The mayor of Arlington, Texas, has long been used to the grief that his community with almost half a million residents, located halfway between the two larger neighboring cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, is repeatedly ignored. Especially when it comes to sports.
The fact that the Texas Rangers, the older of the state’s two baseball teams in the top league, and the football players of the Dallas Cowboys, nicknamed “America’s Team”, reside in his area has not yet sunk into the minds of most of his compatriots.
“That’s pretty hard.”
But a year ago, Jim Ross vented for the first time. “We don’t ask for much,” he said. “But giving a stadium the name of another city is pretty tough.” The annoyance? For the World Cup, the world football association FIFA ensured that the Cowboys’ arena, where nine matches will take place, would be known as the “Dallas Stadium” during the World Cup.
A property in whose construction costs Arlington taxpayers contributed $325 million (equivalent to 276 million euros). And it officially belongs to the city.
Ross isn’t the only one concerned about the situation. However, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who also invested a lot of money in the stadium, saw the opportunity to benefit from the World Cup’s appeal as a plus right from the start.
Even if, due to strict FIFA rules, next summer he will have to remove all traces of the owner of the naming rights: the telephone company AT&T, which pays him tens of millions every year for this. Among other things, the two 13 meter high and 117 meter long letterings on the retractable roof need to be covered.
“We will treat every game as if it were the final,” signaled Jones, who had no problem using a structural trick to enlarge the comparatively narrow football field in line with FIFA requirements. It will be raised five meters higher in order to be able to use the lower stands along the touchlines.
When the United States was able to host the World Cup for the first time three decades ago, such massive interventions were not yet an issue. The field of participants was much more manageable with 24 teams. The same was true for the number of venues – nine huge football stadiums with space for between 56,000 and 100,000 spectators.
Only one arena gave American organizers a headache: the Silverdome outside Detroit. Since the world football association refused to budge, they were forced to use natural grass in the giant hall in an extremely creative way. The solution: almost 2,000 hexagonal plant pots in which the grass could be sown and watered and maintained in the parking lot. They were pushed together inside to form a playing area.
Where is the New York New Jersey Stadium?
But more venues weren’t just needed for the mammoth 2026 World Cup. FIFA’s regulations put pressure on almost all stadiums, including those in Canada and Mexico. The reason: Sports palaces like the one in Arlington no longer have a classic name, but instead function as monuments to a corporate branding culture linked to sports.
Whether global corporations like the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, US financial companies like So Fi in Los Angeles or Met Life on the outskirts of New York, international lifestyle brands like Gillette (in Foxborough outside Boston) and Levi’s (not far from San José) or little-known national companies like the energy supplier NRG (in Houston) or the telecommunications company Lumen (in Seattle) – they are all riding on a wave that started a few decades ago.
The whole thing usually only becomes problematic when agreements unexpectedly fall through. Like when the crypto trading platform FTX went bankrupt in 2022 just a year after signing a contract for the naming rights to the basketball hall in Miami.
Or when, as in the case of the insurance company Allianz, which in 2008 offered a total amount of around 500 million euros over a period of 30 years for the naming rights of the new football stadium on the outskirts of New York, the Jewish population in the region loudly reminds them of the company’s Nazi past. The company felt compelled to withdraw the offer. Ten years later, they risked a smaller engagement in Minneapolis – without there being any protests.
Renaming stadiums is not a new practice
The temporary renaming of stadiums is not a new practice and is not limited to the USA. At the 2024 European Football Championship in Germany, only two of ten stadiums, the Volksparkstadion Hamburg and the Olympiastadion Berlin, were allowed to keep their original names due to the regulations of the European Football Association (UEFA). All other arenas had sold their naming rights to sponsors, such as the Signal Iduna Park in Dortmund, which temporarily became the BVB Stadium Dortmund.
According to American observers, FIFA’s current intervention in everyday North American sports could “cause some confusion,” as the Seattle-based local television station Fox 13 suspects.
One example was the renaming of the arena where the final will take place on July 19th. Here, where the NFL teams the New York Giants and Jets – officially in the neighboring state of New Jersey – play their home games, a new geographical cocktail has been mixed together.
After all, anyone who enters “New York New Jersey Stadium” in a Google search will actually see the correct area shown on the attached map six months before the start of the tournament. The only thing missing from the digital measurement table sheet: the name thought up by FIFA.
