Questionnaire for Walsall fans on the significance of football stadium names

Hi, I am Fraser, a third year student at the Manchester Metropolitan University carrying out my dissertation project on the significance of football stadium names within fan culture. It would be greatly appreciated if you could click on the link below to answer a questionnaire, it will only take a couple of minutes. Thanks ever so much for your help.

https://goo.gl/forms/L47KSl3DmQOIUnNF2

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Just done it pal

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Completed. Good Luck.

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done all the best.

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Done

Bonser out :smile:

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I did it!

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Done - good luck

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Done it.

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Done :+1:

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Thanks to everyone who has completed it. Great response so far!

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Will you feed back the results?

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Fellows Park doesn’t fit the pattern of location or sponsor. Good luck!

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Done, Fellows Park for me, but I’m old, and a duplicate anyway.
Though on thinking more about the recent past The Barry Blower Stadium would seem more fitting.

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Done that for you .:+1:

Pity we couldn’t build a new state of the art stadium with a new owner , then we could call it what the hell you liked i really wouldn’t mind

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Done. Our circumstances are somewhat peculiar and I suspect it’s the same for many. Good luck with your results. Not sure they’ll mean anything!

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Completed

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Done. Good luck with your dissertation Fraser.

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Done it. I get a sense of the hypothesis here, but in our circumstances I’m not sure our answers will prove/disprove.

The moral notion of a football stadium as a community asset walked out and left Walsall in 1992 with whatever it is called always playing second fiddle to that.

Fellows Park was so called because Mr Fellows gave the ground to the people of Walsall which superseded the need to tie the ground to its locale/community through its naming convention.

The people of Walsall and the wider diaspora won’t feel tied or untied to the name of the place where its football team play because it overtly isn’t theirs, legally or morally. And the club re-inforce that view through anodyne subsidiary naming conventions such as “ The Venue, Birmingham”, “ The Bonser Suite” and “The Stadium Suite” to supplement the sponsored names of the ground and its stands. In other words Walsall FC doesn’t even pretend to acknowledge that there is an emotional tie between evocative community led naming conventions and people’s attachment to it. In response they get a pretty anodyne and passive football customer base. Which suits them fine.

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Will do the survey tonight chap.

Interesting for me is it still supposed to be called the Banks stadium or did that sponsorship tie up end a few years back?

Always amused me when watching Soccer Saturday and Stelling would go “Goal at the Bescot” and the screen would save live from the Banks stadium.

Even with the new builds I tend to call it by it’s orignial name e.g. Derby is Pride Park rather than whatever it’s called now and I did still think Bolton ground was still called the Reebok. Bradford still Valley Parade etc.

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My assumption would be that the name given at the start of a stadium’s life, whether that includes a sponsor’s name or not, tends to stick longest.

Whilst we have had approx. 12 years of Banks’s with naming rights, we had 17 years before that where it was “The Bescot Stadium”. To me the 2 are fairly interchangeable but Bescot is the default name and I probably use that 70% - 80% of the time when I refer to the ground.

If you were a Bolton supporter I assume you still call it the Reebok as that name bedded in from the start. Who remembers it being called the Macron Stadium or who refers to it by its current name, the University of Bolton Stadium?

Same with Pride Park. In 3 years as the iPro Stadium I think most Derby fans still called it Pride Park.

As for sponsoring older grounds - I doubt many Bradford fans refer to Valley Parade as the Northern Commercials Stadium or Bournemouth fans call Dean Court “The Vitality Stadium”. I could be wrong though.

If anyone senior at Marstons saw the pictures of the loos, featured in The Sun article, they may look to trigger a break clause in their naming rights of our own ground. :grinning:

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