Murrayfield Will Always Be Murrayfield

by Dugald Skene

The SRU this week announced it was considering selling the naming rights to Murrayfield Stadium, the home of Scottish Rugby.

 

In a statement to the BBC, Chief Executive Mark Dodson said "The single biggest piece of our inventory is our national stadium. We would like to see if we can monetise that.

"It would be crazy for us not to look at using our single biggest piece of inventory to drive revenue. We want to get the right price for it."

Murrayfield - The home of Scottish Rugby

The response has been interesting, with many suggesting that it’s ‘money for nothing’ and it’s a ‘no brainer’ for the SRU.  Those same people argue that whatever the stadium ends up being called, the history and tradition associated with the stadium will ensure that people will forever refer to it as Murrayfield, citing Newcastle Football Club as an example.

Others, the traditionalists, are not keen, seeing it as a sell-out by the SRU, forever condemning the history of the stadium and the great moments it has hosted to a past era which will be forgotten.

Let’s be honest here – it doesn’t make a jot of difference.  I agree with the first group.  Murrayfield will always be Murrayfield to those who have experienced it before and to those that are still to be introduced to it.  The tradition of the game in this country is such that experiences are shared between the generations and those that will know the stadium in its current guise will introduce it as such to the next generation of rugby fan.

My first game at Murrayfield was as a nine year old, going with my mum and dad to watch Scotland beat Western Samoa in the 1991 World Cup quarter final.  The physical transformation that the stadium has gone through since then has been dramatic, with both north and south terraces being replaced and the West grandstand being completely overhauled.  No change to the name of the stadium will be as dramatic.  The symbolism of the name will not be lost or forgotten. 

But what, other than the obvious direct revenue, will selling the rights actually give the game, the stadium and whoever chooses to buy those rights? Does that even matter?

Murrayfield is massively underused.  At 67,500 seats, it is by far the biggest stadium in the country (arguably way oversized) and yet gets an opportunity to be filled only a handful of times a year.  In 2012, only 4 international rugby games are being hosted at Murrayfield; 2 in the 6 Nations and 2 in the Autumn International series.

This clearly can’t be enough to sustain a stadium of this size.  Edinburgh Rugby have boosted the revenue this year with their Heineken Cup run last season which saw them host Toulouse in front of nearly 50,000 in their quarter final.  This however, is not a guaranteed income.  The teams league games attract around 3,500, a crown drowned by the size of the theatre around them.  I can’t help but think the fate of the team in the league, which has been poor in the past few seasons, is affected by the emptiness of their home ground on a bi-weekly basis, despite the best efforts of their fans.

With the refurbishment of an excellent facility at Scotstoun in Glasgow, even the World Cup 7’s has been relocated from Murrayfield, losing a weekend’s worth of valuable revenue in a sparsely populated calendar.

A prospecting sponsor will be hard pushed to be attracted to plastering their name on a stadium that draws small crowds only up to 20 times a year and large crowds seldomly.  The question then would be whether a company’s name will in turn attract further events?  Unless it can, I see very little incentive.

Murrayfield currently supplements it’s income by hosting single one-off events, particularly music concerts but again, these are seldom.  An obvious alternative money maker is football, the best supported sport in Scotland.  But here in lies another problem – for such a small country, it seems more than a little crazy that we have developed two separate national stadiums for rugby and football. Each has their reasons for the way they have developed to what we know now, but the upshot is that both are underused.

 

The SRU may entertain the idea of selling the naming rights, and I believe that it’s only right they do so for every avenue needs to be explored.  However, I really struggle to imagine any company that would be enticed unless the SRU can attract more events to fill out their calendar.  In my opinion, it’s a fantastic stadium which struggles with its own inflexibility and it’s that which may mean it won’t attract any suitors at all.