96 grounds, 37 names: how the big five handle naming rights

Stadium naming rights sit on 37 of the 96 grounds in Europe’s big five football leagues, and Germany accounts for 15 of them.

We counted every ground in the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 for 2026/27. The result is a long way from the picture most people carry around. Most of European football’s biggest stage still plays under a name that money didn’t buy.

Tour the great grounds of Europe and you’d see the Bernabéu, Wembley and the Stade de France. Tour the biggest in the United States and you’d see MetLife Stadium, AT&T Stadium and Caesars Superdome. Notice the difference?

Germany sold the name. The rest of the big five didn’t.

Germany is the outlier. Fifteen of the 18 Bundesliga grounds carry a corporate name, 83%. The Premier League comes next with 8 of 20, or 40%. La Liga and Serie A have 5 of 20 each, 25%. Ligue 1 has 4 of 18, 22%.

Take Germany out and the picture is starker still. Outside the Bundesliga, only 22 of the remaining 78 grounds are named. More than seven in ten have no corporate name at all. Stadium naming rights are a German habit and a minority one everywhere else in the big five.

Why do so many grounds stay unnamed?

Three reasons come up again and again: sentiment, history and reputation.

Sentiment is the biggest. A club that has played in one place for a century finds it hard to rename the place for money, and its supporters find it harder. History matters too. Some names belong to a nation, not a club, and nobody sells those lightly. Then there’s reputation. Put the wrong partner on the front of the ground, or agree the wrong price, and the consequences land on the club for years.

The exceptions prove the point. Seven of the eight named Premier League grounds opened in 2002 or later. A new ground has no century of sentiment to protect, which is why stadium naming rights tend to arrive with the bricks and mortar.

Do fans notice stadium naming rights?

They do. In GWI’s Q2 2026 sports survey, 28% of football fans across these five markets say they notice stadium naming at games. That’s 35.5 million people out of 128.6 million fans. It sits well behind shirt sponsorship at 51% and a little ahead of the kit maker at 24%.

The country split is more interesting than the total. Germany is at 34%, Spain 33% and the UK 31%. Italy is at 23% and France at 12%. France has the smallest sample, so we’d read its figure as clearly lower rather than exactly 12%.

Germany has both the most named grounds and the highest awareness, but we wouldn’t draw a straight line between the two. Spain’s fans notice almost as much, and only five of its 20 grounds carry a name. The numbers don’t say that naming a ground makes fans notice. They say the audience is there to be sold to.

What stadium naming rights are worth when someone has to defend them

A naming deal is never automatic. It has to satisfy the person paying and, on a new build, the people lending. Each of them will ask the same question: what is this worth, and who says so?

That question doesn’t go away once a name is sold. Marseille’s Vélodrome moved to a new naming partner this summer on a seven-year deal. In the big five, names aren’t only being sold, they’re being renewed and re-sold.

A name is worth what you can defend. We’ve valued the naming rights of a stadium before it was built, in one document written for two audiences: the sponsors and the lenders funding the build. That takes independent, verified inputs and a documented method, which is what our sponsorship valuation service is built on, ISO 9001:2015 certified and with a methodology that has held up in a court of law. We have also valued a new commercial asset for Bundesliga International, across the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2.

If a name is on your table, on either side of it, our advisory and consultancy team would be glad to talk it through: info@platformation.global

Platformation Enterprise Services Limited is a specialist sponsorship valuation agency, ISO 9001:2015 certified (Certificate No. GB2006233). The only sponsorship valuation agency, to our knowledge, whose methodology has been tested in a court of law. platformation.global