Wednesday, January 12, 2011

sports grounds and sponsor's logos

Since the 90s, in Australia there's been a terrible trend of major sporting stadiums losing their original identities and selling their naming rights to the highest bidder. This has always been anathema to me as I've always felt that a landmark building/stadium/location etc should only have ONE name that it is forever identified with.
This trend seemed to begin with the Princess Park aussie rules ground being renamed OPTUS OVAL, after the telco. I was upset at this sell out at the time, but tolerated it since it was only a minor ground in the league, and this sort of cheekiness was unlikely to expand at the higher level.
Well how wrong was I, this only ENCOURAGED the corporate sector to arm twist the last traditional hold outs that ran sport to see the light of the new (corporate, capitalist) world to sell off their naming rights. And how much easier it became to do this as the old school sports administrators were pushed aside in favour of professional marketeers who were taking over sports administration.
But perhaps it wouldn't peeve me off so much if these companies actually had a long term investment (ie. generational) in these stadiums that created some genuine ownership or affinity between stadium and product, instead we have the ridiculous situation of iconic grounds changing names every few years. Example; Stadium Australia in Sydney has also been known as Telstra Stadium and now ANZ Stadium...which naturally causes confusion with the ground in Brisbane which was also known as "ANZ Stadium". And Melbourne's Docklands Stadium is not much better, its previous names include Colonial Stadium, Telstra Dome and its current (for this week) Etihad Stadium.
There's so many grounds changing names so frequently that when I see a reference to a ground on the news, I usually have no idea of where they're talking about? A pretty sad indictment for someone who USED to be interested in sport!
Perhaps we need to fight back though, like they did in cricket? Naming rights lunacy reached its crescendo in the domestic Sheffield Shield cricket competition in 1999 when the 100+ year old competition was renamed (almost on a whim) the Pura Milk Cup. Not the "Pura Milk Shield" mind you, but CUP.....a deliberate attempt by the company to disassociate the public's mindset with the Shield, and link it to their product. But cricket fans continued to call it "the Shield", while news channels provocatively referred to it as the "domestic four day competition". Fortunately sanity prevailed and the tournament picked up a new sponsor in 2008, with it now being called the "Sheffield Shield, presented by Weet-Bix".
While that's one small victory against the tidal wave of corporate money currently controlling sport, I suspect people will only ever say "enough is enough" when the grandest stadium of all - the MCG - is renamed the HOLDEN UTE STADIUM...or some other god awful name.
My only reaction to that would be.........schadenfreude.

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