Changing the name of your stadium is one way to create a new 'revenue stream' but why not go the whole hog and rebrand all the players
The recent furore over England's right to wear the poppy took my mind back 15 years to a time when the chairman of Kettering Town attempted to change the club's nickname from the Poppies to the Lions. He said that such a change would help increase the sale of merchandise. Given that antelope don't make up much of the Rockingham Road club's fanbase that was possibly correct, though it raised the question of why he didn't try fully to exploit the climate of the day and retag the club as the Boyzone.
It wasn't the first time a club had attempted to exploit a nickname change for commercial gain. A few years earlier Stockport County had looked into ditching their traditional sobriquet, the Hatters, in favour of the Cobras as a commercial tie-in with the Indian lager company. As time wears on, and sports' craving for cash grows ever more junkie-like, I'd guess we can expect more of this kind of thing. Mike Ashley's sale of the naming rights to St James' Park was predictably followed by legions of self-styled "realistic" football folk dismissing tradition as sentiment, while parroting phrases like "revenue streams" with all the blind faith and incomprehension of medieval Rhenish peasants calling out Latin responses to the Eucharist.
Yet, if football is genuinely so eager to chisel every last penny from itself it needs to look even further back than Stockport's brief flirtation with becoming a load of cobras. It was when I was still at school this pointer to the future occurred, though at the time it seemed like a piece of throwaway sporting trivia, the sort of thing you'd carry around with you no matter how hard your tried to get rid of it, like psoriasis, or the disturbing memory of Steve Ovett's "I 'heart' you" victory gesture.
Back in March 1980 ? in a move that in the next decade may come to look as significant as the Bosman judgment ? Nick Akers, a distance runner who had arrived in the Cayman Islands via Sussex, New Zealand and Canada, legally changed his surname to Vladivar to tie up a deal with a UK drinks company. Vladivar promoted itself as "The Vodka from Varrington". Now, in the midst of the cold war, a runner bearing its brand name was going to compete in the Moscow Olympics.
Since the rules of amateurism were still in force the distillers didn't actually pay Nick Vladivar any money for changing his family name. "They flew me to Manchester from Edmonton, Canada," he told me this week, "and paid all of my expenses while we did the press and photo ops ? �10,000 was pledged to Joel Bonn, the secretary general of the Cayman Islands Olympic Committee, for sponsorship of the Cayman athletes to participate in Moscow, but as the Olympics were boycotted, I am not sure if a payment was made."
Nick Vladivar was arguably the first sportsman to sell naming rights to himself, but he wasn't the last. In Thailand it has become relatively routine for boxers to take on the name of sponsors. As a result there is a flyweight called Kwanpichit 13 Rien Express (in honour of a Bangkok restaurant), while an unbeaten southpaw super-flyweight has been variously known as Samson Toyota-Thailand, Samson 3-K Battery and Samson Dutch Boy Gym according to who was stumping up the cash at the time. This is a strange state of affairs, though since Samson's given name is Saengmuangnoi Lukchapormasak it may be some relief to boxing commentators.
Football clubs have only one stadium name to sell, but they have a whole squad of players whose appellations are ripe for commercial exploitation. And why not? After all, people in the rarefied world of showjumping are quite happy to put up with horses named after conservatory companies. And haven't the game's authorities already left themselves open to sponsorship-deal abuse by allowing players to put nicknames on the back of their shirts? The first player who was given dispensation to do so was Norway's diminutive 1990s winger Jahn Ivar Jakobsen who went by the sobriquet of "Mini" and had that name emblazoned on his shirt during the 1994 World Cup. At the time some of us pondered what Fifa's attitude would be if a player could persuade his team-mates to refer to him as "Amex" or "Miller Lite".
The sale of the naming rights of players is surely the way to take the game forward commercially. Of course people will complain at first, but you have to be hard-nosed about these things. And at the end of the day, Stevie G or KFC ? what's the difference? Just get behind the boy and stop whining. Nick Akers, meanwhile, ran in two Commonwealth Games and still holds the Cayman Islands national record for 10,000m. In 1989 he set a Guinness world record for running a mile in snowshoes in 5m 56sec. He wrote an autobiography, Last But Not Least, and has developed the concept for a stage musical based on the music of Simon and Garfunkel. "Would I change my name again?" Nick says. "You bet I would. But next time it would be to Smirnoff." Over to you Mike Ashley. Or perhaps that should be Mike Sports Direct?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/nov/17/selling-naming-rights-football-players
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