In a charmless brick, steel and concrete industrial park at the south end of the subway line, millions of sports fans pay good money to subject themselves to athletic mediocrity and the assaults of corporate advertising.
This is the nature of professional sports in a lot of cities, but in Philadelphia the relentless corporate fixation with branding–pushing a company’s name so that people dream about it at night and think about it when they eat their cereal–reached new heights last week. The new ballpark for the Phillies will be named Citizens Bank Park, making it the fourth stadium in this dreary cluster to be named after a bank.
Welcome to Philadelphia, where you climb the steps up the Pattison Street subway stop and warm yourself in the nostalgic glow of financial titans–First Union, Lincoln Financial and now Citizens Bank.
Ben Franklin Stadium? Liberty Bell Park? W.C. Fields? Nah. And while you’re at it, change that song to “Take me out to the bank park.”
“Yet another name as thrilling as a mortgage,” read the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, offering one of the more measured assessments of the new park’s moniker.
Outside Veterans Stadium, a lamentable 1960s-style structure that is scheduled to be imploded after this season, sentiments from fans gathered for a recent game against the Atlanta Braves were blunt and negative.
“Kinda stupid,” said Tim Schwob, a student from St. Louis.
“It’s horrible,” said Cliff Dougherty, a Philadelphia mail carrier.
“I hate the corporate names,” added Rob Townsend, a facility manager from Westchester, Pa. “Citizens Bank Field or Park or whatever it is just sounds too sterile and generic. … It’s insulting.”
The argument for corporate names is that corporate money is necessary to deliver a winning team. But don’t bother making that argument in Detroit, where the lowly Tigers, who left Tiger Stadium to move into the new Comerica Park, are on pace to lose more games than any other team in baseball. By the way, Comerica is a bank.
Most fans ignore clumsy corporate stadium names such as the White Sox’s U.S. Cellular Field and adopt nicknames. Lincoln Financial Field, where the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles will play, is known as “The Linc.”
Citizens Bank Park is already the object of a nickname exploration. The Philadelphia Daily News is asking readers to submit names by phone, fax and e-mail. An early front-runner, the paper reported, is “The Zit.”
The name could have been worse, some said–like Glaxo-SmithKline Field, named after the British pharmaceutical company whose U.S. operation is headquartered in Philadelphia. That, however, could have led to “The Glack” or “The Glo.”
But even the comfort of a name that rolls off the tongue–Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park–may provide only short-term relief. Stadiums have increasingly become billboards, temporary superstructures for corporate logos. Houston’s Enron Field became Minute Maid Park after Enron Corp. self-destructed.
“Can you give me the names of five new stadiums?” asked Paul Farthing, a Philadelphia beer distributor. “No, you can’t.”
Pointing to the stadiums behind him, Farthing pointed out that shudders in the banking industry have already rippled through the city’s Southside sports complex, where the Phillies, Eagles, Flyers and 76ers play, and where indoor concerts are held.
In 1998 CoreStates Financial was the logo-home of the Flyers and 76ers. Then First Union bought CoreStates for $17 billion. Up goes a new logo.
Four years later First Union bought Wachovia, but in the transaction First Union agreed to change its name to Wachovia. The new logo will be up shortly.
“That’s three names in five years,” Farthing said. “Sure, this one will be Citizens Bank Park, but how long will that last?”
That’s a good question. The deal the bank struck with the Phillies says it will pay $95 million for naming rights and other in-stadium amenities, such as ATMs, billboards and other not-so-subtle corporate hints.
In a full-page newspaper ad last week, Citizens, which is headquartered in Providence, R.I., called its partnership with the Phillies “something we hold very dear today, tomorrow and always.”
But history suggests that once the economy improves, the forces of consolidation–and profit-seeking shareholders–will once again goad the banking industry into another frenzy of Pac-Man-like behavior. From the summer of 1997 to the spring of 2001–that’s when the market slumped–10 major banking mergers occurred, totaling more than $313 billion.
Dougherty, attending a game last week with his son, is not worried about adjusting to the Citizens Bank Park name.
“This isn’t gonna last,” predicted Dougherty. “They’ll change it.”
