places for community interaction, repositories of collective memory, loci of strong identities, sites for ritualized conflict, political battlefields, and nodes in global systems of sport’ (Gaffney, 2008: 4). Indeed, besides their intended functional purpose as venues of sports activities, stadiums lend themselves to critical analyses focused on unpacking their political, commemorative and economic aspects. Paraphrasing Football Club (FC) Barcelona’s slogan that it is ‘more than a club’ (més que un club), the basic tenet posited in this paper is that a football stadium is more than a physical sports venue. As monuments of architecture and feats of civil engineering – but also as concrete symbols of power and political might – stadiums are ideology cast in stone (Tietz, 2006).
From the perspective of politics, stadiums constitute instrumental sites of power. Stadiums have provided the grounds for organizing political festivals enacted to glorify the state and its rulers. Stadiums were also heavily used as platforms for political rallies and large-scale political spectacle. For instance, for the so-called ‘Nazi games’ – the summer Olympics of 1936 – the Olympiastadion in Berlin was constructed as a neo-classical monumental building designed not only to express the fascist architectural aesthetics, but especially as a ground meant to demonstrate the athletic superiority of the Aryan race (Large, 2007; Tumblety, 2013). Such a wide repertoire of political usage – ranging from venues of political festivals and rallies as detailed above to prison camp for political dissidents during Chile’s authoritarian regime under Augusto Pinochet (Rozas-Krause, 2015) – is indicative of the stadium as an important tool and place in a political regime’s material apparatus of power.
Equally important, football stadiums also constitute sites of political resistance and platforms for contesting state power. As shown by Shobe (2008a, 2008b) in his studies on the politics of place with regard to FC Barcelona, Catalanism and Spanish identity, the stadium (Nou Camp) is a venue for expressing collective identity and where historical memories imbued with politics are being continuously articulated against central power. It is a place for the serialized performance of ritualized tradition codified in songs and chants that convey clear political messages (Shobe, 2008b: 338).
Closely connected with these political usages, stadiums are also powerful places of identity-making, collective memory and loci of commemoration. In addition to public squares and central avenues, they provide the material framework for constructing identity at various spatial scales (ranging from local and regional to national and transnational), enacting memory practices and performing collective identities. Since 1976, the National Stadium in Singapore has hosted parades organized to celebrate the country’s national day (Kong and Yeoh, 1997). As the venue for the unfolding of these theatrical stagings of memory and identity, the National Stadium has witnessed the parade’s shift from a thoroughly militaristic ceremonial involving a display of discipline, hierarchy and military might to an increasingly commodified spectacle (Leong, 2001). As this example from Singapore powerfully suggests, sports arenas are also important venues for the performative politics of commemoration.
Stadiums cannot be withdrawn from the economic context in which they are constructed. An economic perspective highlights how sports arenas are major places of capitalist production and consumption. Scholars in sport studies have explored the economics of stadium building (Rich, 2000; Trumpbour, 2007) and the economic impact of new stadiums on urban development (Ahlfeldt and Maennig, 2010), as well as the effects of the commodification of sports venues around the world (Giulianotti, 2005; Kennedy, 2013; McManus, 2013). In the latter regard, critical scholars of football culture have shown how financial interests turned stadiums into ‘tradiums’; that is, places of trade and consumption as opposed to spaces for community gathering (Bale, 2000: 93).
While geographers of sportscapes and sociologists of sport have discussed all these various facets of the materiality of stadiums at length, scarcely mentioned is the symbolic geography of football stadiums as expressed in their naming patterns. In this paper, I set out to intersect the sociology of football with the cultural geography of sportscapes in examining the patterns of naming football stadiums across the world. Despite the valuable body of works that have been published since the 1980s (e.g. Bale, 1982, 1994, 2003; Koch, 2017), a recent review article characterized sports geography as a sub-discipline that continues to be in a ‘fledgling’ state and which ‘has not realized its full potential’ (Andrews, 2017: 766), a diagnostic that is broadly shared (Wise, 2015). Within this literature, ‘the nature of stadiums and their embeddedness in urban life have been central concerns’ (Andrews, 2017: 768). In theorizing football stadiums as political and memorial places, this paper sets out to consolidate and expand the existing scholarship in sports geography by integrating geographical approaches and the sociology of sport with critical toponymic studies.
The paper aims to address this gap in the literature by examining the toponymic features of football stadiums. As the following section will illustrate, placenames in general and stadium names in particular are practices of toponymic inscription that radiate power, encode memory and anchor meaning into the urban landscape. The methodological approach underpinnings of this research is outlined in a subsequent section, before moving on to presenting the main empirical findings reported in this study. The paper concludes with a discussion focused on the broader cultural and political implications of these results.
The politics of stadium namescapes
In the last decades, the so-called ‘critical turn’ has revived the study of placenames from the linguistic preoccupation with etymology towards unraveling the political underpinnings of place-naming practices (Rose-Redwood and Alderman, 2011; Vuolteenaho and Berg, 2009). Scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of critical toponymies have departed from conventional onomastics analysis and have drawn on social theory to conceive of placenames as the nominal outcomes of power-laden acts of inscribing the landscape with political, memorial and cultural meaning (Rose-Redwood et al., 2010).
Stadium names and the politics of naming sports venues are largely absent from this burgeoning body of critical toponymic scholarship. Whereas in articulating a theoretical framework, researchers have engaged with the generic concept of placenames (Alderman, 2008; Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2016), empirical studies were focused predominantly on street-naming practices. Within this strand of research, most scholars have grappled analytically with how to make sense of the process of street renaming that occurred especially in the aftermath of major power shifts and regime changes (Gill, 2005; Light, 2004; Rusu, 2019b).
With scanty exceptions, the names of sporting venues remained an unexplored terrain. Vuolteenaho and Kolamo (2012) have embraced a Debordian perspective and examined the spectacularization of English soccerscape through the neoliberal rendering of stadiums into ‘landscape advertisements’. Less philosophically, Church and Penny (2013) analyzed the power relations and contentious politics involved in the renaming of Arsenal FC’s stadium. They document how the move from Highbury to Emirates Stadium triggered supporters’ reaction to the corporatization of the venue’s name that forced the club owners to consider alternative ways to ‘Arsenalize’ the new ground. These included christening the sectors of the Emirates with the names of the demolished stands (North Bank and Clock End) and erecting statues of four of the club’s former players. Such naming practices and commemorative actions were meant to prevent the physical displacement caused by the relocation to a new stadium into producing a memorial rupture. Where relocation was not accompanied by similar practices, such as in the case of Walsall FC’s move from Fellows Park to the new Banks’s Stadium, supporters experienced a sense of loss. The new, all-seater stadium – despite its added comfort, improved facilities and better viewing angles – was deplored by fans for its vacuum of history and memorial void. The material improvements alone could not replace the sense of togetherness and belonging experienced by supporters chanting their songs under heavy rain (Lawrence, 2016).
As these examples illustrate, the sole aspect of stadium toponymy that has become the subject-matter of extensive debate and empirical analysis is the commodification of naming rights as a source of commercial revenue. The commodification of placenames in the context of entrepreneurial neoliberalism has become a major topic in critical toponymic scholarship (Light and Young, 2014; Medway and Warnaby, 2014; Rose-Redwood et al., 2019). Cultural geographers and sociologists of sports have documented the emergence of the corporate rebranding of venues in the United States. Acquiring naming rights for sponsorship reasons spread to Europe, Japan and Australia during the 1990s, and reached its peak during the mid-2000s. A study that examined a collection of 193 football grounds from 6 European countries found varying proportions of name commodification, ranging from as low as 8.1% (3 out of 37 stadiums) in Italy to as high as 65.7% (23 out of 35 stadiums) in Germany (Vuolteenaho et al., 2019).
Much less discussed in the scholarship is the toponymic inscription of political power and historical memory into stadium nomenclature. In a powerful plea against naming rights deals, Boyd (2000) argued that ‘selling home’ by ‘sacrificing the commemorative name of a sports venue for a paid corporate name alters the identity statements of memory places’ (330). Such corporatization of stadium names for garnering additional revenue threatens to sever the already ‘tenuous relationship among teams, fans, and the cities’ where the former are grounded. Whereas most scholars of football culture associate the 1990s with the aggressive corporatization of stadium names, some researchers noted an opposite trend of increased commemoration emerging during the same period, at least limited to the British context. Along this line, Russell (2006) argued that a ‘commemorative turn’ occurred in British soccer around 1985.
Starting with this period, ‘football’s culture of commemoration has altered both quantitatively and qualitatively’ (Russell, 2006: 3). He traces this shift as being shaped by 3 factors: tragic events such as the 1989 Hillsborough disaster when 96 Liverpool supporters died, demographic developments such as the deaths of football players and managers, and broader changes in the societal culture of public mourning. These deaths have led to new forms of mourning and commemoration, ranging from retiring shirt numbers and observing minutes of silence to erecting statues and setting up informal shrines. In addition, it has become a custom in English football to name the stadium stands in honor of former players. Newcastle United established a premiere when the club renamed St James’ Park’s West Stand after Jackie Milburn in 1990. A decade-and-a-half later, 15 Premiership and Championship football clubs have had commemorative stands (Russell, 2006: 8).
However, it should be emphasized that these commemorative practices were reserved to the names of stands, as opposed to those of stadiums, which have made the subject of profitable transactions as part of naming rights deals. At least for the British football context, what these research findings indicate is a dual, quite contradictory, development: one the one hand, the rationalization of the game triggered by the Taylor report and the appearance of the Premier League in 1992 brought about increased pressures towards the commodification of stadium space, including selling the naming rights to corporate sponsors (Lord Justice Taylor, 1990). On the other hand, as part of a wider cultural interest in the past, this commodification was countered by a reaction towards the memorialization of the club’s histories. What resulted from the entanglement of these trends is a football culture that is characterized by ‘the coupling of hypercommodified football with nostalgic venue branding motifs’ (Vuolteenaho et al., 2019: 775).
Taking cues from the sociology of sports, sports geography and the interdisciplinary field of critical placename studies, in this paper I look at stadium names as nominal manifestos of: (a) political values; (b) historical memories; and (c) commercial interests. When not bearing names referring to local particularities or topographic features, stadium names may express the ideological ethos characterizing the political status quo. Second, stadium names are sometimes lieux de mémoire in their own right (Nora, 1989). They become toponomastic sites of memory by commemorating historical events from the national past, public personalities such as statesmen and politicians, and sportspeople. Third, as detailed above, stadium names have increasingly become branded commodities that are sold to sponsors for increasing the club’s financial revenues. This typology will be further developed in the methodological section, where I present the empirical data, describe the coding procedure, and detail the analytical approach adopted in this paper.
Data and method
What does stadium nomenclature tell us about the culture of football in a globalized world? Whose memory do these stadium names preserve and how do these patterns of commemoration vary across geographical regions and football cultures? And, finally, what are the factors that shape the nominal identity a stadium bears, including the increasingly popular choice to sell the sports venue’s name to sponsorship branding? To answer these questions, a comprehensive dataset comprising a large collection of stadiums from across the world was constructed. To this purpose, data from multiple sources publicly available on the Internet were accessed, collected and integrated into a coherent dataset. Information regarding football sports venues were retrieved from the websites stadiumdb.com, worldstadiums.com, and worldstadiumdatabase.com. Missing data were completed by additional inquiries on online encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia) and other relevant websites. As a methodological convention, stadium data were gathered from the first-tier football clubs plus the national stadium (where available) from all national leagues affiliated to the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA).
Overall, the dataset included empirical material on 1485 stadiums, organized along several variables: toponymic information regarding the stadium name; data concerning the stadium tenants (football clubs playing on that sports ground); geographical information regarding the city and its population size, the country and the continental confederation where the stadium is located. Data referring to stadiums’ features were also integrated into the dataset: capacity (the number of spectators they can accommodate) and the sports facility’s age. Another variable consisted of the venues’ status as a national stadium (for the countries whose national football teams do have such a designated ground).
After constructing and organizing the dataset, the next step consisted of the coding procedure. Each observation was coded as: (a) local and/or descriptive, when the stadium name referred to the local community (e.g. ‘Municipal Stadium’) or local topographic features (e.g. ‘Riverside Stadium’); (b) politics, if the stadium celebrated political values (e.g. Estadio Libertad in Pasto, Colombia), commemorated political events (e.g. Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, built for the World Cup of 1930 and named thus in commemoration of Uruguay’s independence obtained a century earlier in 1828) or honored political personalities (e.g. the Atatürk Olympic Stadium, named after the founding father of the Republic of Turkey); (c) sports, if the stadium honored sportspersons through its name; and (d) sponsorship, if the stadium bears a corporate name who purchased the naming rights. The stadium names honoring sports figures were further coded as football players, head coaches, club officials, athletes and others (referees and journalists). Lastly, for the stadiums named after corporate sponsors, their pre-sponsorship names were identified and classified as local/descriptive, politics, sports, sponsorship and new grounds.
In analyzing these data, this paper resorts to a range of multivariate statistical techniques. These include carrying out a multinomial logistic regression analysis that was conducted to identify the factors that shape the classification of a stadium name as descriptive/local, politics, sports or sponsorship. Such an advanced statistical method was scarcely used in critical placename studies and never before employed in the study of sports venues. A notable exception is Rusu’s (2020) study on the political patterning of post-socialist street name changes in three Romanian cities. Drawing on a quantitative approach based on complete toponymic data, the paper employed logistic regression modeling techniques to identify the factors that determine the probability of a street name being changed. The analysis revealed that the process of post-socialist street renaming was structured by toponymic factors (streets bearing political names were more prone to renaming) and topographic characteristics (the closer a street was located to the city center, the greater the probability of being targeted for renaming). Applied to the toponomy of sports venues, this analytical approach promises to provide insights into the factors predicting the type of name a football stadium bears. The presentation of the results follows in the subsequent section of this paper.
Results
The presentation of the findings reported in this paper is organized along three lines. I start by detailing the descriptive statistics regarding the distribution of stadiums according to various types of names. The paper presents, first, this distribution in terms of the overall typology and then restricts the analysis to those names honoring the sportspersons. The second section is dedicated to the multinomial logistic analysis model focused on identifying the factors associated with a stadium name type. The final part of the analysis deals with sponsorship names and sets out to determine what stadium names are most vulnerable to become objects of toponymic commodification through naming-rights purchases.
Patterns of stadium naming
Of the 1485 stadiums included in the analysis, more than half bear descriptive toponomies and vernacular names (805 stadiums, representing 54.21%). Examples of this type include Stadion An der Alten Försterei (Stadium at the old forester’s house) in Berlin, Germany, or Všesportovní stadion (All-sports stadium) in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, also known by the locals as Pod Lízátky (Under the lollipops). These are vernacular names that either refer to particular local topography or make sense only to locals.
Corporate rebranding of stadium names is present in 203 sports venues (13.67%). Surprisingly, stadium names that promote corporate sponsors, as well as those that refer to politics (political values, historical dates bearing political meaning, and statesmen) exceed the number of sports venues named after sports figures (296 stadiums, representing 19.93%, were coded as ‘politics’ as opposed to 181, representing 12.19% that were coded as ‘sports’). Some large corporations have invested huge amounts of money for acquiring the naming rights of major sports venues. The most lucrative individual deal is Manchester City’s partnership with the United Arab Emirates’ Etihad Airways, after whom the City of Manchester Stadium is being currently named. Other corporations have resorted to different strategies to expand their public exposure and have developed a portfolio of stadium names promoting their business. In this regard, Allianz Group holds naming rights for six football venues across the globe (Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany; Allianz Field in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Allianz Parque in São Paulo, Brazil; Allianz Riviera in Nice, France; Allianz Stadion in Vienna, Austria; and Allianz Stadium in Turin, Italy).
While the corporate sponsor inserts its presence into multiple places, the stadiums that are rebranded to promote its name lose their identity, as they differ from other similarly branded places only marginally (stadium, arena, park, etc.). These emerging marginal identities rebranded as part of comprehensive corporate efforts to coagulate nominal portfolios indicate the full extent of the entanglement of financial capitalism and football culture in the globalized world. In King’s (2010) words, ‘stadia [and their names, I would hastily add] have become nodes in an emergent transnational order, representing the alliance of global capital, football clubs and consumers’ (33–34).
The results presented in Table 1 indicate that sports memory is less inscribed into football stadiums than political symbols and corporate brands. From the nominal perspective embraced in this analysis, stadiums seem to be less endogenous sites of commemoration that preserve the game’s past and cultivate football’s mnemonic tradition, and more spaces of expressing political power and places commodified by commercial interests.
Descriptive statistics of stadium names.
AFC: Asian Football Confederation; OFC: Oceania Football Confederation; CAF: Confederation of African Football; CONCACAF: Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football; CONMEBOL: South American Football Confederation; UEFA: Union of European Football Associations.
Given the global approach adopted in this study, it is important to take geographical variation into account when analyzing this distribution of stadium names in terms of their type. Table 2 presents the type of stadium names distributed along the six continental football confederations (due to the small number of stadiums existing in countries affiliated to the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), this confederation was merged with the Asian Football Confederation, AFC).
Distribution of stadium name types in terms of continental football association (%).
AFC: Asian Football Confederation; OFC: Oceania Football Confederation; CAF: Confederation of African Football; CONCACAF: Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football; CONMEBOL: South American Football Confederation; UEFA: Union of European Football Associations.
Table 2 shows that the stadium name types vary significantly across the continental football confederations, a variable that can be taken as a proxy for the geographical region (Pearson χ2 (12) = 313.88, p < 0.001). Wide differences set apart particular geo-cultures of naming football venues. Stadiums named after sports figures represent merely 1.16% in Asia and Oceania (AFC and OFC), while this proportion goes as high as 32.56% in the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL). The AFC and OFC are also the regions with the highest proportion of local/descriptive names (61.27%), which suggests that most stadium names remain largely unmarked with neither the symbols of power (politics) or those of football’s own memory. The fact that in the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) the proportion of stadiums bearing descriptive names is roughly similar (58.09%), and well below North America (31.18%), constitutes a puzzling finding, given that the European continent is the cradle of football and the region where the sport is the most popular.
Similar differences can be discerned in sponsorship names: these range from a minimum of 0.44% in the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to 27.96% in the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). In this regard, the continental patterns of stadium naming vary closely with the geographical concentration of capital in the world-system, which is much more present in the ‘core states’ located in North America, Europe and some parts of Asia (Japan, South Korea) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) than in the (semi)peripheries from the Latin America and especially Africa (Wallerstein, 2011).
Political nomenclatures are less prevalent in UEFA (9.24%) and North America (11.83%). In contrast, African stadiums present the highest proportion of politicized names (34.22%), followed closely by the stadium nomenclature in Latin America (30.81%) and Asia and Oceania (27.46%). This duality indicates two different onomastic cultures of football grounds, with regard to politics: a non-political one in Europe and North America and a politicized one prevailing on the other continents. In the latter parts of the world, stadium names are rendered more frequently into ideological vehicles used to celebrate power and legitimate the political order.
It is also important to find out who are the sportspeople whose legacy is commemorated in a stadium name. As expected, most stadiums are named in honor of former football players (90 out of 164 for which data were available, representing 54.88%). Paralleling the situation of sports venues bearing the same sponsor name (e.g. Allianz Arena, Allianz Parque, Allianz Stadium, etc.), there are stadiums named after the same footballer. This is the case with the Estadio Diego Armando Maradona in Buenos Aires, named after the Argentinian legend in 2004, and Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in Naples, Italy, which was renamed from Stadio San Paulo a week after Maradona’s death occurred on 25 November 2020.
There are only five trainers and head coaches after whom stadiums had been named (Başakşehir Fatih Terim Stadium in Istanbul, Turkey; Estadio Manuel Felipe Carrera, in Guatemala City; Estadio Marcelo A Bielsa in Rosario, Argentina; Stadion Miejski im. Floriana Krygiera in Szczecin, Poland; and Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium in Kyiv, Ukraine). Many other former football players after whom stadiums are named have pursued coaching careers, including Diego Armando Maradona. However, since these sports figures were immortalized in the stadium name due to their activity on the pitch, stadiums bearing their name were classified in the category of football players.
A considerable number of stadiums are dedicated to club presidents, founders of football clubs, football administrators and benefactors of stadium construction projects. Half of these football officials are commemorated in stadiums located in South America (25 out of 50), a pattern of sports venue naming that was observed by other scholars (Gaffney, 2008: 17–18). This onomastic culture of football stadiums differs sharply with the one existing in Europe, for instance, where football players represent the most prevalent sports figures after whom stadiums are named (48 out of the 72 stadiums from UEFA that are named after sportspeople are dedicated to former football players, compared to only 16 honoring club officials).
Gender differences are also present in football stadium names. Of the 443 stadiums named after people (eponymous), only 12 are honoring females. However, five of these are dedicated to female saints (two to Saint Mary and Saint Lucy respectively, and another one to Saint Laura), while three stadiums are named after the wives of kings and club owners. Widely encountered in other socio-spatial settings such as urban street nomenclature and school names, the practice of honoring females not as autonomous beings but through their relative status to prominent men is linked to gendered relations of power privileging masculine domination (Rusu, 2019a). In football, this stark gender asymmetry can be accounted for in terms of the sport’s patriarchal culture that has been thoroughly described by numerous scholars (Kidd, 2013; King, 1997; Spaaij, 2008). While researchers have highlighted the hegemonic masculinity underpinning aspects ranging from sports participation to football hooliganism and stadium culture, this study contributes to this strand of scholarship by documenting the gender patterning of toponymy in football stadiums.
Modelling stadium name type
To identify the factors that influence the name type a football stadium bears, a multinomial logistic regression modeling of toponymic data was employed. The dependent variable consisted of a stadium’s name type, which varied among local/descriptive (taken as reference), politics, sports and sponsorship. The predictors used to model statistically a stadium’s name type were confederation (with CONMEBOL taken as reference), sports venues’ capacity measured in the number of seats, the stadium’s age calculated based on its construction year, a sports venue’s status as the national stadium (for the countries that do have such a designated ground) and the situation of a stadium hosting multiple tenants (shared venue). In addition, the population size of the city where the stadium is located was introduced to capture contextual aspects regarding the sports venues’ demographic and geographical settings. To obtain normal distributions, a natural logarithmic transformation was applied to stadium capacity and city population, while stadium age was subjected to square-root transformation. The results of the multinomial logistic regression analysis are presented in Table 3.
Multinomial logistic regression analysis (dependent variable: stadium name type).
p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
CONMEBOL: South American Football Confederation; AFC: Asian Football Confederation; OFC: Oceania Football Confederation; CAF: Confederation of African Football; CONCACAF: Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football; UEFA: Union of European Football Associations.
The results indicate that even when controlling for all the other factors in the model, stadiums located in Europe (UEFA) are statistically significantly less likely to bear political names. As detailed in Table 2, sports venues within Latin America and Africa present the highest proportion of politicized toponymy. For Africa, this could be accounted for by the fact that stadium building in these countries largely coincided with the period of decolonization from European imperial powers in the aftermath of the Second World War. Stadium names were used to legitimate the emerging postcolonial nation-state (Alegi, 2010: 55–56). Although countries within South America gained independence during the early 19th century, stadiums inaugurated during the second half of the 20th century were given a large proportion of political names for the same purpose of legitimizing the nation-building projects and the construction of statehood. For instance, in Brazil in the decade following the military coup of 1964, 13 large sports venues were built, as football and stadiums provided the new dictatorship with a powerful way to ‘associate itself with popular interests’ (Mason, 1995: 64).
In addition to this geographical variable, other statistically relevant predictors that influence the probability of a stadium being named after a political symbol, historical date or statesperson are a stadium’s capacity and, its age, as well as the status of being a venue shared by multiple tenants. First, larger and older sports venues are more likely to be used by the powerful as political platforms for expressing ideological messages. Secondly, football stadiums that host numerous teams are more likely to carry the name of prominent political figures and symbols. The case of Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, the home ground of Internazionale and Associazione Calcio Milan (AC Milan), named thus after the Italian footballer who played for both clubs, provides an exception in this regard. Fierce local rivalries and the scarcity of legendary players who had played for both sides, together with the fact that the ownership of shared venues is usually held by local authorities, render this case highly improbable. More often, such shared stadiums are named with neutral designators (e.g. Stadio Olimpico used by Lazio and Associazione Sportiva Roma (AS Roma) or they are given political names (e.g. Jan Breydel Stadium in Bruges, honoring a 14th-century Belgian hero). From a Durkheimian perspective focused on social consensus, naming a stadium after a political icon (be it a former president or a historical hero, an important date in the country’s political history, or an explicit ideological value) can be conceived of as an integrative naming strategy designed to avoid conflicts among the several clubs that use the stadium as their shared venue.
Focusing on football sports venues named after sportspersons, except for CONCACAF, all the other continental confederations are characterized by a significantly lower proportion of stadiums that toponymically preserve the memory of the game. This effect is most evident in Asia and Oceania (AFC and OFC), where stadiums named after sportspeople barely exist. The scarcity of sports venues dedicated to football players and officials may be accounted for by the fact that in these regions the sport developed relatively late (Cho, 2015). A historical deficit that prevented the accumulation of a rich sport history is one potential factor; another one may be political in nature: naming a public building after a sportsperson, as opposed to statesmen and political rulers (as prevalent in many Arab countries, for instance), also indicates a democratic cultural ethos of celebrating the achievements of civic heroes.
The age of a stadium also plays a role in determining the probability of the venue being named after a sportsperson. The results indicate a positive, statistically significant relationship between a stadium’s age and the chances of bearing a sportsperson’s name rather than being names after a local and/or descriptive feature. This means that the older the stadium is, the more probable it is that it will be dedicated to a sports figure. Heritage stadiums are thus loci of sports memory, and their historical baggage protects them from becoming targets of toponymic commodification. In contrast, the sport facilities built in the last decades are ‘postmodern stadiums’ characterized by ‘innovative design, high standards of accessibility, safety, flexibility to adjust to all kinds of sporting and non-sporting events and above all, economic viability’ (Paramio et al., 2008: 517). It is this imperative of economic viability as ‘a fundamental principle in the current design and operation of stadia’ (528) that renders the newly built grounds prone to lucrative naming rights deals.
Sponsorship names for stadiums are statistically more prevalent in North America (CONCACAF) and, to a lesser degree, in Europe (UEFA) in comparison to Latin America (CONMEBAL) taken here as the analytical reference. This geographical pattern of stadium name commodification seems to be embedded into the broader dynamic of capitalist investments in football and the regional concentration of capitalist power more generally (Smart, 2007). It is important to situate these naming patterns in the broader, socio-economic context of stadium development in global capitalism. The new, postmodern stadium ‘may be seen as a manifestation of globalizing economic flows which have coalesced around professional football. [. . .] This stadium has itself proliferated globally as a result of international football tournaments and above all the World Cup’ (King, 2010: 21), and the new model of stadium can be now found in regions as globally scattered as Brazil, South Korea and South Africa. Naming patterns and especially the selling of naming rights to corporate sponsors seem to follow closely these global financial circuits.
Corporate rebranding of stadium names is also associated with a sports venue’s capacity, age, and the status of being a national stadium. Regarding capacity, larger arenas are more likely to bear sponsorship names, which is easy to understand given the greater exposure a sponsor receives. Bigger stadiums are also an indicator of the home team’s popularity, which is another factor that club owners exploit financially through selling tickets. However, as broadcasting rights and media exposure bring in more money than tickets, corporate sponsors acquire naming rights of popular football teams to extend their media reach well beyond the physical boundaries of the stadium.
Newer stadiums are also more prone to sell out the naming rights, a topic that will be further examined in the subsequent section of this paper. Finally, the venues that are designated as national stadiums are less likely to become toponymically purchased by corporate sponsors. Such a fact can be explained by the special status held by national stadiums in a country’s symbolic geography and national pride. As already stressed, stadiums ‘pose an ideal platform for presenting and promoting certain messages to foreign and local audiences alike’ (Levental et al., 2014: 132). This political function of fashioning an international reputation while consolidating national identity is heightened when it comes to national stadiums. Indeed, a venue that is granted the status of being the ‘national’ stadium becomes ‘a symbolic representation of the country, both internationally and domestically’ (34). Given these stakes, most governments are reluctant to sell off the naming rights of their flagship, national stadiums.
Exceptions do exist: of the 131 national stadiums examined in this analysis, 12 did enter naming rights agreements with corporate sponsors (9.16%), including 2 mega arenas such as England’s ‘Wembley Stadium connected by EE’ (capacity: 90,000) and South African’s ‘First National Bank Stadium’ (capacity: 94,736). However, most national stadiums bear generic names (e.g. National Stadium) (49.62%), followed by political names (30.53%). From the remaining 14 stadiums dedicated to sportspersons (10.69%), only 9 of them honor the legacies of former football players (e.g. the newly built Puskás Aréna in Budapest, Hungary; Johan Cruijff ArenA in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; or Estadio Metropolitano Roberto Meléndez in Barranquilla, Colombia).
Toponymic privatization through corporate rebranding
A considerable proportion of the stadium names examined in this study underwent toponymic commodification through naming rights purchase by corporate sponsors (203 out of the 1485 stadiums, representing 13.67%). As already noted, this trend is geographically concentrated in several regions such as Northwestern Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. In this section, I discern the patterns of stadium name change to corporate sponsors and examine what kind of names are more prone to undergo such toponymic commodification.
For this purpose, additional data were collected regarding the names of sports venues before the selling of naming rights. These names were further coded as local/descriptive, politics, sports, sponsorship (if the previous name was already a corporate name) and new ground (if the stadium was a newly constructed venue that was inaugurated with the corporate name). The results of the analysis are presented in Table 4.
Distribution of stadiums renamed after corporate sponsors by sports venues’ construction period.
Table 4 shows that neutral toponymy (that is, stadiums bearing local/descriptive names) were the most vulnerable to commodification. Almost two-thirds (62.07%) of the stadium names that were sold to corporate sponsors were either vernacular names that referred to local particularities or generic names (e.g. Municipal Stadium). This is explainable by the fact that these stadium names, especially those bearing generic references, held little memorial value. With no explicit commemorative legacy to protect, the commodification of these names also determined the least opposition and contestation from among the supporters.
Newly built stadiums are increasingly named after sponsors from their very inception and subsequent inauguration. While only three stadiums constructed before 2000 had their names acquired before their first match, after this year selling the naming rights has become part and parcel of the plans to develop a new stadium. Also, during the last two decades, more and more stadiums are changing sponsorship names with other corporate naming deals. This pattern of serial renaming of a stadium after various sponsors highlights the structural instability of commodified namescapes. In contrast to commemorative names that honor the memory of either former sportspeople or statesmen – which are, at least in principle, attributed ‘in perpetuity’ – the naming rights purchased by a corporate sponsor expire by default at a negotiated term (usually within the 10-year timeframe).
However, in practice, what the data presented in Table 4 show is that the ‘in perpetuity’ principle of commemorative names sometimes does succumb in the face of financial interest. Overall, nine ‘political’ and seven ‘sports’ names have been renamed for sponsorship reasons, most of them before 2000. Some clubs sacrificed the memory of their founder (e.g. Estadio George L Capwell in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the home ground of Club Sport Emelec, was renamed as Arena Banco del Pacífico), while others commercialize national symbols (e.g. Stade de Suisse in Bern, Switzerland, was renamed as Wankdorf Stadium after the biotech company CSL Behring purchased the naming rights under a five-year deal struck with BSC Young Boys). There is only a single stadium named after a football player that was rebranded, although partially (the Georgi Asparuhov Stadium became Vivacom Arena – Georgi Asparuhov), which shows that bearing the name of a former sports hero constitutes a toponymic protection against market commodification.
Conclusions
Football stadiums, whose construction went rampant in the second half of the 20th century as the game became a mass global phenomenon, are embroiled with politics, cultural stakes and economic interests. These aspects of power, memory and money are also reflected in stadium names. It was the basic tenet grounding this paper that the names of sports venues provide an onomastic window into the football culture and the broader sociopolitical and economic systems that encompass it.
When examined globally, as performed in this study, the nomenclature of football stadiums indicates significant variations of the toponymic soccerscape across geographical regions. Stadium names are used as means of inscribing state power and to politicize the sports’ built environment especially in regions where postcolonialism coincided with nation-building projects (e.g. Africa). Football memory is preserved predominantly in stadium names located in South America, where most sports venues honor the legacy of former players and club officials.
In the western world (North America, Northwestern Europe, Australia, etc.), the football landscape came to express the commodification of sports grounds through the corporate rebranding of stadium names. What these rough delimitations reveal is the existence of several toponomastic cultures of stadium naming that are historically grounded and geographically sensitive, but also broadly embedded within the global flows of capital and power.
The conclusions reached in this study by examining the stadium names are limited by two main aspects. First, from an empirical perspective, toponymic data collected and analyzed in this paper are restricted to the football clubs playing in the top-tier, national league, to which the national stadium was added (where available). This translates into the fact that the empirical scope of the analysis was limited to about a fifth of the total population of stadiums existing around the world.
A second limitation concerns the variables used to structure the analysis and to construct the multinomial logistical regression modeling of the data. A potentially relevant predictor, for which data could not be retrieved, is the ownership of the stadium (public or private). Another is the functionality of the venue (football stadium or multi-purpose facility). The location of the stadium in the urban geography may also prove to be relevant (central or periphery).
Introducing such factors in the analysis could contribute to a better understanding of the patterns of stadium names and especially of the patterns of stadium renaming after corporate sponsors. Further research should be focused on enlarging the empirical scope of the analysis by including the venues used in the lower-tier leagues and enriching the statistical model by introducing more relevant predictors.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Hasso Plattner Excellence Research Grant (LBUS-HPI-ERG-2020-05), financed by the Knowledge Transfer Center of the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu.
