The famous Manny Road blog

The Reebok Stadium is (re)named and shamed

Saturday January 24th, 2009

The Daily Mail uses job losses story to get cheap gags about Bolton Wanderers

The Daily Mail has something of a reputation for scaremongering. Normally it’s about illegal immigrants, benefits “scroungers” or some half-baked scientific research that’s found oxygen may give you cancer.

This week, though, they turned their attention to Bolton Wanderers after Reebok announced they are moving their offices out of the Reebok Stadium.

The Bolton News and Manchester Evening News both saw this as a story about potential job losses in the town rather than impending doom for the Wanderers and published it outside of their sports pages (the BN in the news, the MEN in the business section).

The Mail showed no such reserve, not only suggesting that ‘Bolton may have to rename their stadium’ but also getting their readers to suggest new names, which ranged from the sublime – ‘Nat Lofthouse Stadium’, ‘Burnden Stadium’ – to the ridiculous: ‘Longball Lane’, ‘Donkey Sanctuary’.

All this would seem to be jumping the gun just a little bit. The reality is that Reebok’s current contract with the Wanderers has another seven years to run, which the Mail even admits in the article.

By then, the landscape may look a lot different, and I suspect Reebok’s association with the Wanderers will be decided more by whether we are still in the Premier League (and thus providing them with hundreds of mentions of the word ‘Reebok’ around the world every other weekend) than where Reebok’s offices happen to be.

What do you think? Have your say in the comments below…

BWFC News, BWFC People, Nat Lofthouse

Tags: BoltonWanderers, PremierLeague, ReebokStadium, TheBoltonNews

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