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Praise Be: “Philadelphia Stadium” Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords
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It’s the end of an era in South Philadelphia:
So what did you think about the “Philadelphia Stadium” epoch? As goofy and generic as the name sounded, wasn’t it nice to be free of our corporate sponsorship overlords, if just for a few weeks?
Don’t get me wrong; “The Linc” is an endearing nickname we have used for more than two full decades now, and one that has become ubiquitous in Philadelphia sports. It’s a good nickname, but it’s a shortened version of a Fortune 200 financial and insurance holding company.* Our baseball stadium bears the name of a bank. Our basketball and hockey arena had various bank names up until this past winter, when Comcast replaced Wells Fargo with one of their own brands. And the Chester soccer stadium has held the name of two electrical utilities and a Japanese car maker.
In fact, every single American stadium that hosted World Cup games had its corporate sponsor name covered up. We temporarily shelved Gillette, MetLife, AT&T, SoFi, Arrowhead, Levi’s, NRG, Lumen, and Hard Rock. Mercedes-Benz signage couldn’t physically be obscured in Atlanta, so they left that alone, but otherwise it was a complete overhaul.
It just makes you pause and think about how corporatized everything is over here. Every stadium has a sponsor name on it. We have helmet patches and jersey patches and sleeve patches and the Phillies stuffing a million ads into right field. Penn even sold the naming rights to the Palestra back in 2018. Heresy!
I guess it’s one of those “is nothing sacred anymore?” arguments that we succumbed to years ago. We’ll never have cool European stadium names, like Old Trafford, the San Siro, or Parc de Princes. I think when Jeffrey Lurie builds a new stadium he should scrap the corporate name and give it a badass avian name, like “The Eagle’s Nest” or “The Eyrie” or some intimidating raptorial bird shit. The press conference could be held at Hawk Mountain up in Kempton. Ca-caw! Ca-caw! Imagine walking into this behemoth and lining up across from Vic Fangio’s defense while 75,000 rowdy mongrels go absolutely nuts:
*disclaimer: I am a Lincoln Financial customer. We have some sort of policy, I think it’s an indexed universal life policy, but my wife handles all that stuff. I’ll have to ask her.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com