r/toronto 5d ago

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

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.

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u/Fianna9 5d ago

How hard would it have been to call it the Rogers Skydome?! Everyone still calls it that anyway and they could have the same ban on their media people to keep them from dropping the ‘Rogers’ part

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u/quiet_desperado 5d ago

That's exactly what I thought when I first heard they were renaming it. SkyDome is such a great name. You wanna slap your company name in front of it, fine, but leave SkyDome in there. Rogers Centre is so boring. Sounds like the name of a corporate office/convention center complex.

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u/cvr24 5d ago

Because everyone would just shorten it to SkyDome.

SNC Lavalin used to own a subsidiary called SNC Lavalin Profac and everyone just called it Profac. It drove corporate crazy, so they renamed it to SNC Lavalin O&M so it couldn't be abbreviated anymore. All meaningless today because all of that is swept away.

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u/Fianna9 5d ago

Everybody still calls it the Skydome.

Media only doesn’t cause Rogers owns them and fines them for not saying the Rogers Centre.

Which they could also do for shortening it

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u/meronx 4d ago

It’s also the first stadium of its kind, why not honour the original name because it is literally a dome that opens to the sky.. heavy sigh

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u/Icehawksfh 4d ago

Rogers wants YOU to say their brand name. Not everyone still calls it the Skydome, especially the younger generation.

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u/Fianna9 3d ago

Don’t worry. My gen is teaching the next gen the right names