Giving the name of a company to a stadium, a concert hall, or a swimming pool: the practice of naming has gradually established itself in the French urban landscape. Long perceived as marginal or confined to professional sports, it now concerns more and more public facilities, including those financed and managed by local authorities.

In Montpellier, as in many metropolises, naming has become an assumed financing tool. But behind the budgetary argument lies a deeper question: what happens when economic power permanently inscribes itself in language, symbols, and public space?

What is Naming and Why Do Local Authorities Resort to It?

Naming consists of associating the name of a brand or company with a public facility, in exchange for a financial contribution. This contribution can take the form of a direct payment, operational support, or a broader partnership including communication and visibility.

For local authorities, the arguments are well known. Naming is presented as a pragmatic lever allowing to:

• reduce the operating or investment cost of expensive facilities,
• avoid an increase in local taxes,
• maintain high-level sports or cultural infrastructures,
• attract or retain local economic actors.

In a context of contracting state endowments and strained budgets, the temptation is strong. Naming then appears as a "neutral", technical, almost painless solution.

But this neutrality is widely debatable.

Naming in Montpellier: An Already Well-Established Phenomenon

Montpellier does not escape this logic. Several emblematic facilities of the city and the metropolis now bear the name of private companies.

The rugby stadium of Montpellier Hérault Rugby, owned by the metropolis, thus successively became GGL Stadium, then Septeo Stadium, according to naming contracts. The René-Bougnol sports palace, historical home of Montpellier Handball, is now known as FDI Stadium, named after a local real estate group. The Antigone Olympic pool was also renamed Piscine Angelotti, again in reference to a real estate developer.

These choices are not insignificant. They concern structuring, strongly identity-based facilities, which participate in the image of the city, its collective memory, and its daily life. They permanently install private brands in the everyday vocabulary of residents.

The metropolis has also considered or explored naming for other facilities, notably the Mosson stadium, confirming that these are no longer exceptions but an assumed orientation.

A Political Critique: When Financing Creates Dependency

The main critique of naming is not just about aesthetics or nostalgia for old names. It is primarily political.

By linking the financing of public facilities to private companies, the community creates a relationship of dependency. Even if the contract is legally framed, the asymmetry is real: the company can withdraw, renegotiate, or apply pressure, while the community remains responsible for the public service and the facility.

This dependency becomes particularly problematic when the economic actors concerned already have significant political or symbolic weight. In Montpellier, the recurring tensions between Mayor Michaël Delafosse and certain major local economic actors are an illustration of this.

The conflict with Mohed Altrad, boss of MHR, around the stadium and its operation, shows how a public facility can become a lever of pressure. Debates around the renovation, occupation, or financing of the stadium go far beyond sport: they question the capacity of political power to decide without being constrained by private interests.

Similarly, the complex relations between the municipality and the Nicollin group, an omnipresent economic actor in the city (waste, football, real estate), remind us that the boundary between partnership and vassalization can become blurred. When large companies become indispensable to urban functioning, the balance of power gradually reverses.

Naming fits fully into this dynamic: it materializes in the public space a hierarchy where money buys not only visibility but also a form of symbolic legitimacy.

A Privatization of Language and Urban Imagination

Beyond power relations, naming poses a deeper question: that of language. To name is to define what counts. It is to inscribe narratives, references, and values into daily life.

This is precisely what writer Alain Damasio points out, notably in Les Furtifs. In his novel, cities are bought by multinationals and renamed: Paris becomes Paris-LVMH, Lyon becomes Nestlé-Lyon. What belongs to fiction extrapolates a trend already very real: the commodification of language.

For Damasio, naming is not a simple financing tool. It is one of the symptoms of cognitive capitalism, which seeks to colonize not only physical spaces but also attention, words, and imaginations. When a swimming pool, a stadium, or a concert hall bears the name of a company, this name becomes banal, integrated, almost invisible — and therefore all the more powerful.

Philosopher Bernard Stiegler analyzed this dynamic as a capture of attention and collective memory. By letting the private sector invest the symbolic, public power gradually abandons its capacity to produce common meaning.

What Alternative for Cities?

Refusing naming does not mean ignoring budgetary constraints. But it presupposes making a clear political choice: that of considering public facilities as common goods, carriers of a history, an identity, and a function that are not reduced to their profitability.

Other models exist: assumed public financing, metropolitan pooling, citizen participation, or strictly supervised patronage without appropriation of the name. These solutions are often more demanding, slower, less spectacular. But they preserve one essential thing: the autonomy of democratic power in the face of economic power.

At a time when the 2026 municipal elections are approaching, naming deserves to be questioned not as a technical detail, but as a societal choice. Behind a name affixed to a facade, a vision of the city is at play: a city governed by its inhabitants, or a city gradually shaped by those who can afford the right to leave their mark on it.