Stadium names will be changed if price is right
It is a quote that comes to mind more and more readily these days.
Football is, as we know all too well, in the vanguard when it comes to cementing the ties that bind between business and sport but other codes have shown a similar alacrity in squeezing the maximum from the corporate dollar, euro or pound and few have been more dedicated followers of this fashion than rugby union.
In the last few weeks we have witnessed the continuation of the unseemly wrangle over the future of the Heineken Cup and who gets what portions of the honey pot. Then came the arresting sight of those famous All Black jerseys decorated with a corporate logo for the first time when they drew against the Wallabies in Brisbane.
The only surprise in that latter instance was the relative lack of umbrage which most Kiwis seemed to take. With the NZRFU continually trying to close the door on pushy European agents it was deemed a necessary evil but other bodies and codes have taken a less pragmatic stance when it comes to such potentially emotive issues.
Take that of naming rights. Sports stadiums have been named after commercial entities since 1926 when William Wrigley decided that the stadium his Chicago Cubs called home should be named after the chewing gum that made him a very rich and very famous man. But not every such marriage of convenience has been so blissful.
For every Aviva Stadium or Allianz Arena there is a Newcastle United or San Francisco 49ers flipside, where fans exhibited such disgust at their newly branded arenas that team owners had no choice but to revert back to plain old St James’ Park and Candlestick Park.
None of which has persuaded the rugger crowd to steer clear. We already have the Aviva on Lansdowne Road and now the Scottish Rugby Union are exploring the possibility of hawking the naming rights to Murrayfield in an attempt to rid themselves of the financial millstone that was the ground’s redevelopment and for which they still owe £13m almost 20 years on.
“There will always be people who find that a step too far, but what we have to realise is that the main piece of inventory in all of Scottish rugby is our national stadium and it will drive the biggest price,” the SRU’s chief executive, Mark Dodson, explained. “If we want that to be achieved, we can put all that money into grassroots and save a lot of problems at that level. We had it valued and it’s millions of pounds per year. We’re looking at all options, the whole stadium and separate stands and there is interest in that.”
Only last month there were whispers of the RFU doing something similar with Twickenham. They’re all at it. Wembley, Old Trafford and Anfield have all been mentioned in similar dispatches and, though the Corinthian in us may weep, the realist merely shrugs a shoulder and says, ‘why the hell not?’
Dodson’s use of the word ‘inventory’ to describe Murrayfield may trigger a desire to barf into a bush but needs must and there are ways and means of placating traditionalists while ponying up to the suits. The Wembley Arena (as opposed to Wembley Stadium) is still called the Wembley Arena, for instance. It’s just that “A Barclaycard Unwind Experience” has been tacked on at the end.
Not ideal, we’ll grant you, but it would appear to be a price worthy of consideration at least when the money such a concession would bring in could be redirected — like Dodson said — towards a sport’s grassroots, and this five years into a downturn which continues to put the squeeze on straitened sports bodies.
It was interesting that when Munster Rugby reported a projected deficit of over €1m last summer, the issue of naming rights for Thomond Park was quick to resurface despite a rejection of such a course when the ground was redeveloped. The GAA are another organisation in need of a cash injection.
It emerged earlier this year that a third of county boards failed to balance their books in 2011 and yet the association’s greatest piece of, ahem, inventory, stands unbranded in any form on Dublin’s northside. Sean Kelly and Nickey Brennan said in years past that naming rights for Croke Park would never be countenanced — not on their watch anyway — but then presidents before them said the same about foreign games being played there, too.
