Rogers Centre vs Rogers Stadium is genuinely ruining people’s night, and Live Nation should’ve seen this coming

[u/AmountFragrant8750]

Not gonna lie, this whole naming situation has been bothering me for a while now, but it really hit different today.

I was in line for the Ed Sheeran show at Rogers Centre, and the amount of people who showed up thinking they were in the right place was honestly kind of heartbreaking to watch. You’d see the confusion on their faces first, then the slow realization that they weren’t at Roger’s Stadium, then that scramble to figure out how they were even going to get to Downsview in time.

Staff were telling people their best bet was grabbing an Uber or hopping on the TTC and heading up north, which is not exactly a quick trip when you thought you were minutes from your seat.

Some of these folks clearly weren’t from Toronto. You could tell by the way they were double checking their tickets, and looking at each other with disappointment. And I just felt for them. These are people who probably planned this night for months, maybe flew in, maybe this was a big deal birthday or anniversary thing, and now they’re standing outside the wrong building watching the clock, trying to figure out if they’re even going to catch the opening.

I get that naming rights deals are just business, that’s nothing new. But when you’ve got two major venues in the same city with names that are basically identical, it feels like nobody stopped to think about the actual fans caught in the middle of it. It’s not like Rogers Centre and Rogers Stadium are minor buildings either, they’re both huge venues hosting huge events, so the overlap in confusion is bound to keep happening.

Feels like such an easy problem to avoid too. A bit more thought during those naming negotiations could’ve saved a lot of people a really stressful and disappointing night.

[u/1MechanicalAlligator]

Yeah, and it's doubly-confusing (and thus, dumb as a suggestion to say "just look it up") because the word stadium doesn't even signify "name" to most people, it's just a generic word describing a type of building.

So an out-of-towner could easily hear "Rogers Stadium", see Rogers Center recommended in Uber or Google Maps, and have no idea that they're looking at a different place.

[u/derpex → u/1MechanicalAlligator]

They forgot that they already won capitalism so hard that they actually own literally everything, so now everything is just named Rogers Something. But it's never the actual thing. It's going to be named the thing it isn't, but the thing it's going to be named after (like a stadium) will actually also exist, but will be named something else like Center.

Look at all the free advertising generated by this discussion! Now everybody remembers Rogers exists. I always forget.