Bath City Football Club are offering businesses, fans, and the general public a chance to win the naming rights to their stadium for an incredibly low price!
Special £50 ticket packages that include an entry into the upcoming Stadium Name Draw are now on sale on the club website, accessible through the special address www.namethestadium.co.uk.
The price has been kept deliberately low to enable small businesses and individuals to enter, and entrants are encouraged to be creative with their choice.
The club website provides several examples, including naming a stadium after a friend or family member, a favourite past player, a favourite charity, a newborn baby, or maybe as a very dramatic way to pop the question – just imagine the Marry Me Susan?? Stadium (terms and conditions apply).
The ticket package on offer is for four tickets to the Bath City vs Forest Green Rovers match on Easter Monday, 9 April, where the draw will be conducted at halftime. The normal price for four adult tickets to the match is £56, but this special offer is six pounds cheaper and includes entry into the Stadium Name Draw at no extra cost.
Entrants will not be required to attend the match, however, and the club are hoping that people from all over the UK, and maybe from all over the world, will purchase the ticket package in order to enter the draw.
Having a stadium named in your honour would make a superb gift for a birthday, anniversary, or for Mother’s Day (Sunday 18 March). For an extra £3 the club will even send a card to a loved one, including your choice of name, so that your entry can be appreciated even if it is not the eventual winner.
Fans who would prefer to retain the ground’s traditional name, Twerton Park, are being offered a chance to participate too. The application form for the Stadium Name Draw will also include the option to have no name change at all. If one of those entries is chosen as the winner, the name Twerton Park used exclusively next season.
The naming rights on offer are for the 2012/13 season, and the deadline for entry is midnight, Wednesday 4 April 2012.
The eventual winner will get to see and hear their chosen name in the media regularly, especially as Bath City enjoy a much higher media profile than is normal for a club of its size. From the appointment of Manda Rigby, football’s only woman chairman, to a Korean teenager’s quest to be hired as the next Bath City manager, the club has regularly made headlines in the national press, and has recently been featured in the Sun and FourFourTwo magazine.
Bath City chairman Manda Rigby says: “We pride ourselves on being an innovative at Bath City, and the Stadium Name Draw is just the most recent example. We hope that businesses locally and nationally will recognise the tremendous value of acquiring the naming rights to our ground for just £50, but we also want our fans and the general public to get involved as well. I’ve paid for my entry, but I’m keeping my choice of name secret for now.”
Club captain Jim Rollo, who has made over 450 appearances for the club, says: “I think it’s a brilliant idea. I will certainly be entering the draw, and I’m sure some of the other players will too. And by the way, if anyone is struggling to think of a name to enter I don’t think they could go wrong with ‘Jim Rollo Stadium.‘”
Twerton Park is located in the south-west of Bath and has been the home of Bath City since 1932. It is a classic-style English football ground, with raised terraces on every side, and stunning views of central Bath from the ‘Poplar Side.’ It was also the home of Bristol Rovers from 1986-1996.
Many sporting clubs offer sponsorship draws, especially for shirt sponsorship. Usually entries to these are priced at much higher amounts, from a few hundreds pounds at smaller clubs, up to a thousand pounds at football league clubs. The target market for these is usually local business owners, not regular fans. Stadium name draws are more unusual. AFC Bournemouth held a successful draw for their stadium naming rights in 2009, for which entries were priced at £500.
