By Soccernet staff
Chelsea are preparing to follow Newcastle's lead by selling the
naming rights for Stamford Bridge, new chief executive Ron Gourlay
revealed on Thursday. Although insisting that Chelsea need the
millions such a lucrative sponsorship deal would secure, Gourlay
promised that the words 'Stamford' and 'Bridge' will remain.
Photo/GettyImages
Stamford Bridge: To be renamed.
"We understand that this is a sensitive issue for our fans and
that is why we would keep the name Stamford Bridge in any
deal".
Although some may disagree, Gouray feels that the financial
advantage of selling the rights is essential.
"What we are not prepared to happen, and I am sure our fans will
appreciate this, is allow our rival clubs in England and Europe to
gain a competitive advantage over us in terms of the revenue they
can generate through either expanding the capacity of their
existing stadia or moving to a new stadium and then invest that
upside in their team or the club. Those possibilities are not open
to Chelsea for the foreseeable future because of the restrictions
in expanding our stadium and the issues around finding a new site,
so that means we have to be creative and look at our sponsorship
architecture and see if we can create new value and new
opportunities that keeps us competitive".
In 2004, Emirates paid Arsenal £50million to acquire naming
rights on their new Ashburton Grove stadium for 15 years, and
Allianz is charged £4m every twelve months for Bayern Munich's
ground to bear its name. In the USA, Citigroup pay £10m so for the
new New York Mets baseball arena, now called Citi Field.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ at least stamford bridge stays...
=.=
