Arenas, naming rights and nicknames: discursive strategies and city-patterns around the communication of Allianz Parque and Arena Corinthians

Abstract

Based on a dialogue between Greimas and post-Greimas’s discursive Semiotics and Lotman’s Semiotics of culture, as well as in approaches which defend the complementarity between the two of them and the more specific confrontations with studies on glocalization, this article intends to reflect on the names and naming processes of two of São Paulo’s new stadiums: Arena Corinthians and Allianz Parque. Three are the matters which interest us in this discussion: the implicit semiotic-communication consequences in the passage from the definition of stadium to the denomination of arena; the reiteration, in the city, of the international market tendency which foresees the sale of the naming rights of stadiums to private companies; and the implicit resistance against such tendency manifested through media’s celebration of the nickname Itaquerão – reason for which, according to its board of directors, the club had not yet been able to sell the Arena’s naming rights.