On the occasion of the announcement that Borussia Mönchengladbach have auctioned off the naming rights for their stadium to local energy service provider Ista SE, Get German Football News is pleased to supply a short list of German football stadiums Germans themselves generally avoid referring to by their corporate sponsorship names.
Bundesliga outfit Borussia Möchengladbach have officially sold the naming rights of their playing venue, Borussia Park, to local energy service provider Ista SE. The sub-metering company will pay Gladbach approximately €5m per year over the course of the next five years to sponsor what will henceforth be known as “ista-Borussia-Park”.
In announcing the deal, club bosses Stefan Stegemann and Marcus Aretz confirmed that Gladbach did undertake discussions with the BMG fan-scene about the re-naming project. Whilst some fan groups remained disappointed that they were not consulted until late in the process, both Aretz and Stegemann insisted that they were able to get local ultra groups on board.
Among the arguments for naming the stadium, Aretz and Stegemann pointed out that the club has forgone an estimated €100m in potential added revenue by not securing a naming rights deal over the past 20 years. Gladbach moved into their current stadium in the Nordpark section of the city in 2004 and are one of practically no German clubs not to have a corporate name attached to a new stadium.
Will the name stick?
The fact that Ista is a local company does help matters, but one sincerely doubts that BMG supporters remain keen about the fact that a sub-metering company is now sponsoring their stadium. While such companies make their contribution to macro-scale energy sustainability projects via their data departments, explaining to the layman that that the company that bills them for electricity and heat now sponsors the local football stadium isn’t exactly an easy sell.
One can (always) count on German football fans to lodge protests (on practically anything) at some point. In this case, the company doesn’t employ a large number of locals. Moreover, energy companies and energy service providers (in any Western country) belong to the cohort of companies that straddle the borders of federal and state anti-trust laws.
Whether such companies are allowed to retain a legal monopoly, or oligarchy, is a matter perpetually brought before federal and state courts. In Insta’s case, Germany’s highest federal antitrust body (the Bundeskartellamt) has already forcibly amended the company’s practices. Irrespective of what Aretz and Stegemann say, there will be dissent.
How do Germans treat the issue of stadium naming rights?
Generally speaking, the German footballing public doesn’t get terribly outraged when a newly built stadium comes attached with corporate naming rights. To take some examples, Bayern Munich’s (and for a time 1860’s) Allianz Arena, Freiburg’s Europa Park Stadion, Augsburg’s WWK Arena, Schalke’s Veltins Arena, Düsseldorf’s Merkur-Spiel Arena, and Mainz’s MEWA Arena are all perfectly fine. Stadiums without much of a history don’t need a historic name.
Sometimes, naming rights that still take the local roots of the stadium into account render everything more digestible. It’s certainly not the case that Germans tell their friends that they’re off to Darmstadt’s “Merck Stadion am Böllenfalltor”, Stuttgart’s “Gazi-Stadion an der Waldau”, or Bochum’s “Vonovia Ruhrstadion an der Castroper Straße”, but the fact that these sponsoring entities kept the locales in the venue’s name means there’s rarely protests against the deals.
Corporate-sponsored clubs with corporate sponsored stadiums can obviously do whatever they want. Leipzig, Leverkusen, Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim, and Ingolstadt have every right to name their stadiums after their corporate benefactors and patrons. No one much cares about recent merger clubs (like Heidenheim) or tiny clubs that picked up some new powerful sponsors (like Elversberg) either.
What are the top three cases in which Germans draw the line?
1) DSC Arminia Bielefeld
(Schüco Arena vs. Bielefelder Alm)
This one is by far the most egregious case as it was the citizens of Bielefeld who bailed this club out insofar as the stadium is concerned. Local construction company Schüco (which has retained the rights to the stadium since 2004) isn’t exactly an “evil entity”, but the commitment of the locals to this lovely historic ground means that that Germans insist on calling this venue “the Alm”.
The club had difficulty leveraging itself even before the late-aughts credit-crunch. Borrowing at exorbitant interest rates from financial institutions threatened to bury Bielefeld forever. For stadium renovations, the team had already to turned to the citizens of the city themselves. During the first of three near insolvencies in 2006 Fans accepted low-interest bond yields when no one else would.
A significant number of the fans shrugged off a decade of horrible decisions and a second near insolvency in 2010 to entirely forgo their yields when the building bond came due in 2016. In 2018, the club was once again teetering on the edge of insolvency with debts in the neighborhood €25-30 million.
Selling sponsorship rights on the stadium the local fans helped them restore couldn’t get them that sort of money, so the club went ahead and sold the stadium outright to abrogate the sum of the debt. The whole thing constitutes something of a sad tale,
While the story of the DSC stadium isn’t nearly as egregious as some American franchise threatening to move unless local taxpayers finance a new stadium that gets named for a bank charging 25 percent interest on its credit cards, Germans insist that Bielefeld have and always will play in “the Alm”. It’s only right.
2) Eintracht Frankfurt
(Deutsche Bank Park vs. Waldstadion)
It seems fitting enough that Germany’s commercial, financial, and banking capital leant the name of two of Germany’s most powerful financial institutions to its local football stadium. The current Deutsche Bank Park (for many years the Commerzbank Arena) nevertheless is still owned by the city that built one of Germany’s most beloved sporting venues. Over the course of a full century, perhaps no German city has done a consistently better job with its ground.
Expecting “Main-hattan”? That’s a different cosmos. The Hessen metropolis lies to the north. The “Waldstadion” is situated in a peaceful and tranquil forest deliberately set aside by the city to preserve a green corridor south of the massive concrete jungle. Germans welcoming football-loving guests to the Bundesrepublik simply have to take them on a pilgrimage to this stadium. Everyone visiting agrees that it’s among the best experiences that they’ve ever had.
Numerous renovations have converted the once humble “Waldstadion” into an elite modern sporting venue. The forest surrounding the stadium nonetheless remains untouched. In this particular case, one just really doesn’t have a choice. Whatever bank wants to though some extra cash at the SGE, Eintracht Frankfurt’s sporting home shall always remain the “Waldstadion”
3) Borussia Dortmund
(Signal Iduna Park vs. Westfalenstadion)
BVB continue to protest the re-naming of their home constantly. At least once a year, the Südtribube unveils a massive choreo paying homage to the name that their predecessors celebrated football in. It’s was considered a sad day when one of Germany’s great footballing cathedrals came to be permanently associated with an insurance firm. Many BVB administrators nevertheless remain firm about the matter themselves. Last year’s protest action was met with sternly worded counterpoints from Dortmund execs.
There exists something of a problem here in that the Westphalian club absolutely had to sell the naming rights in order to abrogate exigent debt concerns about two decades ago. It was well after this sale (in 2005) that Dortmund exponentially rose to be Germany’s second biggest football club. Those followers relatively new to the Bundesliga may falsely assume that Dortmund was always nearly as powerful and influential as Bayern. Prior to the Jürgen Klopp years, BVB weren’t even regular Champions League contenders.
One can make the case that, without one of the most important financial decisions the club ever made, Dortmund would not be the German powerhouse and global brand that it is today. One still finds oneself siding with the local fans, however, as it was in the Westfalenstadion that they and their forbearers celebrated three Bundesliga titles between 1995 and 2002. Since the stadium re-branding, the club has only captured two titles. Perhaps now that BVB are significantly richer, they could give the fans the stadium name back.
Are there other examples?
Legions. Outside the “big three”, it can still get a bit tricky. Some Stuttgart fans still refer to their beloved confines as the “Neckarstadion”, but others actually remain loyal to the name that preceded the current “MHP” sponsorship: The “Mercedes Benz Arena”. The fact that Mercedes – the absolute pride of Stuttgart – sponsored the local stadium and football team presented locals with no problems whatsoever. Note that Stuttgart fans are a little less sensitive to naming rights as their “Neckarstadion” (in all seriousness) was once dubbed the “Adolph Hitler Kampfbahn”. Yikes!
Up north in Hannover, the old “Niedersachsenstadion” has gone through so many different corporate name changes that it’s basically become a joke at this point. The old “AWD-Arena” became the “HDI-Arena” and is now christened after German mansion-building firm “Heinz von Heiden”. Double yikes! The worst type of company one could ever associate with a German club also recently started sticking its tentacles into Dynamo Dresden. Triple yikes! Again, no one refers to the Hannover Arena by its current name as it’s simply too laughable.
On the topic of laughable, MSV Duisburg’s attempt to re-christen its relatively new stadium the “Schauinsland-Reise-Arena” is just too funny to be taken seriously. Who in the hell lets something like that out of their mouth? Hannover and Duisburg have gone slightly nuts with a mansion-builder and a travel agency. These two examples notwithstanding, Germany has a long way to go if it wishes to catch up to the United States in terms of ridiculous companies sponsoring stadia.
Across the pond, venues are sponsored by juice brands, ketchup, pizza purveyors, smoothie slingers, crypto crooks, and even pet supply companies.
Quadruple yikes!
Or maybe better stated:
“Woof”!
