I always thought these corporate naming deals for stadiums were gross. I remember when Canadian stadiums had names like "The Coliseum" and "The Skydome" instead of "The Roger's Center".
walthamstow•Aug 23, 2026
Wait til you see the names of the actual teams in the Japanese baseball league.
Azurealistic•Aug 23, 2026
Any examples?
filoleg•Aug 23, 2026
They basically embed company names directly into team names.
Here is a couple of examples: Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
haunter•Aug 23, 2026
Most of the NPB teams are corporate owned and named
I mean F1 teams are literally named directly after their corporate owners too (who are not necessarily the ones designing the engines/...) and people seem to love that.
walthamstow•Aug 23, 2026
One German football team is named after a pharmaceuticals multinational.
(A special case, it was the workers team for the Bayer plant, like Woolwich Arsenal or 'Locomotiv' of many Slavic cities)
sofixa•Aug 23, 2026
At least that one started as a worker's club. The worse offender is named after an energy drink.
tokai•Aug 23, 2026
Those two teams are/were not professional. Not that you are wrong about naming conventions.
c0balt•Aug 23, 2026
E-Sports teams are still the funniest here. From Shopify Black/Rebellion Gold to T1.
My favourite is MAC³PARK Stadium, the home of FC Zwolle in Zwolle, the Netherlands.
It is named after MAC³PARK, a collection of extremely boring business parks (ie office buildings in an industrial zone). The business parks in question are in nowhere near Zwolle (for Dutch standards).
dylan604•Aug 23, 2026
That's the closest to Nascar I've seen yet. At the same time, I'm still a fan for the idea that elected officials should be forced to wear their sponsor's logos on their suits like this as well.
avidiax•Aug 23, 2026
There would be a bunch of Super PACs with a fabric swatch as a logo.
sandworm101•Aug 23, 2026
"BC Place" is still BC Place. It was the only World Cup venue that didn't have to hang drapes over its real name.
sofixa•Aug 23, 2026
I get why they do it, but at the very least it should be "sponsor name real name", not "sponsor name generic description of arena".
Spotify Camp Nou is annoying and worse than Camp Nou, but at least there is some soul and belonging. "Spotify Arena" would have been disgusting and empty.
It always boggles my mind when fans say "so and so at the AT&T stadium"... Until a new sponsor comes in.
dylan604•Aug 23, 2026
>so and so at the AT&T stadium
In at least one town with a stadium of that name, most people do not refer to it by that name. Instead, it is referred to as Jerry's World for the owner of the franchise.
Concert venues are another naming rights area that is confusing. There's one in particular that has had its name changed so many times that I do not know what it is currently called. Instead, it is often referred to by the original sponsor by pretty much anyone of a certain age. Even if you call it the older name to younger people, they know which venue. Some names stick.
rascul•Aug 23, 2026
Capital One Arena is the current name for where the Washington Capitals play at home so that's an example that kind of works.
larusso•Aug 23, 2026
Yes. Or in case of Berlin where whole places and other places get renamed when the sponsor changes.
O2 Arena -> Mercedes Benz Arena -> Uber Arena.
Even other locations around it changed as well as the plaza name.
Tomte•Aug 23, 2026
And when a FIFA world cup is hosted the stadium gets renamed for the duration if the stadium‘s sponsor isn‘t a FIFA sponsor.
tokai•Aug 23, 2026
I much rather have corporations waste money funding sports that some people enjoy, than wasting it on commercial campaigns that does nothing but burn money and steal our attention.
jtari3333•Aug 23, 2026
Bayern Munich's stadium is one of the more famous in the world. More interesting that 0 people recognised it in the design process.
jfengel•Aug 23, 2026
The US managed to issue a stamp with clearly the wrong Statue of Liberty.
Which presumably everyone in the design process should have recognized, if not practically everyone in the world.
The moral being, uh, it's weird how blind people can be when they're not looking for it.
patrickmcnamara•Aug 23, 2026
Wow, the sculptor got 3.5 million USD for copyright infringement from his copycat statue.
adalacelove•Aug 23, 2026
The Statue of Greed, located appropriately at a Casino
jryle70•Aug 23, 2026
If you release an open source software with GPL license that is just a wrapper of an MIT licensed library, and someone manages to misuse your software, should you be entitled to damages?
zimpenfish•Aug 23, 2026
To be fair, if I'm reading that right, the difference is "a small light patch on the middle spike"?[0] I can see people missing that easily enough!
[0] Absent contextual cues about height, location, etc., which aren't on the stamp
layer8•Aug 23, 2026
It means that they used a photo with unclear provenance, or they didn’t check the provenance. For issuing a stamp, you don’t just take a random photo of the statue and eyeball it and say “looks close enough to me”.
cjs_ac•Aug 23, 2026
The government of New South Wales (the Australian state of which Sydney is the capital) commissioned a corporate logo depicting a waratah (the NSW state flower) and got one showing a lotus. They still use it on everything.
jhy•Aug 23, 2026
And they just flat out told everyone who pointed it out -- nope, you're looking at it wrong; and anyway we already paid those consultants so we'd better use it, what?
jordanb•Aug 23, 2026
"Good enough for Australia" is a phrase I frequently heard from Aussies. There seems to be this attitude there that they're a frontier country where one improvises (half asses?) everything.
shakna•Aug 23, 2026
Pretty much. A lot of the innovations of our nation, come from that. Things like utes, inflatable escape slides on planes, race cameras, are all "hacks".
But considering you can still see the gold mine which caused the foundation of my town, it isn't that surprising. We might not be the battlers we believe we are, but there's still a history of a people all around us.
gizajob•Aug 23, 2026
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck." - coined by social critic and journalist Donald Horne in his 1964 book The Lucky Country.
contingencies•Aug 23, 2026
On the subject of flowers, the late Donald was a friend of a family friend who came over one night and after drinking a huge amount of wine decided in a midnight fit of inspiration (when we'd all gone to bed) to rearrange flowers throughout the house. We woke up in the morning to find little bits of flowers everywhere except the vases! Sadly, she passed away recently but it became a running joke in the family. Good sorts.
crabmusket•Aug 23, 2026
Wow, that always confused me since moving here. I thought I didn't know what a Waratah was, but no, it's the logo that's wrong.
"'We're not going to run from it': Sydney Marathon laughs off medal error"
phatfish•Aug 23, 2026
I guess they are laughing it off because it was another Allianz sponsored stadium depicted, and they got the OK from Allianz to make the joke as it is free attention.
If the AI design had chosen a non-Allianz branded location I bet the response would be different.
MattRix•Aug 23, 2026
The race has nothing to do with the stadium, other than running past it. They don’t have to get permission from anyone. Also, there’s no evidence that AI was involved, it could have just as easily been some designer googling for “Allianz Stadium” and illustrating the first thing that came up.
__s•Aug 23, 2026
Years ago I was doing internal login pages for pay day loan insurance saas. Decided to put their logos to avoid mixups. Just googled. One was named Vision, copied logo from https://www.visions.ca figuring they did land on the side. Couple years later I realized my mistake & fixed, nobody else had said anything
netsharc•Aug 23, 2026
Feels kind of pathetic high-schooler level response... "oh well, we're just going to laugh it off, please join us. Enjoy your sloppily* made medal!"
* whether AI-assisted or just lazy human slop that went unnoticed up all the chain.
> It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material.
lateral_cloud•Aug 23, 2026
Someone vibed the medal design
abletterer•Aug 23, 2026
AI slop all the way up to the physical world :D
qurren•Aug 23, 2026
Actually AI would have probably gotten it right.
The more likely explanation is that the person manually googled all the landmarks of Sydney to get some vector images to cut and paste into a CAD program to extrude, and accidentally got the wrong one.
seydor•Aug 23, 2026
Model bias towards northern hemisphere
thesdev•Aug 23, 2026
You can tell it's an Aussie medal because all landmarks are depicted upside-down.
kgermino•Aug 23, 2026
Right there with the Milwaukee Marathon misspelling “Marathon” on their medals this year.
8 Comments
https://www.allianz.com/en/about-us/brand/partnerships/stadi...
And it was probably 8 when they were designing the medal but Palmeiras didn't extend the naming rights contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubank_Parque
Here is a couple of examples: Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
- Chunichi Dragons > Chunichi Shimbun (news corporation)
- Hanshin Tigers > Hanshin Electric Railway
- Tokyo Yakult Swallows > Yakult Honsha (yes, the probiotic milk beverage company)
- Yokohama DeNA BayStars > DeNA (ecommerce/mobile games/online services)
- Yomiuri Giants > Yomiuri Shimbun (media conglomerate)
- Chiba Lotte Marines > Lotte Holdings (related to the South Korean Lotte Corporation mostly known for their confectionery and ice creams)
- Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks > SoftBank (I think everyone knows them on HN)
- Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters > Nippon Ham (food processing)
- Orix Buffaloes > Orix (investment banking)
- Saitama Seibu Lions > Seibu Railway
- Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles > Rakuten (I think everyone knows them on HN)
But that's not a Japanese only thing, the Korean (KBO) and Taiwanese (CPBL) baseball leagues are the same
Kia Tigers, KT Wiz, LG Twins, Lotte Giants, Samsung Lions
CTBC Brothers, Rakuten Monkeys, Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, Fubon Guardians
And not even a baseball thing only the football teams in the region are the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pune_Warriors_India
(A special case, it was the workers team for the Bayer plant, like Woolwich Arsenal or 'Locomotiv' of many Slavic cities)
https://files.catbox.moe/a3fxhw.webp
https://files.catbox.moe/0op34u.jpeg
It is named after MAC³PARK, a collection of extremely boring business parks (ie office buildings in an industrial zone). The business parks in question are in nowhere near Zwolle (for Dutch standards).
Spotify Camp Nou is annoying and worse than Camp Nou, but at least there is some soul and belonging. "Spotify Arena" would have been disgusting and empty.
It always boggles my mind when fans say "so and so at the AT&T stadium"... Until a new sponsor comes in.
In at least one town with a stadium of that name, most people do not refer to it by that name. Instead, it is referred to as Jerry's World for the owner of the franchise.
Concert venues are another naming rights area that is confusing. There's one in particular that has had its name changed so many times that I do not know what it is currently called. Instead, it is often referred to by the original sponsor by pretty much anyone of a certain age. Even if you call it the older name to younger people, they know which venue. Some names stick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty_Forever_stam...
Which presumably everyone in the design process should have recognized, if not practically everyone in the world.
The moral being, uh, it's weird how blind people can be when they're not looking for it.
[0] Absent contextual cues about height, location, etc., which aren't on the stamp
But considering you can still see the gold mine which caused the foundation of my town, it isn't that surprising. We might not be the battlers we believe we are, but there's still a history of a people all around us.
"'We're not going to run from it': Sydney Marathon laughs off medal error"
If the AI design had chosen a non-Allianz branded location I bet the response would be different.
* whether AI-assisted or just lazy human slop that went unnoticed up all the chain.
My own footnote reminds me of this other slop: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/06/starbucks-sout...
> It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material.
The more likely explanation is that the person manually googled all the landmarks of Sydney to get some vector images to cut and paste into a CAD program to extrude, and accidentally got the wrong one.
https://marathonhandbook.com/milwaukee-marathon-handed-out-4...
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1048991822/ohio-reverses-cour...