Playing The Name Game
The world of sports is moving strongly towards stadium naming rights as a key element in the financing of new-build facilities
The question of naming rights on sporting stadia has been very much to the fore recently. Cork GAA went through the mill before confirming that SuperValu would be adding to rather than replacing the Páirc Uí Chaoimh name. Then Dexcom was unveiled as the naming rights partner on the new stadium for Connacht Rugby in Galway, and Virgin Media signed up to secure the rights to Musgrave Park in Cork.
The Dexcom stadium deal is interesting, as the company is reported to have turned away from a similar deal with Galway GAA when the county board insisted on retaining the reference to 1916 martyr Padraig Pearse at Pearse Stadium.
There was a febrile atmosphere around the Páirc Uí Chaoimh deal, with Government ministers talking at one point about some sort of central control over naming rights in stadia that have received State funding. That was surely a kite being flown, and unlikely to become a reality.
The world of sports is moving strongly towards stadium naming rights as a key element in the financing of new-build facilities. With Connacht Rugby, that gave Dexcom – an American MedTech firm building a large factory in Athenry – the opportunity to come in with a single name for the rugby facility, which works better for its marketing department.
The Aviva Stadium was named at the time of the rebuild, as were the Emirates, the Etihad, the Allianz Arena, and Allegiant Stadium, where this year’s Super Bowl was staged. They are fit-for-purpose venues with more comfort, better and safer access, and so much more. Ask the fans if they would like to go back to older grounds and there would be a fairly solid ‘no’.
‘The Park’, as Páirc Uí Chaoimh has always been known locally, was redeveloped in 2017, not before time. Not going down the route of renaming the GAA pitch at the time of the makeover sowed the seeds of the challenges that Cork GAA and the stadium board faced with their supermarket partner this year.
Bringing on board naming rights sponsors is likely to be part of the planning for redevelopments at Dalymount Stadium in Dublin and potentially for the RDS as well. The challenge is more difficult when grounds are renamed while largely remaining the same, and fans and local communities are asked to change what they call them.
There are now 17 GAA county grounds that have a commercial naming rights partner. These partnerships were largely put in place without any huge material change to the stadia, and there is also the fact that the GAA is perhaps more wedded than many to the historic
significance of names. Sponsored GAA stadia include UPMC Nowlan Park in Kilkenny, the TUS Gaelic Grounds in Limerick, and FBD Semple Stadium in Thurles.
Sponsorship, like much in business, can be a cut-throat world, and there will always be an alternative channel for marketing spend. Having a solo brand as opposed to sharing with a legacy name is estimated to be worth 30% to 40% more in terms of the value a brand can gain from the naming investment. So taking a stand on legacy can be very expensive when it comes to the amount of money that a sporting organisation will be able to put back into its day-to-day operations.
Times change, and if you were to ask anyone under the age of 25 where Ireland plays home rugby internationals, the chances are that a large majority would answer with the name of an insurance company rather than a 19th-century landowner.