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St James' Park


Delima

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I’m sorry like. You can’t be happy with PIF changing the stadium name because they’ll throw a bit of money at it. Can we not remember the outpouring of dismay when the name was changed to the Sports Direct Arena?

 

The hypocrisy stinks. Even if Ashley paid £20m a year for the naming rights people still would have been aghast. 

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The owners when engaging the fans may even have a vote on choices of brand name? I’m sure they’d be transparent regarding revenue and plough back into the club also. I’m not overly comfortable with it, but wouldn’t  rule it out.

 

 

Edited by PauloGeordio

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Renaming is a no-go for me.

 

I didn’t hold up a banner that got the singing section kicked from Level 7 for someone else to come along and change the name.

 

 

Edited by christ

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8 minutes ago, David Edgar said:

 

They have a sponsor for their unbuilt new stadium.

Still getting money from their owners company though…even if it isn’t built? Perhaps that’s a solution. Buy some land for development of a stadium…sponsor it, hey presto. 

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6 minutes ago, kisearch said:

That's what Ashley did though.

 

Yeah I'm not totally convinced, would rather them not do it all obvs, but a classy rename inc. SJP better than the dogs breakfast Llamblias cooked up I suppose.  As I say I'd rather they not do it.

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14 minutes ago, Pokerprince2004 said:

Watched Sky Sports News the other night and it showed highlights from 'The Select Car Leasing Stadium' in the championship. Sounds bloody awful but guess most teams are doing it now :lol:

Saudies should donate 250M to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation and have it sponsor the stadium

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Quote

 

The graceless conversion of St James' Park to the Sports Direct Arena has caused a furore among Newcastle fans. Another sliver of football's soul has been lost

Part of what feels so wrong about the 'rebranding' of St James’ Park is clear to anybody who has actually been in Sports Direct. Photograph: Steve Drew/PA

Thu 10 Nov 2011 12.11 GMT

 

The horror of the Newcastle United supporters at the latest gracelessly delivered manoeuvre by the club's owner, Mike Ashley, and managing director, Derek Llambias, is, for all the arguments about the need to "generate revenue", simply understood by putting these words together: St James' Park has been renamed the Sports Direct Arena. Rationalise it in all the obvious ways – football clubs need all the money they can make to compete with richer names, Newcastle are seeking an honest few million pounds more rather than plunging into unsustainable debt, they are obviously not the first – yet still, when the news came out, it felt as if another sliver of football's soul had just been sold.

 

St James' Park is an evocative, historic and wonderfully located football ground, it has been Newcastle United's home for 119 years, and its name lends a grandeur of aspiration which the club has not always lived up to, on or off the field. Ashley, in particular, as many recalled when the new name emerged, has managed to serially embarrass himself since, flush following the flotation of Sports Direct, he bought Newcastle, seemingly on some kind of mid-life whim, in 2007.

 

The man the business press had dubbed a recluse because he never gave them an interview revealed very publicly, among the fans and down the Bigg Market, his taste for drinking and larging it, plus the casino, of which Llambias was the manager before being entrusted with the great club. After that lagered-up honeymoon, however, the fans' fury over Dennis Wise's activities, the constructive dismissal as manager of club legend Kevin Keegan, then the 2009 relegation, put Ashley back in his corporate box. He then complained that Newcastle was not the fun it promised in the brochure, and he wanted out.

 

Many people observed that this naming-rights move was announced with typically gauche timing because Ashley and Llambias have been tentatively rehabilitating themselves in the minds of grudging fans. Having made no landmark signings, unbeaten Newcastle are a remarkable third in the Premier League, playing good football, making Alan Pardew's appointment look shrewder than anybody could believe at the time, and £35m for Andy Carroll looks increasingly like the cunning fleecing of starstruck new Liverpool owners from America.

 

Ashley has faced so much ordure at Newcastle, much of it self-inflicted, yet has put £140m in himself, in loans, and is evidently running the club properly financially. Fans who could have been up in arms about the banking, rather than spending, of the Carroll bonanza have been disarmed by the feats of Demba Ba, Newcastle's free transfer signing from West Ham, who has scored eight league goals this season while Carroll at Liverpool has manager Kenny Dalglish defending a tally of two so far.

Part of what feels so wrong about the "rebranding" of St James' Park – besides Llambias's use of the word rebranding – is clear to anybody who has actually been in Sports Direct. It takes some doing to drain the thrill out of a sports shop, but Ashley's emporia, crammed much more with pile-it-high cheap clothing than actual sports gear, seem to lack any class in the vision of their corporate masters. So the Sports Direct Arena, even if this is only to prepare the ground for a genuine sponsor to pay the club £10m or so for the name, feels cheap and unworthy of the history.

 

However, the facts are that clubs all around Newcastle are making money whichever way they can, and Ashley's club is far from the first to sell the name of its home. There was little criticism of Arsenal's board, from fans drenched in historical appreciation, when their new stadium was announced, so incongruously, as "The Emirates". The Reebok, Dave Whelan's modestly titled DW Stadium, what was Leicester's Walkers Stadium, named after some crisps, and now the Etihad for the club which likes to think of itself as real Manchester, all pave the way for acceptance of renaming.

 

In lower divisions, needs must, but suddenly the richest Premier League clubs are looking to "brand" their homes to make some extra money. Chelsea's chief executive, Ron Gourlay, said on Monday he hopes Stamford Bridge will bear a commercial name by next season to enable the club to shorten its massive losses; Tottenham want to do the same; Liverpool are positively, desperately searching for a naming rights "partner" which John Henry's Fenway Group says might make it financially attractive for them to build a new stadium.

 

Much of this has passed without protest, although significantly, all top clubs' naming rights have been of new stadiums, not historic homes. The furore at Newcastle is because the new name is being visited on St James' Park, together with the general lack of class in Ashley's record, and the particular unattractiveness of the store whose name the ground is labelled with bearing. Whatever the specific circumstances, though, it is still reassuring that in an age where clubs speak and think revenue streams and branding, the fans who pay the money tell them they do not want the history sold out.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2011/nov/10/newcastle-united-st-james-renaming

 

 

Genuinely surprised we're having to have the same argument 10 years on. I'll genuinely be gutted if they changed the name.

 

Coat it however you want, it's no different to Ashley doing it. 

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1 minute ago, TheGuv said:

 

Genuinely surprised we're having to have the same argument 10 years on. I'll genuinely be gutted if they changed the name.

 

Coat it however you want, it's no different to Ashley doing it. 

 

It's completely different, Ashley was looking to benefit himself, our new owners need to generate as much revenue as possible to avoid falling foul of FFP. If that means selling naming rights for the stadium, so be it. We can all still call it St. James' Park anyway.

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