Why did UEFA change the name of the stadiums for Euro 2024?

Probably there is something that doesn't make sense to you after the first matches of Euro2024. Specifically, the names of the stadiums seem strange to you. Different. As if they came out of a video game without licenses. Well, licenses and money have a lot to do with this feeling. To make it simple, UEFA was forced to rename most of the selected stadiums to host the matches of the event so as not to conflict with the companies that provide naming rights to the facility when they are used by club teams. As mentioned, it's a matter of money and licenses: in fact, UEFA cannot use the name by which the stadium is recognized among fans, a scenario that we had mentioned when presenting the stadiums for the Europa League and Conference League finals.

These are the reasons why, for example, you were surprised to see that the opening match between Germany and Scotland was played at the Munich Football Arena and not at the Allianz Arena. It's the same stadium but the name Allianz can only be used by Bayern Munich and so UEFA had to come up with a different name that somehow reminded fans of the original name. The same thing happened during the Italy-Albania match, which for UEFA officially took place at the BVB Stadion Dortmund, also known as Signal Iduna Park, the home stadium of Borussia Dortmund. In this case, UEFA decided to use the romantic wave for rebranding by leveraging the term Stadion, the German word for stadium, in reference to Westfalenstadion, which is the universally recognized name for the Dortmund stadium. So credit must be given to UEFA for carefully studying the rebranding of eight out of ten stadiums selected for Euro 2024, sometimes using the original name of the facility and other times coming up with a brand new name.

In addition to the two cases mentioned, there is the RheinEnergieStadion in Cologne, which has become the Cologne Stadium, the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf, which will be called the Düsseldorf Arena until July 15th, forget about the Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt, now replaced by the Frankfurt Arena, the Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen has returned to its origins as Arena AufSchalke, the Red Bull Arena is now the Leipzig Stadium, and the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Stuttgart has been renamed the Stuttgart Arena. It was not an easy rebranding process, in which UEFA tried to alternate three terms: the aforementioned Stadion, the generic Stadium, and the universal Arena, always accompanied by the name of the city or a reference to the team from that city, in an attempt to minimize confusion. Only two stadiums have kept their original names, the only two facilities that ultimately did not sell their naming rights: one is the iconic Olympiastadion in Berlin and the second is the Volksparkstadion Hamburg in Hamburg.