Earlier this week, news broke that the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers would be renaming their stadium after a corporate sponsor.
This, in and of itself, is not newsworthy. 27 of the NFL’s 30 active stadiums currently bear the name of a corporate sponsor, a ratio that’s roughly equivalent in other professional sports in this country. What’s more, the stadium in Pittsburgh has been in that category for the entirety of its 21-year lifespan.
The problem is the name itself.
A venue once known as “Heinz Field”—named after the Pittsburgh-based H.J. Heinz corporation, longtime purveyor of beans, vinegars, soups, sauces, and its namesake ketchup—will now be known as “Acrisure Field”. This new moniker is apparently derived from a Michigan-based insurance company, something I will choose to forget as quickly as I learned it.
This is a terrible, terrible name. Setting aside how positively lyrical it will sound when run through the linguistic rock-tumbler of southwestern Pennsylvania’s regional accent—go…