The deaths of two sport icons have caused deep mourning around the globe. Pelé, the Brazilian football star, and Franz Beckenbauer, the German “Kaiser”, both died recently. To honour them, but also to preserve their merits, numerous high-ranking officials have proposed that their names be immortalised in the collective memory. FIFA President Gianni Infantino, for example, suggested that all countries should have a stadium named after Pelé (Wilson, 2023). Otmar Hitzfeld suggested to renaming the Allianz Arena in Munich to Franz-Beckenbauer-Arena. However, in this case, this is unlikely to be implemented as the naming rights have been sold to Allianz Insurance since the inauguration in 2005 (Stroh, 2024). The growing interest for stadiums and their names as social artefacts is mirrored in academic publications. Based on pioneering work on the relocation of stadiums (Bale 1991, 1995), recent volumes are dedicated to stadiums as cultural heritage sites (Waterton & Watson 2015) and meaningful places of commemoration (Hüser et al. 2022), as well as commodified toponymies and their evaluation by (local) fans (Vuolteenaho et al. 2019; Gerhardt et al. 2021) who fear the loss of a (language-based) identity marker (Koch & Gautier 2022). As part of the research project DISCLOSE (2022-2024), our contribution joining the congress themes of 1) Discourse analysis and genres … and 2) Sports history and collective memories …, seeks attempts to carve out the factors that influence the naming of stadiums and how fans from Germany and France rate the naming of “their” stadiums. The theoretical framework is a three-dimensional socio-discursive model (Bach et al. 2022), which is tested by means of an extracted data set (~3,000 stadium names). The results are contextualized by 15 interviews of German and French amateur football players. Preliminary results confirm that language, league affiliation and year of construction are significant variables. Fan acceptance is largely determined by the image of the sponsor. Roughly simplified, it can be stated that in Germany the commodification of stadium names is becoming increasingly important (especially since the 2006 World Cup, whose organizing committee chairman was Franz Beckenbauer), whereas in France stadium names retain their commemorative function. The naming issue thus remains at the heart of the public debate between Paris City Council and PSG's CEO concerning the Parc des Princes.