Anfield Presents Amazon Dome may be closer than we think – and fans will be livid | Aaron Timms

TThe Cleveland Browns held a strangely 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 the Cleveland Browns Stadium will be known as Huntington Bank Field. Never mind that Huntington Bank Field is a ridiculously generic name that doesn’t even attempt to maintain continuity with the arena’s two most recent names, both of which called it a stadium instead of a field; the real problem is that the Browns haven’t even decided whether to renovate their current home on the shores of Lake Erie or build a new stadium in Cleveland’s southwestern suburbs.

Under the terms of the deal, Huntington Bank Field will be home to the Browns, regardless of where the stadium ultimately ends up. The stadium now has a permanent name, but there’s a curious air of transience about the location.

The prospect of this proud old franchise starting the new NFL season in a stadium with a name but no fixed location offers a striking example of the power of money to tear modern sport from its roots, to sever it from history, from community, from a sense of belonging. Corporate sponsorship has become such an indispensable force in sport that it is now more powerful and perhaps, in some ways, even more real than the things – clubs, shirts, buildings – it sponsors.

More than 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 in the U.S. and Europe, though the sums involved aren’t huge. The Browns haven’t disclosed the terms of their deal with Huntington Bank, but their last naming rights sale, to FirstEnergy from 2013-2023, brought in a relatively paltry $6 million per yearManchester City’s sale of the naming rights of its home stadium to Etihad would reportedly benefit the club £21.9 million seasonwhich is barely enough to buy half an English full-back on the transfer market. Yet these deals represent money through the door, and in an age of increasingly “sophisticated” investment capital in professional sport and growing television ratings, all that clubs need to do to survive and thrive is generate revenue, wherever and whenever it is available.

In the Premier League, virtually every club is now trying to copy early movers Arsenal, Leicester City and Manchester City and sell their stadium naming rights. Those clubs, of course, signed their naming rights deals this century as part of the move to new stadiums; the ickiness of the brand associations was somewhat mitigated by the novelty of the structures to which the sponsors’ names were attached. Now, however, legendary old stadiums like Old Trafford and Anfield look set to be put up for an appellation auction, following in the footsteps of cash-strapped Barcelona, ​​who in 2022 sacrificed more than a century of lofty tradition – “Més que un club” and all that – in the name of debt service and has given its historic stadium a new name as the “Spotify Camp Nou.”

These historic structures, once bulwarks against social and economic flux, totems of tradition and habit, now fall under the regime of transience that governs all of 21st century life. Seeing their clubs sell out for such meagre returns and throw themselves into everything branded will rightly infuriate many fans.

Executives of Fenway Sports Group, owner of 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 think seriously to sell the naming rights to Manchester United’s home ground. The sale of Old Trafford would be part of an effort to raise money to renovate the stadium or build an entirely new arena – a Cleveland Browns-style solution that would allow the club’s new stadium to be branded before a location is decided. Bank of America and current shirt sponsor Snapdragon are among the most likely corporate names, and the early bows to tradition by those companies’ suits do not inspire much confidence that history will survive the name sale unscathed.

“Old Trafford is Old Trafford, it should always be Old Trafford,” said Don McGuire, the chief marketing officer of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, owner of Snapdragon, told The Athletic recently. But, he clarified, “if there’s some kind of brand attached to it, driven by someone, an ‘at’ or something,” that could ease fans’ fears about losing the stadium’s famous old name. The days of ‘Snapdragon Stadium at Old Trafford’ may be closer than we think. Ultimately, it looks set to see every stadium in the Premier League bear the name of a generic bank or tech giant or insurance company, with the lesser gods of the mobile phone, clothing and food and drink industries plastering their names on every inch of the stands, tiers, hospitality lounges, fan zones, retail “experiences” and “activation spaces” of each stadium.

These sponsorship deals aren’t without reputational risk. The Browns ended a previous stadium deal with FirstEnergy Corp. in 2023 after the utility embroiled in a bribery scandal; in recent years Liverpool have had smaller brand partnerships with the Russian gaming company IxBet and the Thai coconut water brand Chaokoh na accusations of animal abuse were done to both companies. But the real damage of the modern naming rights deal is, of course, the damage to tradition, to the identity of the club, to the sense – already tarnished by decades of commercialisation but still powerful in the hearts of athletes and fans the world over – of sport as something pure, something that transcends the grimy transactional world of money and influence. Orange Vélodrome may be on the same ground as the Stade Vélodrome, but it is no longer exactly the same place.

New stadiums, and even stadium renovations, are often presented as large-scale 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, is likely to contain a similar promise if it goes ahead; there is already talk of building “affordable housing” on the site as part of any stadium redevelopment, the standard paltry concession made to assuage concerns about displacement and gentrification. Mega-corporate naming rights deals expose the cynicism of such moves and the hollowness of high-flown rhetoric about urban renewal, and serve as a semi-permanent reminder of the gulf between fans and those who team executives see as their ultimate audience. As one municipal councilor in Cleveland said that after the Browns’ new partnership with Lincoln Financial was announced, many locals “can’t even get to the stadium.” The stadiums and their cities can be revitalized, but for whom?

Eric Cantona once claimed that he would “quit football for good” if Manchester United sold the naming rights to Old Trafford – and while a move to commercialise the names of these old stadiums is unlikely to bring in masses of fans, something more important, more ineffable, will be lost in the process. Stadium names connect clubs to history and to their communities; they are a way of strengthening the bonds of solidarity and belonging that give sports clubs their social and cultural vitality. Stripping a stadium of its historic name in some ways severs its connection to the place; an arena that is renamed often is somehow less real as a physical space, less solid, standing on shaky ground, both figuratively and literally.

This is especially true in the US, where stadiums are now branded and renamed so frequently that the arenas themselves seem almost nameless, and therefore placeless. Hard Rock Stadium, 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 was still named after a zombie company (sportswear giant Pro Player) that had filed for bankruptcy.

Stadium names are often eye-wateringly ugly: in the major American professional leagues, mixed in with the humdrum collection of Target Centers and T-Mobile Parks, you’ll find such exotic affronts to 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 shed its original identity and transformed into a mere billboard, the branded stadium becomes a zone of corporate influence rather than a sporting arena or a place where fans can experience moments of collective emotion. That’s not to say that memories aren’t made in these places, that feelings aren’t felt—of course they are. But the transience and frequent silliness of the venue names obscure the purity of the experience, I think, for everyone; Thinking back fondly on a day at the ballpark or ballpark becomes a little harder when the memories were made at Guaranteed Rate Field or the Intuit Dome. That sense of drift and amnesia is even harder to resist when the stadium in question changes its name every few years, as most of these arenas do: What’s a place without a permanent name?

The Premier League could still refuse to embrace this kind of soulless American commercialism, but it won’t. As long as the club’s profits get a modest boost, it’s doubtful that anyone in the boardroom at Bank of America FieldHouse at Old Trafford or Anfield Presents Amazon Dome will care about the destruction of heritage caused 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 through the world’s most influential and powerful leagues, with increasingly globalised flows of capital, people and ideas, is very much in the other direction, towards the transformation of sport into a thing without attachment, a spectacle out of nowhere.

The dawn of the “Huntington Bank Field” era heralds not our collective entry into a dystopia, but into a sports no-place. In the years to come, as the number of players increases and the leagues multiply to the point of meaninglessness without stakes, the marketing deals and sponsorship names may even become the most permanent things about these clubs, the only true markers of “history” in a rootless, hyper-financialized, and poverty-stricken world of permanent sporting spectacle. Eventually, the sport itself will become merely a backdrop for the real event, the celebration of the brand.