As the top marketing and strategy officer for Lumen Technologies, Ryan Asdourian never tires of seeing his company’s name atop the Seattle Seahawks stadium, Lumen Field. How could he?
The word LUMEN stretches in capital letters more than 300 feet across the stadium’s roof. At night, it glows across Elliott Bay like 100 lighthouses. The first thing many visitors see from their airplane windows is the giant LUMEN screaming up through the Seattle gloom.
Then this spring, in preparation for the World Cup, Lumen Field workers began covering the LUMEN on the stadium roof, as well as the countless other Lumens splattered throughout the concourses, signposts and restrooms.
Soccer’s governing body, FIFA, demands all World Cup stadiums be free of references to corporations that aren’t FIFA sponsors. Since Lumen Field is hosting six World Cup matches in the coming weeks – including the United States vs. Australia on June 19 – Lumen Field will be known, for the next month, as Seattle Stadium.
The same is happening at the other 10 U.S. host stadiums and some of the ones in Canada and Mexico as well, with the exception being Vancouver’s BC Place, which does not have a corporate naming rights deal.
The marketing world has a name for this: “debranding.”
FIFA’s debranding demands aren’t new. The organization has been ordering corporate names scrubbed from stadiums for years. The same is true for the International Olympic Committee, which vigilantly protects its top sponsors with the same policing of venue names. SoFi Stadium, which is being rebranded as Los Angeles Stadium for this World Cup, will use the same name for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, a fate SoFi appears to have accepted.
FIFA did not respond to a request clarifying its stadium naming policy. But clause 8.2.3 on page 32 of its Seattle stadium agreement, obtained by The Washington Post, lays out the rules for temporarily scrubbing Lumen’s name from the stadium.
“FIFA will determine the official names of the Stadium and Training Sites for the Competition and change the name of the Stadium and the Training Sites for any purposes in relation to the Competition to any non-commercial name that it deems appropriate, without any reference to the naming rights sponsor, owner or user of the Stadium,” the contract reads.
None of this was an issue back in 1994 when the men’s World Cup was last here, nor did it come at the last U.S. Summer Olympics, held two years later in Atlanta. Stadium managers were only beginning to sell stadium rights in those days. But now, with company names on nearly every major American stadium and arena, people are accustomed to their sports palaces being named for big corporations.
Irwin Kishner, co-chair of the sports law group at the firm Herrick Feinstein, said the increase in sports’ popularity has led to a boom in naming rights. Organizations such as FIFA and the IOC, in response, need to protect their own sponsors, who pay for exclusivity at big events such as the World Cup and Olympics.
“It’s all dollars and cents,” he said.
The companies losing their stadium naming rights for this World Cup have said little about the topic. MetLife, for instance, did not reply to a request for comment about seeing its name on the NFL stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, be transformed into the tongue-twisting New York New Jersey Stadium. Neither did the Government Employees Health Association, which has seen its name pulled from Kansas City’s football stadium and replaced with Kansas City Stadium.
Only Asdourian and Lumen appear to be leaning into the blank spaces where their brands used to live.
He’d known it was coming for more than a year. But as he watched his towering LUMEN vanish under a black tarp as if it was being redacted, he didn’t feel rage or regret that his company’s name won’t be on the stadium during the world’s biggest sporting event.
He saw opportunity.
“We’re trying to be the innovative company,” he said. “We’re looking for ways to celebrate what is happening here more than be worried about the name change.”
He noticed that people had become interested in the disappearing Lumens, his social media feeds loaded with photos and videos of the blank spaces where the word once appeared. He wondered whether he could make a video of his own making fun of the whole thing and draw more attention to Lumen at the same time.
So, one day last month, Asdourian and a film crew from Lumen’s marketing department went to the stadium armed with a ladder, masking tape and a jar of white-out. They set out to cover as many Lumens as they could find. The video they made lasts barely more than a minute and shows Asdourian, clad in a hard hat and worker vest trying to slap tape on Lumen signs, one of which was comically just out of his reach. He posted it on the company’s social media feeds on Tuesday.
“I volunteer to take our name down,” he said. “I don’t know how many [chief marketing officers] can say that, but, you know, it’s really not about the name on the building …”
He stopped.
“I don’t know about how much you know about what Lumen actually does,” he said in an interview, and was greeted by a verbal shrug.
“We own and operate the largest fiber network on the planet,” he said, explaining how much much of the planet’s data moves through Lumen’s systems, including the television feeds from every stadium in America.
Explaining that is tough. But in hiding Lumen’s name on Lumen Field, FIFA has given him a chance to use a line he might never have had a chance to use before.
“You can cover our name,” he said, “but you can’t cover our network.”
It wasn’t a 300-foot sign on a football stadium, but it would do.
Rick Maese contributed to this report.
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