Selling home: Corporate stadium names and the destruction of commemoration

Abstract

A city's primary benefits from professional sports franchises are civic pride and identification with its teams. The stadium or arena, as the physical “memory place”; for teams, has historically been named to commemorate the relationship among the team, the city, and the fans. This paper chronicles the rise in corporate naming and argues that sacrificing the commemorative name of a sports venue for a paid corporate name alters the identity statements of memory places, abbreviates the narrative about a city and its teams, and threatens the idyllic illusions about sports that fans have long chosen to maintain. As corporate naming spreads beyond sports, the substitution of commercialization for commemoration presents a growing threat to public memory places of many kinds.

Key words:

• commemoration
• public memory
• naming
• corporate discourse